A SHAPE NOT MY OWN

I didn't grow up with an easy relationship to touch; and from young age I was racked with the overwhelm of trying to feel okay, and the searching itself kept the spotlight on everything that felt disjointed, sharp, and piercing inside me. Like a wound, I learned to protect it by going still. Somewhere in that stillness I formed a kind of cast around myself, how I thought I should present, should hold, should be, and inside that cast, I lost my own energy. I lost the intuition of how to simply be myself. For years, mastering my body felt like the only way to master the pain that seemed inherent to being alive.

Then I went to Nepal, trekking in the Himalaya, using my body in a new way, in a place and among people that felt safe. I was freshly out of a concussion that had scrambled the plans I'd had for my future, raw and starting over, with no clear answer to what came next. In the mountains, the need was so simple: eat, so I can hike. Nourish this body, so it can do what I ask of it. That simplicity struck something in me. It was there I found the yogic path, a structure for how to meet my own mind, my breath, my body, and at sixteen I began a daily practice that would shape the next decade of my life.

At eighteen, I took my first yoga teacher training and found in it a teacher, Jennifer Yarrow, of real integrity. I went on to teach yoga for years, sharing what had been shared with me. Breath was always at the center of it. Prana, the current that moves through and animates the body, taught me that the body isn't separate from what's unseen in us; it's the place where the unseen becomes felt.

TOUCHING THE INVISIBLE BODY

I never expected to become a massage therapist. I barely liked hugs. But when Jennifer offered an introduction to Thai massage, I went, thinking, in my naivety, that I'd simply be extending yoga instruction, guiding people into shapes on a mat. I learned quickly that Thai massage is its own complete practice, independent and whole. And in that first session, I felt something nearly divine. Offering touch this way felt like devotion: to this person before me, to every joy and every pain that had carried them to this moment, alive, now, in front of me. An hour, ninety minutes, two hours, held entirely in service of their safety and ease.

I found a massage school in the town I already called home and began the path to becoming licensed. What I'd found wasn't a new direction so much as an extension of the one I was already on: yoga, breath, wilderness work, now massage, all different mediums toward the same end, helping people return to a relationship with themselves. Because I believe we carry cracks, small leaks, where our sense of our own true nature seeps out of us. And in bodywork, something happens that I can only describe as touching an invisible body, the subtle, unseen layer of a person, and helping it settle back into physical form, the same way breath has always helped me settle back into mine.

SETTLING BACK INTO SHAPE

This is my devotion, first practiced on myself, and now offered to you: a massage practice as a prayer and a dance, in hopes that you might settle back into your own shape.