hands on

Reporting from a good place this mostly sunny Saturday in Portugal. I've been able to connect over Skype with Bradford and see Ben with the video option. I also connected with Lynne ("hi Lynne"), a dear friend from my good times working at the shelter, and with my partner in crime from Boulder, Kirsten. A day of reconnecting, some stillness and quiet - assimilating the learnings and experiences of the past week.

The training has encompassed a great deal of terrain. I've mentioned a few areas of study and practice in previous posts. I'll mention a few more. Recently, we've been working with Polarity Therapy, Ayurvedic Massage, studying the Central Nervous System, Virginia Satir communication theory, working with the body's energy and chakra systems, the muscles and other soft tissues, and Sports Massage. This week brings us further into Reichian theory, the Endocrine and Reproductive systems of the body, Trigger Point massage, and probably more pieces of which I'm unaware. We continue to begin most days with T'ai Chi and

other forms of movement. It's very luxurious to be in a program so focused on the body. At the same time, I'm aware of how numbed-out I've been to my body - to pain (and, therefore, to pleasure), to the ways that energy moves to make me and bring me to life, the ways that I'm affected by my choices (food, action, non-action, thinking, breathing, connecting, touching, being touched).

We've moved into the period of the program that is structured around practicing more full and formal massage sessions outside of the classroom environment. We are each assigned a 'client' from the student cohort with whom we will complete 6 to 8 sessions. Later this week, we will begin to work on members of the public. Stand back!

With all this practicing on others, I was struck by a strange fact; one can never know or feel what it is like to be massaged by one's own hands. Similar to not knowing what we look like (we can only see ourself captured in a reflection of mirror or photography), it's a twist to realize that I cannot feel my own touch. I made a comment to this effect to an instructor and he gave me a very powerful insight from which to grow. He encouraged me to consider that there is a connection between the experience of sensing another through my touch and the feeling which that quality of touch evokes.

There is something very moving, very intimate about physically touching another with sensing as the ground for contact. I came into massage training with the idea that I was 'doing' something to another or giving something to another - it's common to use the phrase "giving someone a massage." Sensing through skin to skin contact, however, is a very different focus. Sensing is a dialogue between me and you - my body, my energy, my system (be it psychological, physical, spiritual, or mental) and yours. I'm not necessarily sensing from any one intention but I can weave together qualities of curiosity, nurturance, acceptance, as well as assessment and intervention. Even as I migrate in my touch towards helping a muscle to relax or release, it's very different to come from a position of sensing rather than knowing. A dialogue. A conversation. An exploration. Very nice.

I say "very nice" because it feels rather delicious to sense into another's skin, another's body and energy. In some ways, there's no limit to what one can feel, what my hands can hear. One time, I had my fingers near the collarbone of a classmate and I felt that I could sense all the way down to the smallest toe on her left foot. And I had a sense that I could connect with that toe from a time when she was 7 years old. Trippy, I know. Trust me, this whole sensing thing is a bit of a mind-warp for me, too. Listening hands are active as well as still, feeling as well as doing, engaging and receiving - dancing and conversing - moving and being moved.

I guess I've always thought my hands were, well, handy. Typing, gesturing, catching balls, paddling, cooking, gripping, cleaning, holding, lifting..... on and on. I've never known that hands could be so communicative and responsive and conveying of presence. I never knew that my hands could bring me so much pleasure by being a conduit of contact and connection.

In my conversation with Kirsten, I shared with her that I was beginning to research massage tables for purchase - so that a table would be waiting for me on my return from Portugal. In our dialogue, I realized that I'm feeling somewhat squeamish about buying a table. It's not so much about the investment of money. It's that buying my first table is a clear statement of my commitment to this field. At this stage of my life, considering my age and the distance I've already covered in becoming a psychotherapist, I feel strange admitting that I practice bodywork. At the same time, as I pondered budgeting for the investment, I surprised myself when I heard myself say, "I'd stop eating before I stopped massaging."

fresh

Today not only marks the first day of Spring - the Vernal Equinox, the Sun is moving, relative to the Earth's tilt, directly over the Equator and balancing light with dark - it's also Nowruz (pronounced "no-rooz"), the Persian New Year, translated "new day."

Last night a 'Super Moon" heralded the Sun's return to the Northern Hemisphere - the largest Moon in over 18 years, the closest the Moon will be to the Earth this year, a mere 356, 575 kilometres away.

In the last week or so, we students in the massage program have begun to remark that we're into the final stages of our training (beginning our third of three months). Michael, one of the facilitators, asked us to consider that a month is a very long time - indeed, it's unlikely that any or many of us will ever again take a training of such length, many programs being held over long weekends. It got me thinking about psychological time.

While it's common to believe that time exists, time is actually something we humans constructed, a false idea we continue to perpetuate in our thinking and acting. While I do not have a full grasp on the history of how a clock or a calendar was conceived, I understand that it was devised - it was devised to correspond to the cycles of the Earth, the Moon, the Sun.

Time is not real, it's a way of making sense of the sequence of life, the way that events follow each other. Ironically, we created Time to help us understand our existence and map it so that we could communicate more easily with each other. We are a species that is now a prisoner of its own creation.

