Table Talk: Spaced Out

Was someone asking to see the soul?

See, your own shape and countenance....

Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

     Spaced out. That’s how I felt after experiencing my first professional massage--plain spacy. I couldn’t really focus on what I was doing. I seemed to have lost any sense of direction and future. I was just there, feeling strange, wondering about the sensation. It probably was a good massage. Then, I had little way of judging, and now, the memory of the massage is not so acute. I stumbled to the shower room, washed my body thoroughly, and enjoyed the cedar-scented lotion provided in a shower-side dispenser. I found my companion, and we made our way out to a forest-surrounded hot tub. The total experience contained new sensations, but mostly I felt dopey, unable to focus, and not really caring to concentrate.

     My second professional massage a couple of years later also left me feeling a bit spacy, but this time I had a new experience that changed my perception of massage. The therapist asked if I wanted her to focus on any particular muscles. “Yes,” I surprised myself in answering. “Could you concentrate on my hands and forearms?” In the past months I had been practicing piano scales and arpeggios, writing a book, and playing computer games; and my right hand hurt. The pain and tightness mostly affected the back of my hands and my forearms. The therapist, a woman in her fifties who had studied with several celebrated teachers in Massachusetts and who brought years of experience to the massage, worked deeply in the area using what she called an interactive massage technique. She seemed to dig into and between the muscles while I kept my elbow moving slowly and slightly. A couple of times I thought I’d jump right off her table, but wanting the relief, I stayed put, bore the pain. To my utter amazement, I had no pain for three and a half months following the massage. I gained great flexibility that lasted long enough for me to realize I needed to change my habits. I didn’t want to recreate the pain and restriction in my arms and hands. My therapist’s effective work changed massage for me. No longer was it simply a luxury item that left me feeling spaced out. Oh, I felt like I was floating all right. I could hardly walk and had to sit in the sun for a while before taking a chance on driving the car. But I realized that massage could take away pain and help one regain full use of a limb. And three months later I was still amazed that the immediate effect of the work lasted. Massage became for me something serious and health-related in ways I had never before imagined. The spaced out feelings brought me into the present with no worry about what lay ahead; getting rid of pain helped prepare me for an amazing future in my own massage career. What wonderful and simple gifts I have received from massage.

Pas du Trois, painting by Phillip Hoyle

These bears painted under the influence of an Osage Indian petroglyph

express the kind of exuberance I experience when I see a person

regain ease of movement and the absence of pain. 

I want to to join them in a dance of joy.