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Early in my Yoga practice, I learned to do the scorpion pose. I thought it would be a cool cocktail party trick, not to impress people with my skill(which wouldn’t be very Yoga-like) but to turn them on to yoga with that flair. Sun salutations, while better for you, just don’t do it. 

This technique is the massage equivalent. Well actually, I don’t think I have turned anyone on to massage each other at a social event, but it sure looks cool.

Check below:

Insert video.

Bet you are stunned. This actually doesn’t hurt at all. The Rhomboids, which we massaged in *technique # 6, are the muscles involved here. Later on, this will be prep for helping someone with *carpal tunnel syndrome, but don’t worry about that for now. 

Relax the recipient.

While I’m not saying that this is the easiest technique, it usually isn’t the quality of your excecution that is the problem here. Relaxing the recipient is the challenge with this technique. Technically, it looks a lot like when a police officer subdues someone, which is really invading the recipients space. This is how you get into the position:

* Don’t worry about them bending their arm at first - get the arm relaxed by holding the recipients shoulder, and moving it back and forth, until they can effectively have their arm hanging limp.

*Once that happens, apply pressure onto their rhomboid. This should be on the same side of the spine as you already are working on. Then, when you pull back on the shoulder this time, their shoulderblade will protrude a little bit. This is good.

Bet you wonder how this works.

When I show this to people, even when one of the group is the “prop”, everyone becomes cautious, thinking it would hurt. It actually doesn’t hurt at all. The Rhomboids connect the shoulderblade to the spine, and when you pull the shoulder back, you are shortening the distance between the shoulderblade and spine, effectively creating ’slack’ in the muscle, which allows you to do this move.

You can use the methods from *technique # 6, as you can manipulate the muscle differently this way, but you should be massaging the way the video shows. And there is only one way to do it.

Don’t be afraid, just jam your hand in there. It looks like it would hurt, but if it hurt, you wouldn’t be able to jam your thumb up in there in the first place. This range of motion exists because the arm is pulled back, and provided that they are relaxed, you should be able to get at least 2 fingers to disappear behind their shoulderblace, if not you entire hand.

Hey, this was the last intermediate technique!

So, if you didn’t think of it yourself, you can do this technique standing as well as sitting. 

Keep reading the *introduction to advanced techniques, or take a break and start massaging. And don’t worry - This material will be here for you to reread in the future.

Previous lesson: Both hands on one side of the body. Next lesson: Introduction to the advanced techniques.

Introduction to the TV massage series:

Technique # 1: Using your Thumbs and four fingers as a unit.
Technique # 2: Heel of hands and four fingers as a unit.
Technique # 3: Four fingers pushing downward.
Technique # 4: Using your knuckles.
Technique # 5: Using bony parts of your hand.

Introduction to the intermediate techniques.

Technique # 6: One hand on front of body.
Technique # 7: The thumbs-stretch technique.
Technique # 8: Leveraging your body.
Technique # 9: Both hands on one side of body.
Technique # 10: The cocktail party trick.

Introduction to the advanced techniques.

Technique # 11: Leveraging your body.
Technique # 12: Massaging the neck. Mmmm…
Technique # 13: Aligning the body of the recipient.
Technique # 14: The Navarronian death grip.
Technique # 15: Scalp Massage.