An unusal effect of Intimate Bodywork
One of the most common – and often unexpected – responses that clients experience during Intimate Bodywork sessions is involuntary shaking, trembling or muscular twitching. Over the years I’ve seen this happen in hundreds of sessions; there is something about the slowing, down-regulating effect of the kind of focussed touch that we’re using that seems to move people into a slightly altered state where this kind of movement happens spontaneously. It’s especially common in people who describe themselves as highly stressed, hypervigilant, anxious or emotionally ‘contained’ most of the time.
Shaking, tremoring, unwinding during massage
Sometimes the response is subtle: a slight quivering, a fluttering feeling or a sense that there is a vibration happening in the body. It can also be much more pronounced: big muscular twitches, a tremor going through the whole body, teeth and jaw chattering (as if they’re cold, but they’re quite warm in that moment), spontaneous deep breaths, emotional release or a feeling that the body is somehow unwinding or uncoiling.
For many clients, it can feel strange, alarming or deeply relieving all at once. If you’ve experienced this in Intimate Bodywork, or other forms of massage, you’ve probably wondered what is actually happening. I’m not a medical practitioner, I can’t give you a precise medical answer, but through trainings like TRE (Trauma Release Exercise) and hands-on observations I’ve pulled together a few ideas…
A natural nervous system response to touch
My understanding – both from experience and from the science we currently have – is that these involuntary movements are usually a nervous system phenomenon rather than something mystical or pathological.
A useful comparison is TRE (Trauma Release Exercises), a method developed by Dr. David Berceli. TRE deliberately induces tremoring in the body through fatiguing certain muscle groups, particularly around the legs and pelvis. Generally in sessions you will perform a specific set of exercises before lying down and intentionally activating a tremor. The theory is that mammals naturally shake after stress or threat as a way of discharging activation from the nervous system – but humans often suppress this response socially and psychologically. If you’ve ever seen an animal shake after a frightening experience before calmly walking away, you’ve seen this mechanism in action.
In my sessions, however, the shaking usually appears through the opposite route: not muscular strain, but profound relaxation. We’re not forcing anything, we’re not stressing the muscles and trying to induce a tremor. It just happens sometimes.
For some people, dropping out of chronic tension and sympathetic nervous system activation (‘fight or flight’) is so long overdue that the body almost doesn’t know what to do with the sudden safety and softness. Tremoring can emerge as the system begins to down-regulate.
The nervous system, fascia and reflexive movement
There are a few overlapping theories that may help explain what’s happening physiologically. One comes from fascial and osteopathic research into what is sometimes called fascial unwinding or ideomotor movement. A paper by Budiman Minasny describes how gentle touch and stretching may stimulate mechanoreceptors (sensory nerve endings that detect pressure, stretch, movements) within fascia and connective tissue, influencing both the autonomic nervous system and motor control systems. This provokes a response that encourages muscles to find an easier, or more relaxed, position.
This isn’t definitively proven science but it is plausible that slow, safe touch gives the nervous system sensory information and that input can encourage a shift toward parasympathetic dominance – the ‘rest, digest and repair’ state. When we feel safe, muscular ‘guarding’ decreases, and the body may begin making involuntary adjustments. The term ideomotor action is sometimes used here, which refers to ‘involuntary movement generated by the nervous system outside of deliberate conscious control’. Most people have experienced the sudden twitch that can happen just as they’re drifting off to sleep. One moment you’re relaxed and letting go of conscious control, and the next your leg kicks or your whole body jolts unexpectedly. While the mechanisms are likely different, involuntary movements during bodywork can feel remarkably similar. Just as strange neurological phenomena can occur during the transition into sleep, unusual movements, tremors and twitches often happen during the transition into profound relaxation during bodywork.
Importantly, this does not necessarily mean ‘stored trauma is literally leaving the tissues’ in a simplistic sense – it’s hard to say for sure whether you’re shaking out that time you were in a 3 car pile-up…However, it does appear that receiving slow, mindful nervous-system focussed touch – blended with down-regulating breath work – in an environment where you feel safe, warm and emotionally un-judged can profoundly affect muscle tone, movement patterns and your state of tension.
Why it often happens in highly stressed people
I can’t accurately predict whether someone is going to experience shaking or tremoring in a session, but one thing I’ve noticed is that the people most likely to tremor are often the people who are least used to feeling safe in their bodies. They appear outwardly calm, competent and functional, but internally they’re running on adrenaline, muscular bracing and constant vigilance that has become so ‘normal’ to them they’re not even aware of it anymore.
