The door shuts, cutting off the low hum of foot traffic through the spa, leaving you in a small, dimly lit room heavy with the faint, sharp scent of rubbing alcohol and synthetic lavender.
The transaction is already in motion before you even lie down. Your masseuse nods briefly, swiftly points to the table, and leaves you to undress. The room is too cool for comfort and the thin sheet that covers you offers little relief. On the wall, an analog clock ticks with a loud, mechanical rhythm, marking time down to the dollar and reminding you that the meter is running.
The air is still, the interaction is stripped bare, and the bodywork begins immediately with routine, mechanical precision.
There is no space to breathe here, no intuitive check-in, no inquiry into why your body has shown up in this way on this day. Here your body is just a broken piece of machinery needing a quick tune-up. It is touch delivered as a commodity and your nervous system leaves just as guarded as when you walked through the door.
Most of us have had a lackluster bodywork experience — I’m looking at you the 4 Seasons in Downtown STL. When I decided to start my own practice I pulled from my own experiences but also my desire. My desire as a practitioner to feel like more than a mechanical massaging machine and for the body under my care to feel more like a person than a hunk of hardened meat.
Our bodies are often regarded as transport vehicles for our experiences. The modern body is rarely lived in or truly experienced, it is simply used. Its hunger for connection and pangs for understanding are inconveniences at best. We are rewarded for self abandonment in favor of productivity and in a similar vein that abandonment appears on the table. Your moment of self-care is reframed as performance optimization versus surrender to what you’re really asking for: to be cared for, intentionally. For a moment to be just yours, and no one else’s. For the yearning to be seen as not an inconvenience but an honor to satisfy.
Has your body been tended to like a garden? Have you been taken into consideration as a living ecosystem of experiences, desires, and sensations? Have you been watered like Earth versus tenderized like meat? That’s a different experience entirely.
It’s why my sessions tend to run longer than most. There is time to arrive, to take in the environment, to talk. And talk about more than just what your body wants but what you as a human being want. You can bring it all into the room. The compassion fatigue of caring for an ill loved one, your dreams of a career shift, or the resistance to your parent’s well-intentioned advice. All of it can show up, all of it is welcome and all of it lives in the body.
You can lay more down with me than just tired tendons and aching bones. There is the invisible weight that lives between your cells, in the top of your inhale, and the dead weight of your exhale. What if we explore more than just what’s top of mind or hovering at the edge of your awareness? The body lives between. The hungry skin lives between silence, asks, and tasks that have all become more important than you.
So my question is, what are you hungry for? It doesn’t have to just be body based, but if you were to give yourself permission to be ravenously hungry for something more and give up feigning satisfaction, what would you demand be put on your plate? How can life serve you?
Let me know… and see you in the next one.