Business Archives - TouchPro International

France recognizes seated massage as an occupational title

by David Palmer | Jul 15, 2016 | Business, Chair Massage

[Click to download a PDF of the press release version.]

France recently became the first country in the world to recognize seated massage as an occupational category with a professional certification. On June 7, 2016, the National Professional Certification Commission (Le Répertoire National des Certifications Professionnelles) approved Xavier Court Training as the sole provider of diplomas for Practitioners of Seated Massage.

Xavier and David

Xavier Court, owner of the school, began the application process three years ago after joining forces with chair massage pioneer, David Palmer, and becoming an affiliate of Palmer’s organization, TouchPro International. Their application received a Level 2 certification under the French grading system (Level 1 is University diplomas) giving it a high degree of professional credibility. Throughout Europe the training is also rated as EuroPass Level 6 (the highest being Level 8) making the credential easily portable between all EU countries.

The approved curriculum is 170 hours and includes training in the TouchPro acupressure approach to chair massage developed by Palmer in 1986. While over 40,000 table massage practitioners around the globe have already been taught this system in continuing education seminars, this is the first time it has been the centerpiece of an entry-level massage program. Besides mastering the TouchPro technique, requires training in anatomy, physiology, hygiene, ethics, customer relations, and marketing to qualify graduates as world class chair massage specialists.

This also marks the first time that France has approved a specific credential for any massage services. Up to this point, the physiotherapists have prevented massage practitioners from being recognized as an independently titled profession. Palmer speculates that because seated massage was specifically defined in this instance as non-therapeutic, relaxation massage the French physiotherapists found it less objectionable than table massage therapy being provided as a health care service.

Another TouchPro affiliate in Trinidad & Tobago has an application in process for Caribbean-wide chair massage credentialing as a discrete occupation and Palmer looks forward to other countries adopting similar curriculum. The likelihood of North America following suit is slim as both Canada and the United States still require practitioners to complete 500- to 2200-hour table massage programs in most states and provinces before practitioners can legally offer chair massage services.

[For further information, please contact David Palmer at dp@touchpro.com.]

New Categories of Corporate Seated Massage Clients

by David Palmer | May 8, 2014 | Business, Chair Massage

New Categories of Seated Massage Clients_ At 31 years, there is little doubt The Walt Disney Company is the oldest continuing corporate supporter of seated massage in the world. Michael Neal began taking a stool around the Disney campus in 1982, providing employee-paid massage. When he retired 18 years later, another practitioner who had also begun working at Disney, Allen Chinn, was ready to pick up the baton from Neal. Besides continuing to work on employees, Chinn occasionally gets paid directly by Disney for individual events such as health fairs.

The reason why Disney originally allowed chair massage on the premises was not complicated. The employees wanted it and no one objected. Disney provided no specific location for the chair massage and there was certainly no scheduling or promotional support. It was all very ad hoc, but it worked.

To discover what seated-massage companies think they are selling these days. you only need to scan a few of their websites. As Rob Nitzschke, from Manchester, New Hampshire, summarizes: “What companies are looking for is a happier workforce, greater productivity, loyalty and retention in their staff and increase the perception of the employees that they are cared for.” What the employees are primarily seeking is instant rejuvenation.

While these traditional rationales still exist, thoughtful business owners, like massage therapist Larisa Goldin, are finding other ways to segment the markets for workplace chair massage. Larisa surveyed her current clients around the Seattle, Washington, metropolitan area to find out why they were buying seated massage. She identified new categories of corporate clients.

The Challenging Workplace. These are the specifically high stress environments where employees are coping with difficult workloads or difficult environments, such as hospitals and schools.
The Growing Workplace. Competitive industries, such as high tech and bio-tech, see a recruitment advantage by including chair massage in their benefits mix. Rob Nitzschke puts it this way: “They want bragging rights to be able to say our corporate culture is tops.”
The Progressive Workplace. There is no question that 21^st century companies are far more likely to have someone in a decision-making position who genuinely believes in the importance of massage. They are also more likely to have a culture that encourages and responds to input from their employees. Larisa mentioned Path, a large international non-profit with 500 serious, focused young employees who internally decided that they wanted regular chair massage. They got it.

