published 10/14/06

Review of Job’s Body: A handbook for bodywork, a book by Deane Juhan

A physiology textbook with imagination and a soul

by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada MORE
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Credentials and qualifications

I am a writer and retired Registered Massage Therapist (unusually well-trained for a massage therapist, a 3000-hour program). I’m almost done with a Bachelor of Health Sciences degree. I am a peer reviewer for The Natural Standard, and a copyeditor for Science-Based Medicine. My most important qualification is more than a decade of workaholic post-graduate study, clinical experience, and constant conversations with readers from around the world, including many experts who have provided countless suggestions and criticisms.

For more information, see: Who Am I to Say? More information about my qualifications, credentials and professional experiences for my readers and customers.

Deane Juhan. Job’s Body: A Handbook for Bodywork. Barrytown, 1998.

This book is both brilliant and challenging. I can’t get through it without a dictionary at my side. But if you can manage the density of the language, Job’s Body is thick with revelations about physiology and healing.

Juhan tries to explain why bodyworkers are often so uncannily effective. This is a job that certainly needed doing, and we may be well into the Twenty-First Century before anyone approaches the subject so insightfully again.

In trying to explain bodywork, Job’s Body is a philosophical introduction to the science of the human body — a physiology textbook with a heart. Many chapters are devoted to pure science — accessible to the hard-reading layperson, but offering invaluable perspectives for the health care professional.

Still more chapters are devoted to pure philosophy. Juhan frequently dares to ask (and answer) the hardest questions in the health sciences: why and so what?

I have never read anything else even remotely like Job’s Body. It stands alone, a unique accomplishment, and a gold mine of rare insights into health healing. I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone serious about understanding human nature — it’s worth the effort.

An excerpt from Job’s Body: A Handbook for Bodywork

This short passage from the introduction to Deane Juhan's remarkable book inspired me as a student of massage therapy and still works its magic on me now. I often find myself trying to say what it says, and falling short. In all my reading on the subject of massage and bodywork, and all the writing I've done myself, nothing has ever come so close to expressing why touch therapy can be so profound.

Friction on the skin, pressure on the deeper tissues, distortion of the tissues surrounding the joints — these are the media through which the organism perceives itself and through which it organizes its internal and external muscular responses. As we develop and mature, most of us build up and reinforce a reliably consistent sense of our selves by carefully selecting and maintaining a specific repertoire of movement habits — which generate a specific repetoire of sensations — and by surrounding ourselves with a stable environment with which to interact. This careful process of selection is largely unconscious, and so as long as we are comforable we are rarely aware of any limitations or potential dangers our cultivated habits may entail. And even if a disturbing symptom appears, we generally do not suspect that our well-worn, tried-and-true behaviour might be its cause. In fact, the very consistency of our normal patterns frequently prevents us from changing our ways long enough to obtain such an insight.

It is exactly this circular relationship between our habitual behaviours and the chronic conditions of our tissues that skillful touching can so usefully penetrate. New frictions, new pressures, and new movements of the limbs necessarily create new sensations, volumes of new data which the mind can scan in search of clues for new habits, new modifications, more constructive conditions. And here we are close to putting our finger on the possible reason why the touch therapies can sometimes produce positive results so quickly, almost “miraculously.” No matter how much I move myself around, my strongest tendency is to move in the same ways that I have always moved, guided by the same deeply seated postural habits, sensory cues, and mental images of my body; but if I can succeed in surrendering to the movements that another person imposes on my body, without my own system of cues and responses interfering, it is possible to treat my mind to a flood of sensations that are novel in important ways, sensations that may well be able to indicate what things I have been doing that have produced my aches and pains at the same time as they have reinforced my normal sense of self.

And even more important, this moment of surrender and new sensation can demonstrate to me that I am not permanently obliged to continue acting out a habitual compulsion. I can see that the habit is a habit, that I am something else, and that for the moment at any rate I can choose to repeat it or now. And if I can drop a compulsive behaviour or attitude for a moment without causing a crisis, then perhaps I can dispense with it altogether. As every physician knows, this kind of insight can often be worth more than any number of drugs or procedures for the reversal of a chronic condition.
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