Table Talk: Heart

After a Cherokee petroglyph by Phillip Hoyle

     Well-known people come to the spa for massage. We are instructed to treat them as we would anyone else who is a guest. One day I asked a celebrity client if he had any places that hurt or needed special attention. “My brain,” he said. I laughed and told him about Richard who, when I asked him if he had any particular pains, replied, “My heart.” I told Richard I don’t do heart massage, but I would be mindful of his heart while I worked. My celebrity client smiled at the story. I wanted to bring this man deep relaxation through massage so he could set aside, if only momentarily, the things that were causing him mental pain.

     One client wants brain work; another, heart. I can only give a loving, attentive massage to their beautiful and important bodies. One of them is an international pop star, the other a simple though lively guy surviving with AIDS. I appreciate what and who both of these men are. I rub their skin, knead their muscles, and say calming things as I perform a tactile ceremony over them. Sometimes the simplest touch can help soothe a sore muscle or a broken heart. A well-timed and well-placed palpation can ease a ligament or a stressed mind. My goal is to usher them into a sense of presence with their bodies so they can value and adore their very real selves.

     People come to me with headaches or tired muscles, and sometimes both. Others arrive at the table with troubled minds and broken hearts. I give them massage. The touch to their bodies helps them relax. The words create acceptance. I sometimes ask for details related to their pains and extend my sympathy when it seems helpful. I strive to bring perspective whether the issues relate to child rearing, relationships, or information about the body. But important as my words may be, the main feature of the time together is my touch--its quality and the concern it communicates.

     Asian massage modalities use compressions on the surface of the skin to impact internal organs. This external-to-internal effect is sometimes cited as the primary distinction between Eastern and Western massage. However, Western modalities also accomplish an external-to-internal change. For example, Swedish massage affects skeletal muscles by increasing circulation. The increase in turn affects the heart as an organ. And, through the relaxation of the body, Swedish massage can affect even Richard’s broken heart. Surely similar things can be said of massage’s effect on the brain, both physiologically and psychologically.

     Massage appeals to several common denominators of human experience: sore muscles, headaches, feeling stressed, and more. It brings its simple or profound relief to rich and poor, healthy and ill, famous and unknown in equal measure. A sage of the Hebrew Bible pointed out that all persons come into and leave the world naked. They show up on the massage table in the same condition, and whatever the externals of their livelihood and general experience, they share the same body pains and need the same relief.

Divine healer, like you, may we hear the deep groaning 

of others and of ourselves. 

Teach us to touch and affect one another as we open ourselves deeply to your love. 

Amen.

Mixed media collage by Phillip Hoyle

Table Talk: Headache

     Last year I read The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, in search of interesting characters to use in conversations, collage icons, and written meditations. I read the book two ways simultaneously, from front to end keeping track of my place with a bus transfer slip, and by consulting an appendix that listed the calendar of feasts for the saints of the particular day I was reading. I found characters to discuss with a friend and ideas to enrich the visual detail of my collages. Also, I found my attention captured by various ills related to massage, especially headaches and the saints appealed to for their cure.

     The lives and experiences of several saints seemed connected to particular kinds of headaches. For example, St. Stephen, a deacon in Jerusalem in the earliest years of the church and one of the first martyrs, was killed by stoning. In the later Middle Ages he was invoked against headaches. The headache connection was not immediately clear to me. Perhaps it was related to the saint’s social-work responsibility as a deacon in the church. He was assigned distribution of food to indigent church members and dealt with the conflicts that arose when one faction thought their widows were being shorted in the daily dole when compared with the handouts to others. I’ve always thought being yelled at by people for doing nice things to help them would give me a stress headache. Of course, the saint may have been prayed to because of the image of having a rock strike one’s head, for he was martyred by stones thrown by an angry crowd. What a headache that would surely cause.

     I read with fascination about St. Gereon, a Fourth Century martyr of Cologne and one of fifty soldiers of the Theban Legion who were put to death for the name of Christ. Like other saints who were beheaded, he was invoked against headaches and migraine. Surely, prayers to Gereon and the others were for help with headaches of the sharpest variety, the ones that feel like they are going to take your head right off your shoulders.

