loose fruit

It's like a pile of ideas but if I had my druthers I'd flesh them out into bigger things. But for now, here they are.

It occurred to me recently on the table the parallel between massage and social change. In the following ways.

1. If you identify where the problem is, how can you ignore it?

As massage students, we’re given a protocol of how things are supposed to go with a client on the table. This is generally just used as a place to start and then as we learn more and more techniques we’re encouraged to make up our own sequence. However, it’s really easy to get stuck in a repetitive routine because it becomes habit and muscle memory. But trigger points and tension can’t be missed. They interrupt the flow and demand your attention. Maybe you give them a little extra attention, but often the therapist just does a little bit of work on them an then goes back to the sequence.

I didn’t become a therapist to avoid problems, I did it to help solve them. Read the body, find the issue, put your focus there.

2. You have to have a complete picture before you can figure out the proper treatment

It’s not just the interview, the intake form, your medical history, SOAP notes and reading a body. It’s understanding their state of mind, their eating and exercising habits. If they want sustainable solutions, it’s not enough to apply pressure to the problem area, you have to help them in a way that they’ll be able to understand why the problem happened and how to avoid or minimize it in the future. Also it’s why eastern massage appeals to me, because sometimes just your hands aren’t the solution.

3. You need lubrication but not too much.

With no lube, no one is happy. The body resists what you have to offer, the therapist can’t do their job and everyone comes away grumpy. Too much lube, the client can’t feel anything and the therapist feels like they’ve done something without actually having done anything.

If you enter any situation too aggressively you aren’t going to accomplish anything. If you enter it in a way that is too perky or too optimistic that doesn’t see things for what they really are, you’re only paying lip service to making a change and the thing you’re trying to help won’t feel any effect from your efforts. Also they’ll hate you.

4. Make sure you cover the sensitive areas.

Stay focused on the task at hand, not everything needs to be exposed in order to get the job done. This might seem to contradict number 2, but there’s a difference between being informed and making someone feel unsafe. Part of the work goes into figuring out what counts as what.

I was watching a TED talk about the brain and how it's built to make connections. It made me think about the internet and how any one thing leads to so many others, either getting you thinking about other stuff or being full of links and ads to take you directly to other stuff. I'd love to do a thing ("performance") in that vein. I saw a show once that said it was based on that idea, but I didn't see that in what they presented. Mostly I saw my friend as Jane Fonda.

Also this

stretched in the shade singing

If I have learned one thing over and over it is the simultaneously uplifting and disheartening lesson that you cannot count on anyone or anything. I realize how that sounds, and I do partly mean it in that way; I have been let down by many people and institutions and I should just learn not to depend on people or things. This is hard when you’re trying to build communities but you don’t trust anyone. The key to it, I’m continuing to learn, is to make sure that you are capable of achieving whatever it is on your own. Don’t make your only goal in life to be hired by a specific theatre company, make the theatre you want to make by yourself. Or at least be able to.

But I also mean that you can’t count on anything in the way that you never know what’s going to happen. It’s one of my favorite things about life, in fact. That you just never know. you can try and plan but there’s no guarantee that those plans will play out uninterrupted.

Recently I’ve been making a lot of declarative and decisive statements.

I will quit my job.

I will move out of philly.

I will go to massage school.

I don’t do that very often. I tend to be (definitely try to be, I know I don’t always achieve it) a go with the flow kind of guy because you just never know and I like to see how the story plays out without my hand necessarily making the decisions. But once in a while you have to assess a situation and take decisive action. I feel this is an important thing to be able to do, at least to not be afraid of. But there’s a reason I don’t do I it very often because living by PRINCIPLES and DECISIONS that you can’t go against don’t necessarily allow you to get what you need. Anne Bogart talks about the violence of making decisions and boy is she right. By making one decision you are eliminating all other possible decisions.

So I did move out of philly and I am going to massage school. But I’m sort of back at my job. And it turns out it’s the best thing happening right now. It’s nice to be in a comfortable place where I know how things work and people know and trust me and I know how to get my job done. Being there in this current stage of life is allowing me a freedom I never had before. I have the freedom of not really having to care. This isn’t the only thing I have “going on” right now so when the show’s over I can walk away and go back to my life leaving those feelings in Philadelphia.

I met someone. We’ve been flirting and seeing other casually for a long time now. Every once in a while we’d get to spend some more serious time together and every time I’d come away feeling revitalized and like the best version of myself. So today I decided to make it serious and extended the invitation to move in together. they’re called the Zen Book. It’s full of potentially cheesy affirmations and verses that speak in a voice I need to hear right now. What’s really coming through right now is the idea that my greater spiritual responsibility is nothing. Is to listen and sit and be. Also it smells like my favorite bookstore where I bought it.

This is maybe getting off topic. But by listening and doing nothing I was able to hear that actually that decisive violent decision to leave my job was maybe what I needed in the moment I made it, but that staying with the job is actually proving to me an amazing thing. It allows me to…well a lot of things actually, but the best thing it allows me to do is sit back for a second and have a big strong hearty laugh at the world and its foibles.

I think this stage of life (at least this part of this stage) is about humility. Is about swallowing any pride I may have had and addressing my needs in this one moment. I don’t care what anyone says about my decisions. Because who knows what will happen tomorrow.


in that spirit, here's a thing that a lot of people will think is stupid. But I like it because it makes me feel small and inconsequential to the enormous swirling madness happening all the time without any input from me.




Blessings.