Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Not a Clue

It's beyond me to comprehend fully what was happening while I lay on a futon for two blissed-out hours Sunday afternoon. If you're lucky enough--actually, make that blessed enough--to know a really gifted masseur, you'll have some idea of what I'm going to try to express.

I could try to tell you about the unholy mass of tension in my neck and back that I brought with me to the session, or to describe how it gradually melted away during the generous hour I spent face down, before George invited me to roll over.  I could try to assemble some kind of connected narrative description out of the raw material of my experience. But  the words would just disappear into the gulf between language and the body's deep wisdom.
Have you ever received touch that itself awakens you to how deeply you needed it? Has gratitude ever welled up directly out of the knot in your shoulder, bypassing your head more or less entirely? Have you ever lost track of how the arm that's being gently extended is connected to the hip that is also somehow, in the same moment, being  encouraged into repose by firm contact with another body?

Have you ever found yourself wondering, how can he possibly be doing this, and that, at the same time? Is he kneeling at my head right now? Or at my left side? Or standing over me with his legs astride my hips? Is that his hand on my sacrum, or his foot? His thumb applying pressure, or his elbow? And have you finally said, to hell with trying to figure it out: it just is?
Breathing deeply, eyes closed, the body isn't so much a unified whole as it is a field of possibilities. The body of your masseur isn't so much an object of attention as a mystery that inspires wonder and thankfulness. Especially if you both turn off the flow of words more or less completely.
How much is that briefly non-verbal state like a return to what we knew as infants--or for most all of us, more accurately, to an idealized version of what we wish it had been like for us as infants?  Those hours on the table or the mat are still informed by all that we didn't get in those first months of life, as by all that we've become in the long years since we first looked in a mirror as young children and misrecognized our unified, all-in-one-piece reflections as ourselves. What we experience isn't so much a return, then, as a reparation.
At the end of two hours, I found a hand laid to my chest , an arm slid gently, easily, surely around my shoulders--no state-accredited, licensed and certified experience, this--and a voice repeating softly in my ear, "I've got you. I've got you."
What if we took such experiences as a parable in the quest to understand our encounters with God--not as the object of our thought, but as the One whose touch mysteriously loosens what's blocked within us and in the world, unpredictably delights what hungers for loving attention, and unwaveringly cradles what thirsts for reassurance?

1 comment: