To Be Seen

Quick survey question:  How many articles have you seen on your social media feed asking some version of this question: How do I relationship?

My answer is well into the double digits.  It's a good question, and, I'm worried, one we are getting worse at answering as we retreat further away from collaborative living.

What I mean by collaborative living is this -- living in such a way that we spend more time talking to people in front of our faces, where we use more voices, hands and facial expressions than emojis.  But even more than that, living in such a way that we know our neighbors and we know the people who own the businesses in our area.  Shopping locally, caring about the whole street where we live and not just the portion surrounding our possessions.

Lots of people write more informed words on this topic than I do.  Today I am thinking about just one aspect of it that interests me.  I am worried that we are losing the skill of being seen.   I am talking very deliberately in the passive voice.  It is not so much our ability to see and know other people that I've been thinking about, but our own ability to let ourselves be seen and known.

Our online lives are carefully curated, often by well-meaning but careless gatekeepers.  I mean, of course, ourselves.  We choose what to share and show and how to frame it.  In doing so, we necessarily exclude a large portion of our reality.  We tell ourselves this is because not everything we are is for everyone to know.  And we are right, but we are also losing a valuable skill.  The skill of letting someone see.

There are truths about myself that I don't like.  But they are true, and they are pieces of all that goes into myself.  Recently, I have had the great honor to meet friends who really want to see all of my pieces, and I am realizing I don't know how to do that.  I mean, I can open up, I can show the whole picture, but I fear I have lost the knack of handling their reaction, of not taking personally those things which are not personal.  And someone else's reaction to things about me that are true -- those are not mine to take personally.

I see this often with some of my clients.  Even though I work with soft tissues, everyone brings their whole self into the room, and their emotional, spiritual and intellectual truths sometimes come out through the movement of their bodies.  If I see someone often enough, I can start to see the changes in their lives just in their gait or facial expression.  It's not magic.  It's observation, something I've practiced for as long as I've been practicing massage.  I'm not in the habit of commenting on it, but I am in the habit of seeing.  Because of this, I have been fortunate enough to see how powerful it can be for a person when someone just sees.

Quick story:  At the last place I practiced, I had a client I saw every week for a few years.*  With that kind of continuity, you start to learn a bit about each other's lives, and you start to notice things.  She had what most of us would call a good life -- lots of love and friendship and fulfilling work.  She was (and remains) a seeker -- of truth and wisdom.  Sometimes this caused her some anxiety, especially as the world seemed o grow less compassionate in general.  Most weeks, her massage was "easy."  She had no chronic pain or injury, and she did not like aggressive work.  It was a gentle hour of meditation for both of us. 

One day she came in and she was different.  I only knew because I had known her for so long.  She spoke less and in a flatter tone.  She moved slower.  Her whole demeanor seemed heavy to me.   She asked for the same kind of work, and I did a similar massage.  I felt like I moved slower and stayed still more often in response to her own heaviness.  After the massage, she asked for some water and I brought it to her.  We sat in silence in my office for a moment, breathing together.  I made eye contact with her.

"Today is hard," I said. 

She looked startled for a moment, then she dropped her head and nodded.  In a few seconds I realized she was crying.  I walked over to her and gave her a hug.  We sat and held each other for a moment while she let all her tears happen.  When she was done crying, she thanked me, nodded, and walked out.  Not completely released, but a little more quickly and a little lighter than when she walked in. 

I don't know what made that day hard for her.  That's not the point.  The point is that she was seen, and it gave her space to cry.  I believe and hope she felt that space was safe and welcoming. 

In my own life, I have much to learn about being seen and living in my truth.  I'm starting by recommitting to daily creativity, to reconnecting to my first love (writing) and trying to find again that love of how words go.   I am also trying to risk putting more writing out in the world where anyone can find it -- can see.

And I am also recommitting to my massage practice.  While it has been a good choice to move back home, it has also been (and continues to be) terrifying, which makes it harder for me to be truthful about the kind of work I do and the kind of work I excel at.  Fortunately for me, those two things are pretty much the same. The impulse in a new(ish) home with a new practice to build is to take on all clients.  To fill my books by any means necessary.  This would, I know, exhaust my spirit.  And with an exhausted spirit, I will forget how to see, and I will never learn to be seen. 

Under My Hands

Towards the end of her massage, I laid my hands on both of her cheeks, intending to release some of the tension in her jaw.  I saw her face tighten, then relax as she started to cry.  Her tears traveled down her cheeks and under my hands.  I asked her if she wanted a tissue.  In response, she covered my hands with her hands.

"No," she said. "Just keep holding on to me."

So I did.  I held her head between my hands while tears fell down her face, under my hands and to the table.  I took long, slow, deep breaths and watched as she slowly started to do the same.  I felt the tension in her jaw release as she smiled a little bit.

"I could just feel my mother here,"  she said.  "She wants to tell you 'Thank you for fixing my daughter.'"

What I wanted to say, but didn't:  How could I possibly fix something so complete, so whole and so grandly human?

