Stories I Tell Clients: Luxury Item and Left or Right?

I received my second professional massage at the historic spa in Jemez Springs, New Mexico. The therapist asked me if I wanted her to concentrate on any particular place. “My forearms,” I requested. I had tightened them up by obsessively playing computer games—the ones that go faster at each level. She worked deeply; I almost jumped off her table several times the pain was so intense. We made it through the massage, and due to her skill, I had three and a half months pain free, a respite for me to figure out how not to hurt myself again. That’s when I realized massage can be much more than a luxury item.


“Are you left handed or right?” I often ask a client at the outset of a massage. I asked that of a young lawyer with whom I had already been laughing. He didn’t reply. I joshed him, “That’s not a difficult question.”

He finally answered, “I was trying to figure out why you were asking.”

I reminded myself that he was a lawyer.

I tell that story to other lawyers or to people who ask why I ask. It’s because I want to know where to begin my work—I tend to begin on the side opposite the dominant—and how to assess the differences in muscle tone and size by whether or not they are on the dominant side of the body.

For the Utes Coyote was a trickster.
Mixed media on paper. Phillip Hoyle