On the massage table, I started thinking about repetition.

Jacob T has very large hands, perhaps as big as my feet, and deploys them with long, sturdy strokes. Which is what I want in massage, so that’s all good. And then he uses those same strokes in the same places for perhaps three times longer than I’m accustomed to.

My muscles are not known for relaxing themselves; I routinely schedule half-again-longer massages because it just takes a while to get my muscles to let go of what they’re holding. But Jacob’s technique not only convinced them to let go, it convinced them to stay loose, even when he moved on.

He ironed out the resistance.

Is that the heart of repetition techniques in any space? They iron out resistance?

It’s hard to sustain long trains of thought during massage (!), but I mulled over broken record. I’m thinking now of those mind-control techniques they’d warn us about in the movies, where large groups would chant phrases for hours on end. Or maybe that was the news, and those were Hare Krishnas…these memories are misty, little-kid ones.

Is that part of leveraging habits? The repetition irons out my internal resistance to doing The Thing?

 

I suspect there are plenty of other aspects, affordances, and access points at play in our responses to repetition. But I’ll leave them for you to discuss.