Why I do what I do

“Why do you do this?” she asked, lying facedown, her French accent echoing out of the face-cradle. Multi-lingual people can have a way of unknowingly omitting tact when speaking in a secondary language. Blunt, but as result, succinct and brilliant as well.

My work, she meant. This was sometime last year. I do a few different kinds of bodywork, but I was giving her a massage at the time. “What made you want to become a massage therapist?” people often ask, ostensibly confused by my willingness to touch perfect strangers. I'm never able to come up with an answer that I’m satisfied with. But the bluntness of her phrasing cut right to the heart of the matter, and before I could over think it I said, “because when you touch someone, you’re touching their entire life.” 

When I type that out I can see how that might read as intrusive, overly self-important, and frankly, creepy. But when you work with people in this way, you are working with so much more than just a body. You are working with the entirety of a person.  

The body is sacred. It is a living, breathing record of history, a storehouse of every emotion and physical sensation you’ve ever experienced, as well as what you’ve inherited ancestrally and what you might carry with you from previous incarnations. Your body is the location of your entire life. And when you put your hands on someone’s body, you are, in a way, putting your hands on their whole life. You are touching a zygote, who, in it’s infinite wisdom, knew how to implant itself onto a uterine wall. You are touching a head which has emerged from a birth canal. You are touching a body that has survived war, car accidents, unspeakable grief and terror.  You are making contact with skin, blood, lymph, muscle, bone, vasculature, all while making contact with a being that knows the simple satisfaction of swallowing a drink of cold water, of feeling the breeze. You are touching a hand that pet its dog today, an arm that just held its grandchild for the first time. 

This poignant meeting of the opposites, this recognition of the spectrum containing both the mundane and profound, is just one of the many reasons I am drawn this work. In the early days of quarantine I stumbled across this quote while I was seeking comfort in the aptly named book, “Consolations” by David Whyte.

From the chapter Ambition:

"...a true vocation calls us out beyond ourselves; breaks our heart in the process, and then humbles, simplifies, and enlightens us about the hidden, core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place. We find that all along, we had what we needed in the beginning and that in the end we have returned to its essence, an essence we could not understand until we had undertaken the journey.”

As bodyworkers, we are offering whoever’s body is on the table, with all of their enumerative experiences of being here in this particular human form, an invitation of what it is to be here, now, in this body, and reminding them of the inherent health within it. It is a meditation. It is a constant surrendering to a deeper wisdom. It is a bow to each individual’s particular pattern of expression of being. By regularly guiding others to this type of reminding experience, I am putting myself in direct contact with the very same truth. I am reminded of my own inherent health, I am bowing to my own expression, I am acknowledging the entirety of my own being. It is wonderment and it is so very ordinary. It is one fabulous ouroboros of a way of working, relating, existing, and a point from which, through which, and by which my soul feels continually nourished.