After she left, I took a moment to appreciate the gift she gave me -- that she would let me touch her tears with my bare hands.  May we always be worthy of such trust.

This Little Trigger Went to Market

I was talking to a friend about a teenager we both know.  This child recently got taken out of a sport due to a knee injury.  My friend expressed some concern about the teen finding some activity to do in place of the sport.  This friend expressed concern over the possibility that this child could become a fat teenager.  She called that a "bad thing."

So, here's the thing -- I was a fat teenager.  And in many ways it was a bad thing.  It was a bad thing because of the way other teenagers (and some adults) treated me.  Because somehow it was okay to be teased at school and to feel shamed at home.  It was a bad thing because of the nickname that I got that stuck with me until I moved away from my home town, the nickname that even now I won't tell anyone because it carries such shame-filled memories.  My point is, it was a bad thing because of the way the outside world made me feel unacceptable because my body was somehow unacceptable.

Fortunately, I have a loving and supportive family.  Even through missteps and unintentionally hurtful things,  I knew that I had worth and value as a human being.  Not everyone is that lucky.

This, I am discovering, is a big part of my purpose as a massage therapist.  My practice needs to be a place where every human can feel safe and valued in their body, just as it is right now.  My very first client in Louisville reinforced that for me.  Here was a woman who spends her life working hard, caring and providing.  The hard work took a toll on her body and she was finally making a commitment to take some care of herself.  After her first session with me, she sat in a chair and wept over the "mess" she had made of her body, and how "bad" she allowed it to get.  I handed her a tissue and told her two true things:
1)  Every human body that arrives in my office is a successful human body.  Period.
2)  In my space, no one apologizes for their body.  Ever.
She looked stunned for a moment, nodded a little, and scheduled her next appointment.

So, when my friend talked about how bad it would be to become a fat teenager, my overprotective amygdala went a little nuts.  I perceived her view as a threat.  It is a threat.  It threatens the world I am trying to create in and push out from my massage office, where a person can feel safe existing in their body.  On a more personal level, it threatens my own sense of worth, which may seem solid but is in fact a tray full of water on the deck of a ship -- it could spill at any time.

The wonderful writer behind the blog Your Fat Friend does a much better job of talking about our cultural hullabaloo surrounding fatness and body image.  You should go and read her blog.  Here, I will just point out that I can think of things so much worse than being the fat teenager, and I am still struggling with a world that still wants us to live somewhere besides in our bodies.  It is the struggle that clarifies my purpose.

Scoliosis Orca

My client has a chronic genetic condition*.  As a child, it caused so much discomfort that she spent weeks confined to her bed at home.  During this time, she developed a habit of spending hours searching the internet for interesting facts.  She read voraciously about many different subjects, and deeply about very few.

She was the kind of client who needed to chatter for the first third of the massage before she could settle into her body.  How could I blame her?  Her body had never been a comfortable place to be.  She felt safer in her mind.  Those 20 or so minutes generally consisted of a wide-ranging array of different facts and stories ranging from the bathing habits of Ancient Romans to genetically modified, drug-testing mice.

One day I will always remember, though, because she spent her entire "talk time" telling me one story.  Apparently somewhere in the wild is an orca who has scoliosis.  Scientists have been following this whale (and his related pod) for some time.  Left alone, this orca would die.  His spinal curvature keeps him from hunting effectively, and he does not swim as fast as the other whales.  Scientists noted, however, that other whales in the pod were actually helping this orca.  They would bring food to him, and if he fell behind, they would sometimes even wait for him to catch up to them.  My client had spent much of the night (she didn't sleep well) reading about this whale and watching video footage of the whole pod in action.  At first, it was the orca's mother doing all this tending, but then even after his mother died, the rest of the pod continued to take care of him.

My client went over and over this story, each time remembering little details from some video or website or other.  Eventually, as in every session, she relaxed into her body and gradually dropped off talking.  I had a nagging little sense that something was being opened to me, but I put it aside to focus on her massage.

After she left, I started thinking about the story she told me, and how much it captured her attention.  I remembered something a co-worker once said to me: "We use metaphors because they tell us something real."  Of course.  The story of the orca was a metaphor.  Here was this creature with a chronic genetic condition.  Left to his own devices, he would have been abandoned and left behind, possibly even left to die.  Instead, his fellow creatures stepped in and took care of this creature's needs, thereby keeping him connected to the whole of his world.

My client maybe thought she was telling me the story of an orca, but really, she was telling me the story of her life.  Of all the people who stepped in to help and support her when she could have easily been left behind.  She told me the story of the orca gave her hope.  I suspect it highlighted the hope she already received from those closest to her -- her own pod who kept her connected to the whole of her world.



*-- names and identifying details have been changed

Five Words

I know a couple, quite elderly.  They have been married for more years than many people get to be alive on this earth.  The gentleman has been, until quite recently, very robust for his age.  Although he required a small bit of assistance to get into and out of his favorite recliner, he was otherwise very independent.  His wife was much more frail.  She slept much of the day and rarely ever spoke.  When she was awake, she frequently looked at him and smiled, her bright blue eyes twinkling.  He would take her hand and raise it to his lips for a kiss, ever the courtly gentleman.  He called her "Mama."