Some clients start shaking almost immediately after lying down. In these cases, it seems to me that the body is releasing a long accumulated store of tension – almost like an adrenaline dump once the person realises, consciously or unconsciously, that they no longer need to ‘hold themselves together.’ I remember a virtual coaching session during the Covid pandemic – where I wasn’t even in the same room as the client – where the simplicity of 5 minutes of down-regulating breath work was enough to initiate a shaking response in his body, which I then gently guided him through. It’s not uncommon for someone to remark that they didn’t realise how tense they were until their body started shaking. Often the tremoring is accompanied by:
- spontaneous sighing or yawning
- changes in breathing depth
- warmth or tingling
- emotional release – tears, laughter
- a sense of heaviness or melting
- waves of exhaustion followed by clarity
These are all signs associated with shifts in autonomic nervous system state.
The pelvic floor, internal work and deeply down-regulating touch
Another observation from my thousands of sessions is that a shaking response frequently begins after pelvic floor, anal or internal (prostate) massage work. The pelvic floor (a collection of muscles attached to the boney landmarks of the base of your pelvis) is deeply connected to the autonomic nervous system and unconscious tension patterns. Many people carry chronic contraction there related to stress, fear, shame, hyper-vigilance, sexual anxiety or simply years of disconnection from that area of the body. Internal touch often accesses layers of tension that external massage cannot reach. When clients then roll onto their back afterwards, the body sometimes begins trembling spontaneously.
My personal interpretation is that there are several things happening simultaneously:
- The slowness of the touch allows deep muscular holding patterns to reduce
- The breath becomes fuller as we’re indirectly relaxing the pelvic diaphragm
- Sympathetic activation (‘fight or flight’) decreases
- Emotional reactions associated with vulnerability or protection come up
There may also be something significant about working with smooth muscle tissues internally, which can have an unusually strong calming effect on the nervous system.
There’s not much scientific research to back this up, so I want to be careful not to overstate any certainty, but in my hands-on experience the pattern is worth mentioning and fairly consistent.
Is it dangerous to shake during a massage?
In the overwhelming majority of cases: no.Assuming the client is medically well and the response happens in a calm therapeutic environment, involuntary shaking during massage is usually a very natural and healthy nervous system response. In fact, many clients describe it as strangely enjoyable and deeply relieving afterwards. That said, context matters and not all shaking is ‘trauma and tension release.’ Tremors can also be caused by:
- adrenaline
- anxiety
- cold temperature
- muscular fatigue
- neurological conditions
- medication effects
- blood sugar fluctuations
A good practitioner should remain grounded, check in with their client about how they’re feeling and avoid making grand claims or projections about exactly what the body is ‘releasing.’
Is it very Spiritual if I shake during a massage?
I’m cautious about overly spiritualised explanations that frame every little twitch as profound trauma healing. I also find it too limiting and vague to simply label any kind of spontaneous movement as magical ‘energy’. The idea that one needs to be flopping around like a fish to be ‘sexually open’ creates a kind of ‘goal’ or performance aspect to something that is, at it’s root, about relaxation, Most often the body is simply reorganising tension and autonomic activity in a very ordinary biological way. And yet, even without mystical language and esoteric explanations, these experiences can still feel profoundly meaningful to clients. I recall one woman, in her late forties, who was a self-confessed ‘control freak’. Her shaking was accompanied by tears and laughter and the acknowledgement that ‘I’ve never let go like this before, it’s amazing to me that my body is doing something without me controlling it’. The experience certainly felt ‘Spiritual’ to her, as it was essentially inexplicable and outside her usual experience of her body and reality.
The body knows how to regulate stress: we just need to give it the space
What fascinates me most is that these responses often appear completely spontaneously. The client is not trying to shake (usually they have no prior knowledge of this built-in mechanism), and I’m not telling them to shake or – as previously mentioned – getting them to do any muscle fatiguing exercises as in TRE. I don’t set out at the start of the session to make it happen but when it does there’s a sense of ‘oh, there we go, the shaking is happening, that’s interesting’. The body simply begins doing its thing once enough safety, relaxation and permission are present. To me, this points toward something important: the nervous system already contains mechanisms for regulation, clearing and reorganisation but modern life keeps us too stimulated, defended, distracted or disconnected to access them.
Sometimes a warm quiet room, safe intimate touch, deep breathing and the removal of performance is enough for the body to begin finding its own way back toward more ease.
If you’re curious about Intimate Bodywork sessions, or feel your body is holding a lot of stress, tension and guarding that you’d like to clear, get in touch to book your first session.
With Love,
Libby
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