Pay close attention to the millennials. They have grown up with a far more positive idea about massage than any other generation in history and the massage industry is just beginning to reap the benefits. Listen to what they want out of massage and how they want it delivered. To a great extent they control the future of workplace massage.

Seated Massage Success in the Workplace

by David Palmer | May 8, 2014 | Business, Marketing

This article originally appeared in the May 2014 issue of MASSAGE Magazine.

Seated, or chair, massage is alive, well and flourishing in the workplace, primarily because of two overarching trends: evolving public perception of massage therapy and the impact of the Internet. Large companies and corporations that have contracted with seated massage companies include JetBlue, The Walt Disney Company, Brandeis University, Boeing, The Weather Channel, Gillette, Delta Airlines, Apple Inc., SunTrust Bank, Bank of America Investments and IBM—as well as countless smaller businesses that rely on seated massage to reduce employee stress while improving morale and productivity.

A look back

In 1982, the concept of professional massage done through clothing, on seated customers, out in the open, was as unfathomable as the notion there would someday be a computer in every pocket. Thirty years ago, marketing chair massage to corporations was often done by picking up the telephone and cold-calling. Now, add to that the experience of trying to describe a service no one had ever heard of before. I recall one human resources director fretting about the need for an electric outlet in the massage room. It was an understandable confusion, since the only massage chair she was familiar with was the kind you had to plug in.

Seated massage has come a long way in three decades, and is now a familiar part of the cultural landscape, regularly appearing in malls, in movies and in the workplace. In cities large and small, companies of all sizes use seated massage to keep employees happy and healthy.

As Carrie Mudrick-Rubel, owner of Massage on Wheels in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, said, “The amount of people who are aware of massage has increased over the years. We rarely get funny looks anymore from people when we walk into a building.”

Certainly, visibility helps, making seated massage itself one of the biggest drivers of changing perceptions of massage therapy overall. “Within our culture, the image of massage is improving—and chair massage has been leading the way because it is so accessible,” says Larry Trager, who has offered seated massage since 1982.

The public is increasingly understanding the wide range of potential benefits of professional massage, ranging from the basic feel-better sensation of most massage, through relaxation, health-promotion and disease-prevention benefits, all the way up to specific treatment of a variety of emotional and physical challenges.

“There is greater enthusiasm for chair massage. People treat it more like a necessity than 10 years ago,” says Robin Faux, a seated massage practitioner in Los Cruces, New Mexico.

This visibility and awareness of benefits of massage inevitably reach corporate decision-makers, albeit sometimes more slowly than we would like. Massage therapist Mary Cheers, of Dayton, Ohio, tells the story of a CEO who had been a table client for years and only became interested in chair massage for her employees after reading in a trade magazine about how good it was for increasing morale.

Online impact

If successful public relations created a more receptive climate for chair massage services, it was the Internet that offered the ideal condition for stimulating its growth.

Trying to locate potential customers of workplace chair massage is like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack. It takes a lot of time and energy. While doing cold calls, mailing flyers or knocking on doors can still sometimes be useful for getting a seated massage business off the ground, without question the best contemporary strategy is to create an Internet presence and let companies looking for seated massage services find you.

Massage therapist Jessica Lugo began offering chair massage in Kansas City, Missouri, a year ago. She now provides seated massage at eight companies. She was initially inspired by her work with a chiropractor who paid her to go into corporations to provide free seated massage to promote his practice. She noticed a lot of interest in seated massage, and decided specializing in it would provide the flexibility she, a mother of four children, required.