Recently, though, he succumbed to various respiratory illnesses, and even though his body was vigorous, it was nearly a century old, so each illness landed him in the hospital for a longer period of time.  Each time he came back home, he was a little bit more weak.  More devices appeared around him, and the caregivers seemed closer to him for longer periods of time.  

Through it all, his wife, still quite frail, looked on him with love, affection, and a growing concern.  I knew them only like this, in their increasingly frail old age and decline.  I learned a few things about them very quickly, though.  Right away I learned that they loved each other with the kind of deep, realistic, daily-work love that is never depicted in poetry.  I learned that when they looked at each other, they each saw past their fading physical shells and into a long, shared life of which they were justifiably proud.  And I learned that Mama, at least, had gotten everything down to essentials.  

Mama rarely spoke.  And when she did, she said only “Thank you” or “I love you.”  In all the time I was near her, these were the only things I heard her say.  I have known for a long time that language is only one of many ways we have to communicate, but her limited vocabulary still struck me, especially since her husband was still so engaged in language and conversation.  

One day, however, watching her with her long-term caregiver, it dawned on me that she had things exactly right.  Her body was frail, she lacked energy to do more than what was absolutely essential.  She had distilled her actions down, and I finally realized, she had also distilled down her language.  

As I thought about it, if I could only say five words out loud for the rest of my life, could I think of a better collection than “Thank you” and “I love you”?  What other five words would serve to express my connection to the people around me?  How much more simple could it be?  Every time I visited them, and I saw her saying only “thank you” and “I love you,” I realized how much she had chosen to convey.  With her fading strength, knowing every word was an effort, she chose to say the words that kept her connected to all the people around her, and that told them how much she cared for each of them.  Could there be another five words more important?

Maintenance

One of the enduring joys of this job is learning from the person who is going through treatment.

 Liesl's* several children all lived out of town, but one of them always drove down for her treatments.  All twelve of them.  For her birthday, they decided to get together and buy her a massage to go with each of the last four chemo treatments.  This is how I had the pleasure of meeting her.

For her last four chemo cycles, Liesl (and whichever son or daughter) arrived at my office the day after her infusion.  Each time, Liesl walked herself slowly back to my office with me.  She gave me the same list of side effects, each time just a little bit worse than the last.  She would lay in a supported, semi-reclined position while I gently held her feet, hands and head.  After the massage, she would take my arm for support, walk with me to the waiting room, then give me a hug before she left.

At her last appointment, Liesl asked me to do her a favor.  She knew I was connected to some of the staff at her treatment center so she told me, "Please tell them.  Tell them they need to touch people."  She went on to assure me that she felt she had received good care from caring people, but that it disturbed her that they never seemed to take a minute to just touch their patients.  To lay a hand on their arm, or give them a gentle hug.  It made her feel cold and somewhat neglected, she said.  Cancer treatment was scary enough, she said, without feeling isolated like that.  "I have my family there," she said, "but what about the people who don't?"

What she said to me wasn't anything different than what I say to people pretty much all the time, but for some reason it hooked deep into my heart.  I wondered, when do I touch people purely for comfort, compassion and to show that they are special to me?  Outside of work, when do I do this?  And when am I comfortable receiving this kind of touch from my friends and family?  This happens a shockingly small amount, if I'm being honest.

I don't have any answers today.  I don't have any wisdom.  There is just the knowledge, and gratitude to the woman who brought it out for me to look at.  There are so many complicated, important things facing the world in general right now -- issues that divide us and might even harm us.  From one perspective maybe it seems frivolous for me to spend so much time and brain space worrying about how much we touch each other, and trying to change that.

But then, I ask myself (and you), if you can touch someone with gentleness and true compassion, doesn't that make it harder to objectify, deny or hate them?  So, in addition to the staff at the treatment center, I am sending you Liesl's message:  with compassion and an open heart, just touch people.

*--name and identifying details have been changed

How Do I Even Feel About This?

That was the text message I sent to a friend.  She does the same kind of work as I do, and I shared my story with her right after it happened, when I was still not sure what to think.

(Warning: there's a semi-graphic description of some nasty treatment side effects following.  There is also some cussing.  Stop right here if you're easily disturbed by that kind of thing.)

Let me tell you about it.  My client has an advanced stage of cancer-*.    She has tried many treatments, which have exhausted her body, mind and bank account.  She is undergoing a treatment now that causes extremely painful lesions on her skin.  The ones I can see look like giant spider bites, but she tells me about others which are open and sometimes weeping.  She takes multiple medications to manage her pain.  She tells me that as a result she is "much more mellow than usual."

She describes herself as a "hard-driving" person, and talks about raising the money to go abroad for alternative treatment.  She says to me: "If I can't afford to go abroad, I don't know what I'll do.  Just die, I guess."

That day she wanted me to take a picture of a particularly large lesion on her chest so she could send it to her doctor.  She sat on the edge of the table and gingerly pulled away the gauze pad which was covering the wound.  I took a couple of quick pictures, then noticed the wound was weeping a bit, so she quickly covered it up and buttoned her shirt.

She wanted to see the pictures before she left.  I hand her the smart phone with the last picture on display.  She looked at it then started laughing maniacally.  "Wow," she said through continuing laughter, "that's really horrible."

And it is.  Really horrible.  It is also really horrible that despite marijuana, morphine, and massage therapy, she is in constant pain that sometimes takes her breath away.  And it's horrible that she may not have access to the treatment she wants because it has been so expensive to keep her alive this long.  There is so much horrible here that it is tempting to just drown in it.

But she laughed.  She chose to laugh.  Not the kind of laugh that makes you wonder if someone is really "all there," but a deeply knowing laugh.  The kind of laugh that knows and embraces all that is painful and dark about her human experience.    It was a "Fuck you, I will go on" laugh.

And,  I will admit it, I found it disturbing at first.  Then I didn't know what to think, so I texted my friend and colleague.  Her response was perfect: "I love this while my heart breaks."

I love this.  My heart breaks.  This is the circle I step into, as soon as I leave work for the day. Fortunately, love and breath and understanding friends win out, and I am ready every day to come back.

*- name and identifying details have been changed

No Ego No Cry

I arrived early to find my client seated in his living room.*  "Come in, Rebecca," he said, "Sit down.  I need to talk to you."  The way he said it made it clear that he was not about to compliment my amazing promptness.

He asked me what it was that I was doing the last few times I had been there.  What kind of work did I call that?  It was an honest, direct question.  I gave him my stock line about Western, anatomy-based massage adapted to reduce any additional strain on his body.  He nodded to show me that he understood.  Then he described his last massage therapist.  Her strong hands.  How the work was so much more beneficial for him.  He wondered if this was something I could do, and if not, would it be worth it to either of us for me to keep coming back again?

I swallowed my tirade about gentle work and my knowledge of the physiological changes happening in his body.  I swallowed the urge to tell him I knew how to work with his body better than his previous therapist, that he was somehow wrong for getting more benefit from her work than mine.

Instead, I remembered the mantra I used when I was learning in Thailand:  no ego, no cry.

I asked him more about his previous treatments, if he could describe what he found particularly beneficial.  I listened to him talk about the skill of his previous therapist.  I nodded to show I understood.  The massage I gave him that day was more muscle-adhesion focused, still within the boundaries of my training and comfort level.

He invited me to talk to him about what I was doing so he could understand.  I inhaled and exhaled -- reminded myself that this was not a person trying to trip me up in a mistake so he had an excuse to fire me.  This was a person who truly sought to understand my approach to his body.  I explained what I could, answered his questions as clearly as I could.  I did all of this until he began to breath more deeply, and settled into his massage.

That day I discovered my next Why.  Why I am not done with massage.  My ego was my biggest struggle in Thailand, and that struggle came home with me.  In fact, it was started here.  My next challenge to to find out how to end it.  Here.

* -- identifying details have been changed

Transcendent Moments of Massage.

I have the good fortune to be in the middle of seven straight days of classes.  We having been learning about and discussing some pretty hard and heavy things — childhood cancers, extended hospital stays, the dying process.  All of us are here because for our own reasons, we are drawn to this kind of work.  

I am noticing again, though, a story we tell ourselves that I find unsettling.  It is the story of the Sainted Massage Therapist.  The one professional who floats in on waves of compassion and caring and leaves behind a moment of comfort and peace in an otherwise cruel world.  We say things like, “I could provide that moment of comfort . . .”  or “I gave her that connection . . .”  or “This is beautiful work.” 

Here’s the thing — we are not necessarily wrong to say these things.  Those tiny moments of comfort in the midst of suffering make the work worth doing.  And it is beautiful.  Sometimes unbearably so, because it puts our hearts on such clear display.  

Where I get unsettled, though, is when we start to believe our own mythology.  We can start to tell these stories a way to keep ourselves ultimately separate from our clients.  It turns into a protective barrier, emphasis on barrier.  When we make ourselves into Saints or Superheroes, we isolate ourselves.  (Wonder Woman, Spiderman, Batman — their lives were all solitary.)  We need to find a way to stay in the human realm.  

One of my favorite massage moments illustrates this perfectly:

I was doing my clinic rounds for a Geriatric Massage class.  We were working on the dementia floor of a Skilled Nursing facility. My client was confined to her bed, and clearly had been for a long while.  She had limited verbal communication, and was about 80 pounds.  I brought a chair over to her and held her hand.  She turned her face towards me and started humming — no specific tune, just a gentle humming of different notes.  It felt like I should join in, so I started humming along.  Somehow we matched each other’s pitch and tone and made a little music together while we held hands.  The class instructor stopped in the doorway to watch and called some of the staff over to see this beautiful, transcendent moment.  