     Then there was St. Armel, a martyr of the Sixth century from South Wales. He was invoked to cure headaches, fever, colic, gout, and rheumatism. Hospitals sometimes made him their patron. One could pray to St. Armel for relief from a headache that accompanies some other malady.

     The accounts and traditions of these saints and others suggest some ideas and images. A clinic in my neighborhood advertises massage for “Headache Relief.” I imagine the main hallway there as being lined with icons of headache saints. These bruised and beheaded patron saints receive the requests of the hurting clients as they make their way back to the therapy rooms. The saints also may remind the therapists of a variety of ways they can treat their patients.

     At school I learned that the trapezius muscles--upper, middle, and lower--are sometimes called the headache triangle. Perhaps someone could invoke the three persons of the Trinity (were they Trinitarian) as they work these three muscles. Another therapist may wish to invoke the trio of Saints Stephen, Gereon, and Armel. Such a massage could serve nicely as a meditation, but one must watch out and not get so enthusiastic in the work as to increase the pain. Headaches are tricky things to heal.

     Most headaches respond to massage therapy. The palpation of muscles changes what happens chemically within the muscles. The stress is reduced both by muscles coming out of spasm and by the effect of having one’s body touched. The communication calms the whole person and stimulates the release of hormones or other chemicals that make one feel better. Of course, there are headaches related to serious underlying pathology. In such cases, massage may not be helpful. A doctor should be called for and many prayers made to the headache saints.

Table Talk: Trauma

     Melissa came to my practice at the suggestion of a friend. She was looking for a massage therapist near her home who would help her recover from an accident. We set a time for a first session in which to evaluate one another and decide if we should work together.

     While walking across an alleyway, Melissa was run into by a moving automobile. The car was not moving very fast, yet it hit her on the left side and dragged her several yards. She then landed on the asphalt on her right side. Her terror turned to anger as she confronted the driver who then, freaked out by what he had just done, drove away from the scene of the accident.

     For three months she had been working with a massage therapist and a chiropractor. Her masseuse left the practice, hence her search for someone else to continue therapy complementary to the chiropractor’s. As we talked, I observed Melissa’s anger. Three months after the accident she was still angry with the driver. The focus of her fear, though, had changed. At age 21, she was afraid she would never recover fully and would live in pain for the rest of her life.

     The initial session went well. Melissa scheduled several more. In the subsequent months of therapy, I discovered in practice what my teachers had told me over and over: integrative massage techniques can address issues resulting from trauma to soft tissue. Thus I used deep tissue massage, neuro-muscular therapy, and connective tissue techniques wrapped together in an organizing package of Swedish massage, and complemented by verbal therapies. I chanted, so to speak, a prayer of recovery as I worked deeply between her ribs, and inched my way into the anterior hip muscles deep in her abdomen. I stretched out shortened muscles in her neck and shoulder, speaking all the while about the body’s amazing power to heal itself. I released trigger point after trigger point in the tissue around her knees while engaging her in conversation about school and the direction of her artwork. I was pleased, even impressed, as I watched her heal.

     Certainly her healing was enhanced by massage. But this independent young woman didn’t need to remain dependent on others for pain relief. I demonstrated and encouraged her to practice some self-massage techniques for muscles in her face, neck, ribs, and abdomen. She did them at home and started setting her appointments farther and farther apart as she mended.

     I suspect Melissa will feel some pain in her neck, ribs, knees, and hips for the rest of her life. She will remember her accident whenever she is tired, and occasionally, she will revisit her feelings of terror, anger, and fear. But also, she will carry with her the memory of healing and of the simple, but not insignificant, part massage played in helping her muscles to mend. She will be able to apply simple techniques of self-massage when the pain is slight or seek further help from a massage therapist when the pain persists. 

God, help us see the complexity of the healing process. 

May we learn how to balance our acceptance of pain with our doing something about it. And in so doing, 

may we recognize your voice and touch. 