One of her customers came from the chiropractor connection, but the other seven were hard-won by sending hundreds of emails, mailing dozens of flyers to local companies, and offering to provide free sample sessions. It took months of follow-up phone calls and legwork to land those seven clients and, while her persistence has paid off, in retrospect Lugo says the return was not worth the effort. She is now convinced future growth of her business lies in developing a website and creating an online presence.

Indeed, some of the largest chair massage companies market almost exclusively through the Internet. Infinite Massage, for example, spends 95 percent of its marketing budget on online advertising to keep their pool of more than 1,000 practitioners busy with seated massage. No matter where you are in the U.S., an Internet search for chair massage or seated massage will nearly always bring Infinite Massage at or near the top of the listings.

Trying to persuade the unenlightened of the value of seated massage, while noble, is not the most efficient use of time or money. The unconscious and deep-seated personal resistance many people still have toward massage can rarely be overcome by data, no matter how bottom-line oriented or scientifically persuasive.

However, being visible through the Internet to corporate decision-makers who are already looking for seated massage services is, at this point, a necessity. Make certain your website is search engine optimized, and create a presence on the major review sites, like Yelp, as well social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Recession-proof your practice

Workplace seated massage can be roughly divided into two sectors: one-time events and regular appointments. To minimize the effect of a downturn, don’t put all of your eggs in the event basket. This lesson was strongly reinforced when the economy downturned in 2008.

Infinite Massage, for example, derives two-thirds of its national income from one-time events—and by the end of 2008, it had lost 35 percent of its revenue. Smaller seated massage businesses are even more vulnerable. Massage therapist Maryuri Velazquez in Davie, Florida, focused 90 percent of her seated massage services on workplace events, particularly corporate health fairs. The recession hit her hard, and most of her event work disappeared. When times are tough, corporations make the easiest cuts—and special events are always high on the list.

Just to be clear, although workplace event massage may be first to go in a recession, it is still a significant income stream at all other times. For example, many millions of dollars have been spent on massage at corporate health fairs. There are regional and national massage companies whose primary revenue comes from providing seated massage practitioners to such events. They connect with companies primarily through referrals from insurance companies and by working with third-party organizers of corporate wellness programs.

Likewise, one-time chair massage for rewards and incentives will always be popular with companies like the Austin, Texas, branch of Apple Inc., which brings seated massage practitioners in from Seize the Day for an annual staff-appreciation day.

The second way to recession-proof your seated massage business is by having employees, rather than the company, foot the bill. As long as employees have a job, they are loath to give up their regular chair massage. In fact, they may believe they need it even more during stressful economic times.

That is what massage therapist Larissa Golden experienced at Boeing in Seattle, Washington, where her company has been providing seated massage since 2006. The employees were emphatic that Boeing would pry their massage away only at the company’s peril.

All of the most enduring seated massage businesses understand this survival tactic. Employees at USAA Insurance in Tampa, Florida, have been paying for chair massage without interruption for the past 22 years, a service provided by Vitality Break, one of the original seated massage companies in the state.

Conversely, massage therapists Larry and Stephanie Trager attribute much of the longevity—three decades and counting—of their business, Corporate Touch, to company clients paying for all or a portion of their fee. They have found companies that split even a small percentage of the cost of seated massage with their employees have a difficult time cutting the program despite a challenging economy. They also say when a company pays for at least part of the massage, it sends a message to employees: It is the difference between a company just allowing chair massage on their premises and actually encouraging it.

Active support

That kind of active support can be helpful for guaranteeing the success of seated massage in the workplace. Internet marketing works so well precisely because at least one person in the company is pre-sold on the value of chair massage—or she wouldn’t be searching for it online.

In addition to subsidizing massage, there are a number of other ways companies can demonstrate commitment to seated massage at little or no cost:

Providing the space for seated massage.
Designating a specific person as a liaison to the seated massage service.
Giving employees time off to get massage, rather than taking the time away from a break.
Maintaining a scheduling system. Massage therapist Marcy Basile has the office manager do the scheduling at a 150-person software company in Houston, Texas. A manual system may be adequate, but one that employees can access from their computers is even better.
Promoting the service. At USAA Insurance in Tampa, Florida, not only can the employees book online, reminders to sign up also periodically scroll in the newsfeed at the bottom of every monitor.
Implementing payroll deductions, if the employees are paying for all or a portion of the massage. This is a huge convenience for both the practitioner and the employee.