After about 5 minutes, the woman stopped humming and turned even more towards me.  She reached her other arm over and held my hand in both of hers.  I could see she had something to say so I leaned in close to her.  She took a deep breath and said, “It’s poop.”  

And I took a breath in and knew that it was.  

I plan to remember these messy human moments, right next to the transcendent ones. 

Letter to a Client, Long Passed

I am regularly asked things like "How can you handle that work?", or "What do you do when someone dies?"  This letter to one of my former clients is yet another attempt to answer those questions.

______________________________________________

This is how I knew that you had died:  your husband called me.  He used your phone, so I knew to answer the call.  I was not surprised to hear his voice instead of yours, since you had missed our last few appointments because you were too fatigued.   He told me that you had passed away, just the night before.  He seemed collected until I thanked him for calling me, then he started to sob so much that he just hung up the phone.

Just the week before your husband had called me on your phone to see if I would come to the house to give you a massage.   You were too weak to call yourself, he said, and you had family visiting for a while.  He felt sure, though, that after they left you would want a massage.

There were many things about you that brought me joy, but one of them was not even you -- it was your husband.  The way he looked at you.  Even when you were half-asleep in a lounge chair, connected to an IV line with your bald head covered by a crooked felt cloche, he looked at you with the purest love and admiration I have ever seen.  

There is a story about you that I tell to every class I teach.  You came to my office for a massage, and you had been having a rough week.  We did a very gentle, slow massage without much movement and lots of attention to being present and breathing.  After the massage you asked me what kind of energy work I was doing because you felt something come in and strengthen you.  I told you that I don't do energy work; that I am not trained in that kind of work so I couldn't claim to be doing it.  You grinned at me and said, "Bullshit!"  You were right.  What you felt was true, even though I had no explanation for it.  

I met you first by reading your chart at the cancer treatment center.  Your chart was dismal, to be honest.  An advanced stage of a notoriously difficult-to-treat cancer, inoperable tumor, one of the nastiest chemo combinations I knew of.  But then I met you in person.  You were so thrilled by the idea of getting a massage that you grinned through the whole thing.  You told me hysterical stories about your family.  You knew exactly what you were in for, but still managed to say "I feel like crap today" in a way that sounded like optimism.  

Okay, confession time.  First:  as soon as I met you, I was preparing myself for the idea that you would die soon.  There are fantastic, unexplained, miraculous things in the world.  I wanted and hoped for this for you -- but I also knew the statistics of your kind of cancer.  As one of my favorite books says, "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst."

Second:  I kept your number in my phone for a long time.  Occasionally, as I scrolled through on a data-clearing mission, I would think about deleting it.  Most of the numbers I delete are from people I don't know (or care to know) anymore, so deleting your number felt wrong. 

And finally:  I don't remember your name.  I remember your face, your laugh, some of the exact details of your treatment and disease progression.  I remember that the last time I saw you, you were wearing new jeans and you had trouble getting into your pocket to get the check you had for me.  But your name is gone.  

I am left, lucky me, with all the joy I got from your spirit, and all the learning I got from your heart.  

Thank you.

Love Always,

--R

Synonyms for Pain

There are moments in this work that bring home the absolutely clear distillation that only comes from great pain.  Today I saw a child reach out for his loving mother as the only response available to significant pain.  Never mind that the child was a nearly 40-year-old man*, and the mother, for all her loving kindness, could not begin to touch the pain arising from his multiple abdominal tumors.

He was short with her, sarcastic in a way you expect from teenage boys who don't want to clean their rooms.  She hovered over him, carefully avoiding mentioning certain procedures so as not to upset him.  It was an entire boy's childhood enacted in a 30-second vignette.  And draped over it all was the presence of his physical pain.

The hospitalist came while I was there, so I stepped out to give them some privacy.  When I came back in the son was looking at his mother, clearly needing someone else to help him decide.  "Should I take something, then?" he said.  She nodded, "I think it would be a good idea."  He called the nurse, who gave him a small dose of a large painkiller.  He settled into a comfortable position, ready to receive gentle, soothing touch.  I held his feet, head and hands with a warm, weightless hold, visualizing a space clearing in the center of his pain -- one small, comfortable space where he could sit for a little while.

After his massage, I walked down the hall with his mother, who held my hand the whole way.  "What are you doing to take care of yourself?" I said.  She stopped and turned to face me.  "I don't know," she said, "that's a good question."

She walked back to her son's room without an answer.  Her hands worked at her sides and her shoulders slumped, trying to balance the weight of her own, significant, excruciating pain.



*--names and identifying details have been changed

Masajear la Cabeza

Another client story:

Deirdre* is young.  Barely out of childhood young.  She has a rare cancer, which, in her body, showed up in an even rarer form. This massage appointment is a gift from people who can't stop telling me how rare and remarkable she is.  She greats me at the door with a knit cap on her bald head, tape over her port, and the biggest, most open smile I have ever seen.  She hands me her completed intake form -- she is so close to school that she turns it in and asks for feedback as if it were something I was going to grade.