Amen.

Buffalo Ceremony by Phillip Hoyle after a group of Kansas petroglyphs

Table Talk: Great Performance

     Yesterday, at the spa, I massaged a man named John. I showed him to the room where we would be working and asked whether he had any special needs. “Neck and shoulders,” he replied. Since one’s work often impacts particular muscles, I asked what he did. “I’m in town for a performance tonight.” I wasn’t sure whether he was an actor, a singer, a guitarist, or in charge of lights or sound. From something he said, though, I thought he might be connected with a musical performance.

     The massage went well. I established a comfortable rhythm as I worked his body thoroughly, massaging each muscle group. With loving palpations, using long, gentle strokes, I responded to the changes in his body. I paid close attention, working deeper where the tissue was tight and lighter where it was already supple. John began to relax. We talked very little, but he seemed pleased with the massage. Afterwards, when John came out into the hall, I handed him a glass of water and asked how he was doing. He smiled, said he was fine, and told me, “That was a great performance.”

     His assessment matches one of my favorite ideas about my employment, for I consider massage therapy to be a performing art, one with similarities to music, dance, and drama. Like other arts, massage communicates a message, develops a style, and involves the therapist in various roles. I find mastering massage techniques similar to learning piano scales and arpeggios. When I work around my client on the table, I feel like I am dancing. I love the free, improvisational movement of my whole body when coaxing muscles to relax. It reminds me how I used to dance for my choirs to get them into the mood of the anthem we were learning. Now the accompanying massage music invites me into a rhythm of beats and phrases. A dancer’s half turn on the balls of my feet changes the direction of my stroke, and I glide.

     In my artistry as a massage therapist, I take chances as I create or elicit feelings in my audience of one. I want to move my clients into a relaxed state, a reduction of stress, a sense of pleasure, and an experience of letting go. I hear their sighs and moans like applause and am spurred on to create within them a sense of well being. I play a tune on the body, or I sculpt a new relationship of muscle and bone. I introduce my themes, develop them as I engage the muscles, and invite the deepest relaxation with a reprise, a recapitulation at the end that will continue to assert itself like a tune one remembers when leaving a concert. I want the client to come to a full cadence, to a feeling of rest and completion as I lift my hands from their body when the performance has concluded.

     I am always excited by the improvisational challenges related to different environments and different types of massage. I like the street performance feel of chair massage in a coffee shop, lunch room, or exhibition hall. I even enjoy constantly changing rooms at the spa and meeting its one-hour time limit. By contrast, work in my own studio gives me more control. I find myself responding to my selection of music and to the aromas of various oils. I like being free to extend the massage when it seems appropriate. Massage offers me no script but, rather, a recipe I can follow or alter. While I must meet particular requirements to designate a massage as Swedish, deep tissue, integrative, Thai, or neuromuscular therapy, the style in which I deliver them is my own. Mostly, I love “jazzing” an old massage theme, improvising in response to sights, sounds, smells, and feelings in my sessions with my clients.

     From time to time I receive compliments: “Nice massage,” or “That was the best massage I’ve ever had,” or “I’ve never had a massage like this before.” While I appreciate these comments, I liked most what John said: “That was a great performance.” My preference for his compliment doesn’t surprise me since I see life as art. For me, God is the great artist; my work is a reflection of the Creative One. And always I want to give a great performance, “for the glory of God,” as the old theologians said it, and for the benefit of my clients. So be it.

Chorus Line Bears by Phillip Hoyle.
Enjoy their enthusiasm. Great Performance!

Table Talk: Contemplation

Cross mixed media by Phillip Hoyle

     Historically, we are not sure when Mary Magdalene became a mystic. We are not at all sure that she traveled to Provence to evangelize and stayed on to the end of her life, meditating and living as a hermit. But we can assert that she began her contemplation when she wouldn’t give up Jesus’s body, even though he had died.