Getting company involvement in these ways will bind them into a closer relationship with your seated massage business and encourage a long-term the partnership.

But there are no iron-clad guarantees. If the seated massage cheerleader leaves the company or the corporate culture shifts, then there is always the danger of being marginalized or even ousted

New directions

Since selling chair massage to the workplace is a mostly passive, Internet-based process, our active marketing efforts must continue to be directed toward education and public information.

Traditionally we emphasized the individual benefits of an increase in circulation and a decrease in the negative impact of stress. Now, we are reframing those rationales. Over the past 20 years, researchers have been slowly shifting their attention from studying the mechanisms of pathology—why we get sick—to the mechanisms of health. This mirrors the broader paradigm shift within our health care system from treatment to prevention.

Chair Practitioner as Wellness Coach

by David Palmer | Jun 1, 2013 | Business, Chair Massage, Marketing

This article originally appeared in the May 2013 issue of Massage Magazine. The focus of the issue was on the business of massage and I was asked to respond to the question:

“How can I best position myself as a wellness coach offering chair massage services to business?“

Here is my response:
In a previous article I discussed why becoming a wellness coach is a good strategy for marketing workplace massage. To position yourself as a credible wellness coach for massage I suggest getting a credential and a good rationale justifying your services. The established wellness industry can give you the first and some revolutionary research the second.

Credentials
Formal training in wellness is often as close as your local academic institution, which may offer degrees or certification in health, wellness and fitness. A quick search will also put you in touch with related academic extension and online courses.

You can also access professional training and specialized credentials through non-profit organizations such as the National Wellness Institute or The Corporate Health and Wellness Association, both of which offer online and in-person training, certification, membership and conferences.

Both the academic and professional credentials are useful paths for getting a broad-based foundation in wellness and developing credibility as a wellness coach. However, you will quickly discover that massage is rarely found in the curricula of the mainstream wellness industry. In part, this is because of our deep-seated cultural phobia regarding touch. Specific prohibitions about touching are still routinely included in many corporate sexual harassment policies.

This absence of attention to massage by the wellness industry is also indicative of an absence of good data justifying the benefits of massage in the workplace.

It wasn’t until 2012 that the first (and as of this writing, only) textbook surveying the field of massage research was published (Massage Therapy: Integrating Research and Practice. Edited by Dryden and Moyer). With chapters on cancer, fibromyalgia, scars, sexual trauma, anxiety and depression, low back pain, neck and shoulder pain, headaches as well as special populations (pediatrics, pregnancy and labor, athletes, and older adults) it appeared that there was little evidence to construct a proactive rationale for massage in the workplace.

Fortunately corporate attitudes are in rapid transition and positive justifications for massage are appearing.

Corporate attitudes
Thirty years ago only in my wildest dreams could I have imagined a business conference entitled Wisdom 2.0 that would bring together leaders from some of the most successful tech companies (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Cisco) together with academics, researchers, politicians and spiritual educators (such as Marianne Williamson, Jon Kabot-Zinn, Jack Kornfield) to discuss “how to live with greater wisdom, purpose and meaning.” Yet, that is exactly what happened this past February for four days in San Francisco.

Check out videos of some of these presentations. Listen carefully and you will hear the business jargon of future and it will contain words like presence, engagement, compassion and mindfulness and concepts such as conscious capitalism, the innovative mindset, places and spaces of intimacy and reclaiming our selves.

Another easy way to learn about the changing values in business is by tapping into the seemingly bottomless library of presentations offered up by TEDTalks (www.ted.com). One word you will hear over and over again in all of these discussions is connection. Companies want their employees to feel connected to themselves, to each other, to customers, to their work, to their communities, to their environment and even to the greater good of all humankind.

