Massage Therapy 2: Massage and Writing

I am not a big talker. I prefer listening to people and thinking. I usually express myself best through dance and writing. I always have a hard time putting words together verbally, especially with people I don’t know very well. I get shy and awkward. I’m not an assertive conversationalist, so if other people are talking, I don’t fight to make myself heard.

A massage therapy session takes this verbal communication challenge to a whole new level. In addition to being quiet by nature, I am now face-down on a table, deprived of the use of facial expressions, and without the use of my hands to as a visual aid.

One of the main points of massage therapy is to help you chill out, so one of the first effects I usually experience is the unplugging of my higher brain functions. I have noticed that after about three or four minutes, answering basic questions like, “how did you hurt your shoulder?” require an enormous amount of effort. It’s a little like trying to have a conversation when you are mostly asleep: words come out, but they don’t always join together well and they rarely make sense.

While I am enjoying my hour of massage time, ideas swirl around in disconnected ways inside my head. I don’t say a whole lot, but I think a great deal. While I am there, these thoughts are unformed little baby concepts twirling like a sleepy tornado inside my head.

I can’t say I leave the session with a single idea in my brain. In fact, when I go to pay, I often have a hard time with the simple mental math of tip calculation, and I frequently have to ask the receptionist to do if for me. But in the days that follow, interesting things happen. When I have quiet time, like when I am out on a run, or waiting for my kids in the carpool line, those fragments of swirling ideas start to float back into my head one at a time. At this point, my brain is working again, and I can start to pull these ideas apart like cotton, and begin to weave them into a single thread, or two, or three.

During this phase, I find it really helpful to talk to myself. I like to do this when I’m driving my car, because no one else has to listen to me. As opposed to the massage therapy session, where I fail to assemble words in a coherent order, I am Winston Churchill when driving alone in my car. Baby ideas become stories as I drive around Virginia setting and retrieving radon machines.

At that point, all I need is time: just an hour or two a day of quiet time to get the thoughts down on paper before they evaporate.

The past three months in which I have been consistently doing massage therapy have been some of the most productive of my life, and I am full of gratitude for all the benefits this experience has provided. It’s like the unplugging of a drain. The challenge now is finding enough time in the day to capture ideas before they evaporate into the air.