     In an effort to understand her preoccupation, we recall that she rushed to his tomb to anoint his body as soon as the sun came up after Sabbath. We may wonder if she really was the appropriate one for this task. Wasn’t it his mother’s responsibility? Did Mary Magdalene volunteer on behalf of a grief-stricken mother who couldn’t pull herself out of her deep depression? Did she go to the tomb as a sister of Jesus, or as some interpreters read, his wife? We don’t know, but she hurried there, full of curiosity, grief, and need. She discovered the empty tomb.

     When she asked a man nearby where they had taken Jesus’ body, he called her by name. Recognizing Jesus’ voice, she reached out and embraced him. But Jesus said, “No. Don’t cling to me.” Never before had he rejected her anointments of oil and tears or her rapt attention to his teaching. He had praised her willingness to leave all and follow. But now the relationship was changing. He was going away. She would have to rely on her memories. Thus Mary Magdalene began to contemplate the body of Christ, a practice she continued for many years and that earned her the distinction of becoming patron saint to religious contemplatives.

     The word “contemplation” comes from an ancient Latin word that described the work of a class of Roman priests who, through observation and study of signs and portents, foretold events. The word connotes both great intensity of observation and a space dedicated to that work. Mary’s strength of observation and feeling seems matched only by that of two or three other disciples of Jesus, but unlike them, she didn’t wait for Jesus to wash her feet. No, she washed his and dedicated herself to his ministry in unparalleled fashion. Although she reputedly retired to a hermitage late in her life, her earlier contemplation focused on the space of Jesus’ body as the temple of the Holy Spirit of God. What did she see there? What revelations came her way? What indications of the future?

     I imagine that Mary, in her contemplation, regarded the body of Christ: its beauty, its calluses, its tired muscles, its responsiveness to touch, its desire to be washed, its need for anointing. From her vantage point in the maritime Alps of southern France, she recalled his rather normal body and saw there visions of loving service to all kinds of people. She reflected on Jesus’ skilled healing touch, and considered the meaning of his holy acceptance of the body even when it was diseased, despised, and rejected. She pondered experiences of his love communicated through unusual relationships with ordinary folk. Perhaps she augured the power of Jesus’ acceptance and love as a model for bodyworkers and other lovers of humanity.

     She had seen his resurrected body fixing food and sharing meals with his followers as well as teaching them, and she realized his intention was to teach them to do what he had done. Jesus made clear that his ministry would be continued by his followers, who were to do even greater things than he. Mary contemplated the body of Christ within the space of her own body. Surely she accepted that her love for him was a beautiful thing, a monument to his power, and a glorification of the human body that foresaw and experienced resurrection. The continuing work of Christ would be caught up by hands that, like hers, reached out, touched, ministered, fed, and loved in an amazing variety of ways among an even more amazing variety of people.

     Christians too often try to bypass the body in the quest for spiritual growth and maturity. We risk missing Mary’s insight. We forget the corporeality of Jesus of Nazareth, his daily interactions with disciples, his hands of healing love, his great compassion for individuals and crowds who thirsted after the kind of life he exemplified and taught. We eagerly hear St. Paul’s words of resurrection as a spiritualization and conveniently forget his other difficult teachings of the resurrected body. We want to resurrect a spirit ministry but forget the hands-on nature of Jesus’ and Mary’s love. The risen Christ taught, yes, but he also fixed fish over a fire, broke bread, and otherwise entered the daily lives of his faithful followers. He taught them to feed hungry people, give clothes to the naked, heal the ill, and wash one another’s feet. Mary’s contemplation valued these acts as the greater things Jesus’ disciples would accomplish in the divine name.

Mary, Saint and patron of contemplatives, 

bless us as we join you in humble service, anointing the body’s hurts and communicating divine love. May we too contemplate the body of the living, dying, deceased, and risen Christ and come to see his and our bodies 

as the temples of the Holy Spirit of the Divine. 

Amen.

Fee photos by P Hoyle.
Can you think of them as somehow communicators of divinity?

Table Talk: Time to Heal

     A very tired woman came for a massage at the spa. She had traveled for four weeks on business to China, Japan, and England and back to the US twice. Her muscles were tight, both from hours sitting on a jet plane and from having run on the treadmill just prior to coming to the spa. Given the development and shape of her muscles, I was working deeply. As I approached her lower leg, she told me she had a broken bone that wouldn’t heal. A hairline fracture on the inside of her fibula, near the ankle, kept giving her terrible pain when she ran--her nearly daily exercise. “Would you be careful there?” she asked.

     Carefully working the ankle and listening to her talk, I finished up the leg with some long strokes and moved to her other side. As I massaged her right leg, I tactfully suggested she could swim for exercise to let the bone heal. “Yes, I could,” she said, but went on to explain how running gave her a good workout and a high release of endorphins. “I like the way running makes me feel.” She had been a triathelon contender and, having swum a lot, knew she couldn’t get the same benefits from swimming. Since it didn’t sound like she was going to quit running, I let my comments rest a few minutes. She talked more and admitted to working twelve to eighteen hours a day on some international project, rarely taking time off for herself or her family. Later, when we were laughing about something else, I suggested she take off a month for a vacation to let her bone heal. She agreed that she had the month coming, but if she took it, she’d want to have a tummy tuck. She was thirty years old, in great shape, and quite attractive.

     A tummy tuck. Running on a broken leg. I didn’t get it. Was she a victim of Madison Avenue advertising, thinking she had to look like a model? Did she have some compulsive disorder that caused her to imagine herself as a fifty-year-old movie star? Had a parent harped at her for being an out-of-shape teenager? Perhaps she was an over-enthusiastic disciple of the apostle Paul, daily pummeling her body both physically and mentally. Her wound seemed more than a broken bone. Her body may have become her enemy.

     St. Paul presented images of runners and boxers as he explained how he made decisions about his ministry. He pictured himself as a runner who, throwing off every encumbrance, dedicated himself to winning the race. Like a runner, he didn’t run aimlessly. Like a boxer, he didn’t just jab at shadows. He was fixed on a goal, and he disciplined himself to reach it. He claimed to punish his body and encouraged his readers to do so likewise as they tried to live successfully in the light of the Good News. Over intervening centuries the Apostle’s words often have been isolated from their context of advice on how to balance one’s sense of freedom in Christ with the need to live together in society. They have been moralized into a kind of rule of discipline and spiritualized into a concept of body rejection and sometimes even body hate. Was my client hurting herself daily in some unholy allegiance to a holy image? Was she loving the running while hating her body, its breakdowns, its aging?

     The encouragement of a beloved coach or of a holy apostle can be heeded with healthy or unhealthy results. Pushing oneself to excellence, even with an appeal to the sports adage “No pain, no gain,” may help one build muscle, strength, and stamina. But to go too far, to pay no attention to what is happening to the whole body, is to invite accident and injury. The freedom-loving and daily-disciplining Paul regulated his behaviors and, perhaps, his body with what he called “the law of love.”

     He learned the law from Jesus’ words: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” If the idea is simple, its practice is not. It assumes that one loves oneself. In principle it says the best social behavior requires self-consideration. Jesus and Paul assumed their readers loved themselves. Such self-love can serve as a helpful monitor for reading the ancient words of the apostle and for following his advice, even in sports and exercise. Love yourself; love your body. Make your body your friend. Take your vocation seriously, your relationships realistically, and your workouts religiously. But in so doing, take a vacation, pay heed to the needs of your family and friends, and give yourself time to recover. It may mean that you must take yourself lightly and lovingly. It certainly means you will accept and love yourself--your body, your strength, your aging.

     My tired, over-worked client was getting a massage. I saw that as hopeful. Would she take time to rest, to be restored, or would she make massage another quick fix-up of a stressed self? I hoped for the best: that she would love herself, love her body. Perhaps she would even come to love her body as herself.

Open our imaginations, Divine Creator, so we can recognize opportunities for healing and love. Amen.

Abstract painting by Phillip Hoyle

Table Talk: Saints Rescue

This group of Artist Trading Cards are inspired by the shape of a bird's egg, one of the symbols associated with Saint Mary Magdalene who figures into this week's meditation on the body. Artistically the set was part of a larger group that comprised a study in contrast rather than making an illustration for Easter or an interpretation of a saint. I think I need to buy a better camera!

Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main

concern, and includes and is the soul;

Leaves of Grass, W. Whitman

     Growing up, I had never known saints religiously. I had never knelt at one’s shrine or addressed a saint to pray on my behalf. I had only known them as names of churches and towns: Saint “X” Catholic church and school in our city, the village St. Mary on the road to Topeka, and St. Paul’s Lutheran Church where our neighbors attended. Of course, I ran into more saints as I matured. In mid-life, I even told a few saint stories to children and used saint images in collages. I came to see the saints as icons of holiness. As such, the saints intrigued me.

     I started reading more about saints, wondering what perspectives they could lend my life and interests. I wanted saints to make statements that could bring together spirit and flesh, sacred and secular, and other pairs of contrasting values and experiences related to the human body and sexuality. I used (or misused, as one friend accused) saints in collage icons, showing advertising models as holy figures. I wanted to rescue saints from what, to my liberal Protestant self, seemed to be superstitious practices, and at the same time, to make symbolic statements that would communicate my own values.

     But I discovered saints don’t need rescuing. To my surprise, I found out that their lives, works, and legends could support life and work in the opening decades of a new millennium. Perhaps that’s too grandiose. What I needed to figure out was how they could guide, enrich, and, somehow, rescue me.

     For a while I had the notion that I might rescue Mary Magdalene by making her the patron saint of massage therapy. She got a bum rap over the course of both Catholic and Protestant centuries. She symbolized repentant sinners, not a bad thing in itself, but surely her patronage of them reflects the questionable assumption that she reformed after years of demon possession and prostitution, that her conversion into a follower of Jesus transformed her from a sex-focused individual to a spirit-filled person who didn’t need or want sex. The selling of sexual services has long been perceived, in Christian parlance, as one of the worst of sins, and Mary was saved from this awful life.

     I was surprised to discover that another long-standing tradition declared her to be patron of contemplatives. She supposedly became a mystic and a hermit, and if she did not really do so as a person, she did it as a saint, perhaps fulfilling some kind of Third or Fourth Century penance for having focused so much on the body in a prior lifestyle. To make her patron of massage therapists, I reasoned, might somehow rescue her by giving a positive slant on her body-centered activities and make a helpful statement about her continuing and important interest in Jesus’ body. The new assignment could honor Jesus’ words about this anointing female who for eons would be remembered for doing a beautiful thing.

     Whether or not Mary Magdalene was the anointer of this particular story, John’s gospel did picture her hurrying to the tomb to reverence Jesus’ dead body by anointing it. Neat switch. She, the corrupt turned clean, was to anoint the clean tragically turned corrupt. Mary was amazed to find that God had already rescued the corrupt body with the anointing of a new physical spiritual life. Still, her own work did not go unrecognized, and in John’s gospel, Mary became not only a rescued individual and an anointer of bodies, but also the first announcer of the good news of Christ’s resurrection.

     Since Mary was who she was and has come to symbolize both repentant sinners and contemplatives, my efforts really ought to aim at rescuing massage therapy and therapists, including myself. The saints represent holy values and have often rescued under-valued human experience. They show us how house cleaning, printing, hair dressing, carpentry, studying, and basket making are, in fact, sacred. Surely this is my present task. I want to help rescue massage therapy from its being equated by some with hired sex. I want to encourage people to see this work as communicating love, hope, and enthusiasm for life. I want to interpret massage therapists as caregivers to the holiness of the human body. 

Mary, dear Mary, as we give massages, may we honor you and ourselves with the same love Jesus showed you. In so doing, may we become bearers of the glad tidings of the body’s beauty, worth, and healing. Teach us not to fear touching the profane and the sacred in the human body. Help us anoint the lively and the dying with equal love and concern. Rescue us by becoming our symbol of acceptance, wholeness, and love. 

In the name of the lover of all humankind. 

Amen.