Of course, touch is the physical manifestation of connection and chair massage is a very safe container for a whole lot of touch. So, in the massage version of a wellness coach we are actually connection experts.

Revolutionary research
Why is massage so good at creating a sense of internal and external connectedness? In a word—oxytocin. In the past ten years, this hormone/neurotransmitter has risen from obscurity to take a leading role in the wellness narrative. Here is the short, somewhat oversimplified rags-to-riches story starting with some basic physiology.

The autonomic nervous system has two complementary branches: the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), which generally activates our fight or flight response, and the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) which generally promotes rest and recovery and makes us feel calm and connected.

We live in a sea of stress caused primarily by over-stimulation of the SNS. Too much noise, too many smells, too many people, too much work, too much email, too many perceived dangers. The fight or flight response, once the occasional visitor when a tiger crossed our path, has become a constant companion. This chronic stress response has been dissected in thousands of research papers and the conclusion is simple, we are overwhelmed physically, mentally and emotionally.

What has been studied far less, until now, is the PSNS that stills the waters and brings a sense of peace and calm, comfort and compassion, healing and health to our lives. Evidence is mounting that the primary chemical that triggers this parasympathetic response is oxytocin. Originally thought to be released only during childbirth and breastfeeding, oxytocin is now known to be produced by the pituitary gland of both males and females throughout our lives.

We also now know that the most efficient way to stimulate the release of oxytocin is through caring touch. This means that we have a scientific rationale for why massage makes us feel better that we can explain to companies and customers. For the last 25 years my key message was “Circulation is not optional” now it is “Oxytocin is not optional.”

When oxytocin kicks in employees feel better about themselves and each other, productivity and creativity increase because energy is no longer drained away by a hyperactive SNS, and the multiple health problems brought on by a chronic stress response are reduced, resulting in lower absenteeism and health care costs.

Conclusion
To become a serious wellness coach to business carrying the banner of massage, get a credential and become an oxytocin expert by checking out the pioneering work of Kersten Unvas Moberg (The Oxytocin Factor), Paul Zak (The Moral Molecule) and Dr. Gabor Maté (drgabormate.com). The latter two have some engaging videos on YouTube.

On the Side of Angels

by David Palmer | Oct 4, 2012 | Business, Chair Massage

There is a successful company in Australia, 3-Minute Angels, that started in 2002 providing 3-minute chair massages in pubs and clubs for free. Customers would pay whatever they thought the service was worth. Today the business has grown into a more conventional chair massage provider with hundreds of practitioners offering 5- to 15-minute massages at events and in the workplace.

A similar company in Europe, Ibiza Angels, has trained 200+ massage practitioners to perform 7-minute massages in exclusive night clubs and at high-end entertainment and sporting events.

What both of these companies of “angels” have in common is that most of their practitioners never went to massage school. Indeed, the initial massage training for both businesses is accomplished in about one day.

I can almost hear the outraged grinding of teeth in American massage schools, associations and businesses where the current standard in most localities requires that practitioners go through a minimum of 500 hours of table massage training before they can make a living doing chair massage.

“One day of training? These practitioners are a danger to the general public. In pubs and clubs? This will only lower the status of massage professionals and undercut the ability of massage “therapists” to make a living.”

We have seen the enemy and he is us. – Walt Kelly

I recently returned from two weeks working in Paris and London where, once again, I was struck with how out-of-sync North America chair massage training is with much of the rest of world.

In both England and France, people routinely take one day courses in chair massage and begin to work professionally. In fact, for the vast majority of countries in the world short courses in chair massage (under 100 hours) is the rule, not the exception. Some of the training is done by businesses training potential workers, such as Ibiza Angels. Other courses are offered by private trainers or schools. Consequently, chair massage is thriving.