Deirdre tells me the story of her cancer so far.  Diagnosis received while out of town for vacation ("I thought I felt sick because of all the partying I was doing.") Confirmation that her cancer was a very rare presentation ("I guess I'm rare and special.") Description of how debilitating her first round of chemo was ("I was completely out of it, and it was my birthday.  But if I wasn't in the hospital, I would have gotten wasted on my birthday anyway, so it's alright.") She tells me this story with her big, open, gorgeous smile.  She apologizes for how much she sweats as a side effect of her treatment.
I talk to her about oncology massage, and I ask her if she wants me to massage her scalp.

She puts her hand to her knit cap.  "My scalp?  You can massage my scalp?"  I nod.  I didn't think it possible -- but her smile gets bigger as she pulls off her knit cap.  "I never thought I could have a scalp massage."

She settles into a comfortable position for the massage.  Deirdre's mother comes into the room and folds blankets around her.  Deirdre smiles at her mother and tells her, in the language they share, that she is going to have her head massaged.

Deirdre keeps her eyes open at first, taking mental notes like the good student she so recently was.  As soon as I cradle her head in my hands, though, she closes her eyes and breathes.  Her hand rests gently over her tumor site.  Without her knit cap, bald head exposed,  Deidre's features emerge in stark, gentle purity.  Her head radiates heat into my hands as I hold it.  

I try to be neutral about my clients' prognoses.  They are with me to experience what it feels like to have a comfortable present.  That respite, that moment out of time, is my honor to provide.  Deirdre, though, with her face too young for lines and smile too open for tragedy -- she makes me hope.  Maybe, just this one time, a rare and difficult cancer could end in a rare and special cure.


*--name and identifying details have been changed

Sweetness in the Belly

I started this blog because so many lovely and amazing things happened with my clients that I found myself just wanting to tell stories whenever I got together with friends.  And also because some of those things were very emotional, and writing has always been a place where I could untangle emotional things.  I had a couple of new client experiences recently that are making me glad I started this blog.

This one came out in the form of my first writing love, poetry:

I kneel at her side, my two hands cradling her one,

catch sight of the book on her nightstand —

Sweetness in the Belly —

a bookmark tucked about 100 pages in.

Pages left unread that her eyes will never see.

I’ve seen skin like this before.  

Papery, tinged with yellow, fading bruises in a path from foot to head.

I’ve seen eyes like this before.

Sunken back into dark sockets, withdrawn and piercing in their largeness,

no eyelashes soften the steady gaze.

Animals know.  

The dog curled at her head, still as breath,

looks up and right at me.  

He dips his head, raises it, settles back to sleep —

This is good.  What I am doing is good.  

Her almost-adult daughter plays with attitudes.

Looks over my head —“Does the massage therapist know not to go in there yet?”  

Avoids eye contact, moves like she’s wearing a chain maille helmet.  

Later I hear her voice, muffled, to her father:

“I can’t do this.  I can’t put up with this any more.”

Her husband rides up in the elevator with me.  

“She’s not exactly, you know, compos mentis right now.”

He takes another asthmatic breath.

“We are nearing the end of the road, you see.”  

Yes.  I do.  

Having It All

Yes, here I am.  Yet another woman musing on the difficulty of "having it all."  I went about my tasks this morning -- eating breakfast, folding laundry, mentally preparing for a busy day -- and as I usually do, I let my mind wander a bit.  And, as sometimes happens with former Literature geeks, I started musing on the real meanings of words.

All.  It All.

What is "it all" anyway, and how do I know when I have it?  And while I'm on the subject, do I really "have" any of it?

This last thought stopped me for a minute.  Having equals holding equals grasping equals fear of losing.  So when I have, really and truly have, I put myself automatically in danger of living from fear of no longer having.




I see this often in my clients, and even more often in my students.  We acquire something -- knowledge, a skill, a new range of motion, and after the initial joy of the thing has faded a bit, we work extra hard to protect that thing, so we stop taking risks.  And we forget that taking a risk was how we got the thing in the first place.

For me, I have worked very hard and (for me) very patiently to get approved to teach S4OM-approved Oncology Massage Workshops through Greet the Day.  I finally got that approval, and for a while, I just held that approval in my hand.  I had it.

But not It All.  So, now I am taking the risk and reaching out to people I know, trying to create opportunities to teach this workshop.  I have put together a proposal for a formidable former teacher, I have contacted friends and acquaintances in other states, I have said out loud that I am qualified and ready to do this important and scary thing.  The risk of asking will soon (I hope) be overtaken by the risk of someone actually saying yes -- which requires doing.

Which brings me back to my Lit geek headspace -- having it all is an action, always in motion.  It is a goal which shifts as soon as we near it, and rather than frustration, that inspires a new burst of creativity.  Journeying.  Learning.

It is an excellent adventure.

