The broken one

My regular massage therapist is amazing and gifted; so much so, in fact, that she is booked a month and a half out these days. Amy and I do a lot of talking during our sessions; we work through the scars on my heart (and sometimes hers) while we work through the traumas and memories found throughout my body. The synergy we've created has been a great vehicle of healing for me over the past 18 months. A couple weeks ago, needing to see a therapist before her next available time, I scheduled my monthly gift-to-me with a man she recommended, hoping (a little disappointedly) for an experience even half as nurturing as our times have become.

She forgot (intentionally, as I'm coming to suspect in hindsight) to mention that not only is Troy a massage therapist, but also an energy healer of sorts. I know, I know. I am the first person to try an alternative therapy, having learned first-hand what little Western medicine has to offer at times, but even open-minded me was thinking: "???"

I don't think I'm capable enough to share the intimacies of the experience, mostly because any language I use will seem overly spiritual and esoteric, not to mention completely inadequate. We could start by saying that Troy and I share some life and career experiences that I believe helped us to understand each other on an introductory level. He had an uncanny ability to discover, without my input, all those places in my body that cry for attention and healing. But near the end, as he pressed his hand into my hip (a place that is not an injury focus, though it is a source of unexplained chronic pain) and placed his other hand on a specific acupuncture point on top of my head, my breath caught in my chest as I fought the immediate and overwhelming urge to sob. Not tear up, not cry, but just sob, from the deepest place that exists in my heart. I hadn't yet made a sound, hadn't yet scrunched my face or shed a tear when he said, "No - it's okay. You're safe. Don't stop it. Just let it come." (How he knew what I was fighting, I have no idea.) I tried to whisper, "What's happening?" and the fight was over. I wasn't in pain, nor was I even consciously upset. As the waves came over me, he answered my strangled question: "We're just taking the lid off a pot that's been boiling for a long time."

I'm still not sure if I understand completely what happened. I only know that something in me changed because of it. I suppose practioners of this modality would say that my "energies have been realigned." Sounds nuts, but you know, that's what it feels like inside. Like my broken places aren't tamped down and paved over, but open and exposed - in a really good way.

(I also know that my left knee, which has hurt every day since I injured it at 16, hasn't hurt since. Hip + head = knee pain relief?)

If I had been prepared for this in my mind, I wouldn't have scheduled this on a day where I had to go to work. I had been expecting 90 minutes of blissful but unremarkable Swedish massage. I sat in a hot salt bath for an hour after I got home, my mind in some other world, trying to pull myself back into the present. But I liked this place he'd brought me: where pains are acknowledged, where tears and emotions are welcome. I didn't want to come back.

Still feeling supernaturally aware, vulnerable, and a little obtunded, I went to work at 2300. And naturally, I had to transport a suicidal patient. Despite my carefully constructed professional distance (designed to hide a huge reservoir of empathy), I'm generally able to speak at a very real and human level to these patients - even when it's the last thing I want to do. Even when I'm frustrated, upset, and feeling pretty shitty myself.

Except tonight. Tonight, I didn't have one word to say. I just handed him the Kleenex box, fighting the urge to grab one myself. He said, "I just feel so alone. Life is so hard sometimes."

I agree. I told him so. Some nights, I am the broken one.