Techniques are rarely soothing unless they flow into one another. A typical concern of students is that they are performing techniques correctly but that their massage still feels choppy. The solution to this is to practice transitions. A transition is a stroke that connects the next logical stroke. For instance, a common transition stroke in the back is a stroke with the palms that moves down the spine.
As your hands reach the lower back, rather than pulling them off, use your fingers to make circular motions out towards the sides of the body and then back up towards the shoulders again. This circular stroke up the sides of the body is a transition back up to the shoulders. As you repeat this, you’re teaching your hands not to stop at the end of each stroke.
A mistake that you might recognize if you have this problem is that you are focusing on remembering what technique to do next. To compensate for the lack of knowledge about transitions, your hands stop moving while you’re deciding what stroke comes next. It might be just for a second, but the break in the flow of your strokes is enough to ruin the peacefulness of the experience. This can be fixed by simplifying your massage to just two or three techniques, and repeating them over and over again until you get the transitions right. Once it feels more comfortable, you can add more techniques into the mix without stopping between them.
You can use the following short exercise to work on your flow: Start by gliding your palms over your partner’s back for a few minutes to get the muscles warm and to establish the beginning of your connection. Then find a long stroke down the back and connect it with a circular stroke up the sides of the body. Repeat the sequence of the long stroke down and the circle up several times, paying attention to the connection between the two. As you get comfortable, add in another stroke, like a forearm stroke, after your circle up stroke so that your hands are flowing into a deeper stroke. Practice for a few minutes and see how much more connected you feel.
If you find that your transitions start to feel a little awkward or stiff, check to see if you’re using too much pressure and tensing up your wrists. If so, lighten up and let your hands move more freely over the surface of the muscles. This should help you find a more fluid connection between your strokes. The more you practice, the more your hands will begin to automatically connect one stroke to the next to create a peaceful flow of movement.