In Waves

My client is an artist.  She regularly shows and sells her work at galleries in the nearby suburb.  She also has Parkinson's, so I'm not sure if she is creating new work.  She tells me she used to receive massage every week when she was younger, but that she hasn't had a massage in over 12 years.  She has forgotten that I massaged her once a month for a time last year, but I let that go.  

She speaks clearly and with deep intelligence, but her cadence is stilted.  Her speech pattern resembles a particularly adept computer voice simulation.  Unconsciously, unnecessarily, I slow down my own speech.

She climbs onto the table, and I hold her in my arms like a child to help her gently lie down.  Once we have pillows in place and she is comfortable, she closes her small, piercing blue eyes and goes right to sleep.  I give her a gentle massage, slow and still with respect to her thinning skin.  I am struck by her arms.  Her upper arms are soft, fleshy.  Her forearms, however, are wiry and dense.  I can feel in her muscles the years of holding a paintbrush, moving canvases and mixing colors. 

She falls deeply asleep during the 30-minute session.  She is my last client of the night, so when I wake her to tell her the session is over, I tell her she can lie there until she feels ready to sit up.  She is grateful, and asks for a few minutes.  I sit in a chair in the corner of the room, while she rests on the table.  While I sit quietly, watching to make sure she is in no distress, I start to catch and match the pattern of her breath -- or maybe she catches mine.  I feel a warm surge traveling around the room.  A wave.  A cotton sheet in a summer breeze.  The first touch of brush on canvas.  In the few minutes after the massage is done and before she is ready to get up, I find utter stillness.  I reconnect to my purpose.  

Living It

I have been thinking a lot about the idea of "flow," and how to structure my career so I can find it more often.  As part of this, I have been doing some writing exercises from the book Bliss by Katherine Ramsland.  Here is what I wrote today about a recent session with a new client:

As I entered the room, I felt like I was stepping into a higher version of myself.  I felt my pulse moving and yet I was completely relaxed.  My mind was not thinking forward or backward.  I felt like the nerve connections between my touch and the interpreting parts of my brain had been widened and cleared of debris.  Everything I did was a sun salutation, with movements happening at the rhythm of breath.  I was pre-verbal, able to communicate through gesture and intention alone.  It wasn't that training, knowledge and science didn't matter.  It was that those things were so completely absorbed into my being and doing that I didn't need to actively reference them --- the way you don't need to reference the contractions of the cardiac muscle in order to have a pulse.  The session was a deep and meaningful conversation, conducted in total silence. I used my body, I worked hard, but I didn't notice until I stepped out of the room at the end of the session.  Even the sore quads and fatigued hands felt like gifts that were oddly energizing to my mind and spirit.  It was the experience of feeling and doing two totally opposite things at once, where the logic brain gets so confused it taps out and the art brain takes over.

There Are More Things on Heaven and Earth

Last time I wrote about Christina, and I talked a little bit about True, as in, "what happens on the table is True." (quote by Tracey Walton.) "True" is the word that stuck with me after our session, and the word that keeps coming into my mind at unattended moments.  It came to me again in the form of Gina*, my client.

Like many of my clients, Gina has cancer.  She has a difficult cancer that most places would call end stage.  As in terminal.  As in: don't waste your time with chemo, Gina, just enjoy the time you have left.  Gina isn't having it.  Last time I saw her, she spoke for a long time about her quest for the next level of treatment, and about how the massages brought her to a calm place after living every day in anxiety. She asked me, in all sincerity, what kind of energy work I was doing with her.

I told her I wasn't trained in energy work. I didn't have that knowledge or skill, so I couldn't possibly claim to be doing energy work on her.

Smiling, Gina said, "Bullshit!"

She climbed on the table for her session.  I focused and grounded myself, like I always do.  I massaged her gently, cautiously, and slowly, like I always do.  I silently wished her peace as I did so, like any human being would do.

Gina's breathing slowed, her shoulders dropped.  After the session, she told me she felt a light and calm presence surrounding and infusing her body.  I thanked her, and hugged her, and decided not to wonder where that came from.

True.

*-- name and all identifying details have been changed

The Question of True

"The bear is chasing you," she said, "You need to get out of that sympathetic state."  She twisted my ankle back and forth directing me to move my eyes.  Eyes open.  Eyes closed.  Eyes open.  Eyes closed looking up.  Eyes closed looking to the left.  She gave me words to focus on.  True.  Grudge.  Moral.  Joy.  Each one unremarkable in itself, but somehow every time she said a new word, a new wave of tears broke over my face.  I was the ocean, finally breaking through the futile walls built to control and contain.

I went to massage school with Christina, and I am ashamed to say I don't think I treated her as well as I should have.  She was deep into energy work, fields, auras, chakras and all that.  I was deep into science.  The evidence-based path that I knew was the only way to build respect for our profession.  We left school, parted ways, stayed tangentially in touch.  I went to see her because I was buying a room divider from her before she moved out West.