Why is North America so different? I would argue that the problem stems primarily from the decision to define all “massage” as “massage therapy.” I have discussed the background of that decision extensively in other articles, but essentially, when you opt to define a profession such as massage as primarily a health care service, you automatically raise the training bar to a high level. After all, virtually all health care professions require a college degree plus some form of post-graduate training.

As I watched both Presidential contenders extol the wonders of a free market economy during the debate last night, it occurred to me that our industry could benefit substantially from that approach.

It’s not that chair massage was over-regulated in North America, its more that chair massage simply got swept up by the regulations that were already in place for table massage. There is currently no separate regulation for chair massage and there needs to be.

The idea that you must learn 500-hours of table massage before you can learn chair massage is patently absurd. The reverse makes far more sense. All practitioners should be required to learn chair massage before they learn table massage. It is chair massage that is entry-level for both practitioners and customers, not massage therapy. Learning chair massage first would be a lot less expensive way for students to determine whether they should invest thousands of dollars learning table massage.

In countries where there is little or no regulation of massage, most massage is inexpensive chair or foot massage. That is what the public wants and that is what they can afford. The reason that less than 5% of the U.S. population get regular massage is to a great extent because the regulation of chair massage is conflated with the regulation of table massage. Chair massage needs to be regulated separately to meet the pent up market demand for convenient and affordable professional touch. Better yet, let’s just exempt chair massage from all regulation. Here’s how.

To extract chair massage from table massage, you have to define it. Here is my definition:

Chair massage is non-remedial massage done on seated, fully clothed customers, performed on the upper body above the waist or on the lower legs (from the knees down), in an open, public space.

Note that this definition also includes foot massage as long as the customer is seated and it eliminates the problem of prostitution because it does not allow massage behind closed doors in private rooms. Note also that this excludes massage therapy/treatment from the chair. Only massage with a wellness, prevention, or relaxation intention is allowed.

If this exemption was amended to every current massage law in the United States and Canada, our industry would explode with new businesses providing services to millions of new customers who would get in the habit of including a massage in their health lifestyle. A good portion of these new customers would then graduate to table massage and massage therapy ensuring our professional growth for decades to come.

Change is not easy

I understand that what I am proposing is not easy, but I do believe it is the only sensible course if we want to make massage truly accessible to everyone. The only reason we have massage regulation is to distinguish therapeutic massage from adult entertainment massage. But a clear and simple definition of chair massage eliminates that concern. Nobody mistakes chair massage for prostitution.

The only other rationale for regulating massage—that it is potentially dangerous—has never been demonstrated. To the contrary, the insurance companies who track these risks would never offer $4 million annual professional liability policies for less than $100 wholesale if there was a significant potential of harm to the customer.

Personally, I am not a fan of one-day training courses in chair massage. However, if a business can provide a chair massage service that people will buy, then why not let them? Just don’t let them call it massage therapy.

Unshackle chair massage and let it grow as it has in the rest of the world. The marketplace wants safe, convenient and affordable massage. Let’s finally let them have it.

How Culture Mediates Massage

by David Palmer | Oct 4, 2012 | Business, Chair Massage

Whenever customers sit in my massage chair, I know that their subjective experience of my touch will be the result of at least four factors:

Their genetic profile (Are they male/female? Do they have biological disorders such as autism).

Their personal touch history (Have they had massage before? Have they experienced healthy touch or abusive touch in the past? Have they experienced touch at all?).

The attitudes and experiences with touch they had in the family (Were they breastfed, or not? Was their family highly affectionate, or not?).

The customs and attitudes toward touch that are emphasized by the culture in which they are immersed.

This fourth element is the subject of this article. As the world continues to shrink and multi-cultural societies becomes the norm rather than the exception, understanding the cultural environment in which a customer was raised is crucial to healthy professional touch relationships. In this article I will give two examples of how culture affects how we touch.

Defining pain

I began my massage career in 1980 working at Kabuki Hot Spring, a spa in San Francisco’s Japantown. I was the only Caucasian male working in a sea of mostly Asian, mostly female faces. While I had been trained in traditional Japanese massage at a school that was run by the owners of the Hot Spring, a majority of the other practitioners had been trained in Japan. It was at Kabuki that I began to understand why Japanese massage had gotten a reputation in the United States as “beat-me-up” massage.

While the Kabuki had private rooms, most of the customers availed themselves of the public baths and the communal massage room, which had 14 massage tables lined up in an open space. Doing massage alongside Japanese practitioners introduced me to what I have since come to understand is a differentiation in how cultures define pain.

I would regularly notice a poor customer at another table squirming uncomfortably under the strong thumbs of a Japanese colleague. If the customer tried to get the practitioner to ease up they were likely to get a slap on the back and be commanded to, “Relax! Relax!”

In the immortal line from Cool Hand Luke, “What we got here is a failure to communicate.”

In Japan, China and many other Asian cultures, if you are feeling a strong sensation while getting a massage, you are happy because you believe the massage is working. In the West, we often interpret the same strong sensation as pain and we think it is a bad massage.

The Japanese practitioners I was working alongside were clearly mystified that anyone would want a lighter massage. From their point of view the problem was not that the massage was too strong, but that the customer was resisting the benefits. To the American customers, the massage simply hurt.

This mistake is still being perpetuated by the flood of Chinese immigrants providing chair massage in malls throughout the U.S. Nobody has taught them that they need to regularly ask their customers for feedback about the pressure and there is often a serious language barrier making it difficult to do so.

For my part, every time I have someone in my massage chair born in the Far East I keep that cultural difference in mind. More often then not they like pressure on the strong side of the spectrum. In all cases, of course, I ask for feedback.

The French form of connection

I use a martial arts approach to teach massage through “Katas,” highly choreographed sequences of select acupressure points and Japanese massage techniques.

Over the years hundreds of people have used my DVDs and other curriculum material as the basis for training thousands of chair massage practitioners around the world. Last year, for example, I discovered that my basic chair massage Kata was famous in France and literally thousands of practitioners were using some variation. They even have a name for it: the Amma Kata.

When I saw a video of one chair massage trainer demonstrating his work, I was amazed. He had been trained by a person who had been trained by a person who had been trained by me. Despite this fourth generational relationship, I was impressed that my original Kata was plainly visible.

What caught my eye, however, was not what was similar, but what was different. The trainer had added two full minutes of slow, deep, luxurious scalp massage at almost the end of the 15-minute sequence.

Recently I had an opportunity to meet with this trainer, Xavier Court, in Paris and spend a week working on the Kata with him and the other trainers working with him. When I experienced his head massage in a chair, I loved it. He had given thousands of chair massages to French people in the workplace and at events and was convinced that the additional work on the scalp was essential to a satisfying experience for his customers.

I explained to him that, in the United States, we had almost exactly the opposite experience. If there is one part of the massage that people most often ask us to leave out, it is the scalp. Here it seems that customers want us to get to the parts of the body that they perceive “need” the work—most often the neck, shoulders and back. If we spent two minutes “just” doing the scalp, people would feel like they were not getting their money’s worth.

In France, on the other hand, there is a cultural recognition that deep relaxation is a goal in and of itself. This is the land dedicated to the 35-hour workweek, five weeks of annual vacation and dinners that don’t start until 9 p.m. Unlike its neighbors to the north (Germany, Netherlands, England, Scandinavia), France is an essentially Mediterranean country with all of the sensuousness and slow pace that implies. It was truly an eye-opening experience that reminded me of an analysis by Virginia Postrel about what is missing from American attitudes toward massage.

What do you see?

These examples highlight the need for cultural sensitivity when doing massage. There are many more differences in cultural perceptions of massage most obviously ones that stem from cultural attitudes and norms about touch and sexuality. Please share your cross-cultural insights in the comments section below.

« Older Entries