I couldn't help it -- she asked me how I was and I told her the truth through tears.  Not good.  Not fine.  Generous, lovely Christina -- she would not let me leave without doing some work for me.  She gave me her gift of time, attention, and, yes, energy.  I don't pretend to understand the systems she used.  I never studied energy work.  But I decided in my broke-openness to accept.  Just accept the gifts being offered to me.  I don't understand what happened, but I know I left feeling stronger, lighter, and better able to breathe.

I am reminded of something Tracey Walton said in a workshop about massage therapy research: "What happens on the table is true."  I couldn't find any evidence to support what I was felt except that I felt it.  I used to say, in my arrogance, that I didn't "believe in" energy work.  That I preferred to focus on the known and proven/provable physiological effects of massage.  I thought the woo-woo ness of some energy-based bodywork cheapened our profession.

After some years doing oncology massage, I was coming around a little bit, but still maintained a healthy skepticism.  But now I must admit that the work Christina does is, in the fullest sense of the word, True.

C Word

Yesterday I behaved in a way that makes me ashamed of myself.  Someone reached out to me for a nonjudgmental, caring touch, and I pulled away.  I don't want to make excuses, but here's the story:

Once a month, my friend and I work in the memory care wing of a nursing home. One of the residents, "Agnes," has. Been there since we started two years ago.  She never wants a massage, but she does want to say hello.  She regularly peppers her language with cursing and insults.  Example:

"Hello Agnes.  How are you today?"
"Shaddup ya c***."

Recently, she has taken to spitting at people to get their attention.  She does this with a noisy warm up, so most of the time we can cut her off with a simple, "Agnes, please don't spit on me right now."

Every time we see her, we ask her if she wants a massage.  She always says no.  We try to sneak in a little bit of caring touch.  She will let us hold her hand for a few seconds, and sometimes even lets us rub her shoulder.  Agnes has surprisingly strong and sharp nails for a woman her age, though, and after a few seconds of hand-holding, she will rake one against our fingers -- hard.  I am ashamed to say that I am always cautious when holding her hand.  She has nearly drawn blood a couple of times.

Yesterday, she was letting me hold her hand, and even put both her hands around mine.  Quite suddenly, she pulled down on my hand, and by instinct I pulled away.  When I looked int her eyes, she looked devastated.

I immediately bent down and gently hugged her and laid my head on top of hers.  She has never
accepted so much touch from me.  Still, I knew that I had rejected her when she was most vulnerable.  She tried to pull me closer, and I pulled away. I tell myself that I am on a mission to bring human touch to those who need it, to show people that age and infirmity should not exclude you from the world of warmth and connection.  In that moment, though, I failed myself.  Every time I see Agnes, I will try to make it up to her.

Goodbye. I Love You.

Today, I am breaking up with my massage therapist.  She has been my massage therapist for about six months. I met her while I was in school, and kept in touch lightly over the years.  A few months ago, she announced that she was going to strike out on her own.  Around the same time, I was trying to find someone I could trust with my neck.  It seemed like a perfect match.  I respected her knowledge, and I always felt calm in her presence.  I needed a consistent therapist, and she was ready for consistent clients.  Perfect.

Almost.

Every time I saw her, I felt immensely better; more grounded, more aware of my body and with a renewed commitment to taking care of myself.  I even started to notice that my own work improved after a session with her.  But, not too long after we started, scheduling started to become an issue.  She would have to cancel a session because of her other job or family needs.  I would have to cancel for the same reasons.  We would reschedule, of course, with no hard feelings and a true mutual understanding of the demands of our profession.  I told myself how nice it was that we could be honest about our needs, and trust each other to be compassionate.

Soon, though, I realized that the "every two weeks" we agreed on was more like "every month" or longer.  I was willing to deal with this, maybe fill in with a massage from my workplace (where I got a discount) every once in a while.  Yesterday, though, was the end.

I have had a rough few weeks.  We dealt with the death of a beloved pet, I have started teaching in addition to my other jobs, and a few of my most beloved patients have died.  Our session yesterday (rescheduled from two weeks before) was going to be me getting back into caring for myself.  After weeks of stress eating, poor sleep and sporadic exercise, I was going to take the time to reset myself.  As I walked to her office, I thought about how I would express my needs for the session to her.  I looked forward to her getting it right away.  I savored the upcoming gift of 90 minutes of time away from the world.

I got to her office,and the door was dark.  No problem.  Sometimes she ran late.  So I sat in the hall and waited.  10 minutes after my appointment time, I sent her a text message.  10 minutes later, I left. I made the decision to find a new massage therapist this time.  I need more consistency.  I was surprised by how shattered I felt when I realized I wasn't going to get a massage, and decided I was done with all that disappointment.

So, I am breaking up with my massage therapist.  I love her as a friend and a colleague, and I hope we can keep that relationship alive.  I need my massage therapist to be more professional.  I need to respect myself enough to demand that.  I am often frustrated by the amount of flakiness that is accepted in this profession.  It does us no good, and we need to present ourselves as the wellness practitioners we are.

But it is going to be so hard to find someone I trust to work on my neck.