In the cartography of time, I am generally more in contact with my psychological sense of time (how long will I be waiting in line? how much longer until I retire or vacation or get home so that I can relax? when will I get to where I want to be?) than I am with the eternal Now. We have collectively traded our human experience of this precious moment - just this - for a sense of sequencing, a way to understand and conceive our reality rather than experience it. It's not about being where I am, right now. It's more about how long will I be doing this in order to get somewhere else - experience is a means to an end rather than an end in itself.

And so, rather than watching the impressive Moon rise over the sea last evening, I was attempting to photograph it, all the time wondering if I'd ever see such a Moon again ("you're not seeing it now" said a quiet voice within me).

Likewise, rather than being fully in the unfolding process of this training, sometimes I'm mapping it/me in my mind according to where I am in the sequence of psychological time.

Sometimes, however, I am walking the mile between my apartment in the ghetto and the classroom down the coast and, instead of mapping the 20 minutes in my mind, my senses are caught and captured by the experience - a young man turning countless spirals on his tripped-out bike, the combined weight and lightness of my sandals on compact red earth, a breeze bringing a scent of new blossoms across my skin.

And so, recognizing that I am not guaranteed anything in life - not another 40 years, not another trip to Portugal, not another extensive training in bodywork, not even another full breath - I decided to make today the "first day." Maybe it's the first day of training. Maybe it's the first day in this skin. Maybe it's the first day to meet myself, to meet an 'other'. Perhaps it can be a day in which I do not need to carry heavy suitcases of endless stories and beliefs of who I think I am and what this living is all about. The calendar and the clock, afterall, were likely devised not so much to manage Life but to move with it.

new post

.... is dated 25 February 2011 ("les portes de Portugal"). Me and technology still dancing with each other!

a week of stormy winds and high waves has given way to a sunny Saturday here in Praia da Luz. I'm off to swim, to sit on the beach and spend a few hours with Detective Rebus c/o Ian Rankin.

hope you're well and that the weather in your corner of the planet is yielding to Spring.

when two rivers meet

As a raft guide in British Columbia, I learned the term 'confluence,' the place where two rivers, two bodies of water meet. As a Gestalt therapist, I learned that 'confluence' referred to one of the 'contact boundary disturbances' - how two individuals might forego their respective experiences of autonomy so that they can merge. I looked online and noted that the term is used more generally for any coming or flowing together, a meeting place.

On the river, I recall the feeling of readying myself and my craft to hold steady and stay upright with the swelling of force that happened when the Thompson River merged with the mighty Fraser. The eddy line, the place of encounter could jolt, twist, spin, and create chaos for me if I wasn't prepared - eventually I learned that the biggest part of prepared is being relaxed, ready to respond and receive and adjust. I wondered if the Thompson, itself, wasn't also preparing upstream for the inevitable meeting, as though the wisdom of the Whole whispered a kind of intelligence into the seemingly separate parts. I remember being in awe of the way the textures, colours, rhythms, flows, temperatures, and sounds danced and mixed at the confluence.

Some days I imagined that the Thompson was attempting to hold its distinctness for a mile or more downstream. Eventually, it's clearer, warmer, slower blue would yield to the larger, colder, muddier, and more forceful Fraser. I did not realize until this moment that the Thompson River 'ended' at the Fraser. The larger river continues south to Hope, British Columbia and then swings west to Vancouver, itself eventually surrendering its energy to the larger Pacific Ocean.

This week I spun, twisted, danced, and dropped into the confluence which marries psychotherapy and bodywork. There are many more metaphors I could mix in attempt to articulate my experience: I simultaneously had a feeling of landing and recognizing that my feet were firmly underneath me as well as the sense that the resultant force of two such immense energies coming together was more than I could ride - like rocket fuel. I felt both peacefully 'at home' as well as buoyantly born into a wild and wonderful new land that was awaiting my arrival with excitement and anticipation.

Somewhat uncharacteristically, prior to coming to this program, I had not researched the theory (landscape, history, language, practices, and rituals) of this new territory to any great extent (sorry, Dad). Before committing to this adventure in Portugal, my understanding of bodywork-psychotherapy was limited to experiences I had personally (as well as witnessed) as a participant in programs at The Haven (www.haven.ca) and some mutations of therapy on a bodyworker's table. I also credit Wayne Allen and the Phoenix Centre (www.phoenixcentre.com) for bridging his own trainings and intuitions and pursuing greater integrity in the field of counselling and personal growth. I have a great deal of respect for folks like Wilhelm Reich and Ida Rolf and countless others who have strayed away from the main trail and cut a path for people like me to continue moving forward. It's striking that even in this age, more than a century after Freud, I feel squeamish when I describe my reason for being in Portugal and the passion I feel for weaving body intelligence into psychotherapy in a more hands-on way.

At 40 years old, I decided it was time to grow up and that, for me, growing up included taking responsibility for my instincts and em-bodying my passions. I've been aware for a few years that my hands 'throb' with energy and heat, that I long to place these hands at the ends of my arms on the bodies of people around me. At times, my hands have surprised me by seeming to have a life of their own, a 'mind of their own,' and a will sometimes in discord with my mind which likes to keep things safer, more controlled, more known.

This week I had my first experience of working with touch and migrating the territorial boundary between massage and psychotherapy. Unlike the upheaval I've experienced on the eddy line of the Thompson and Fraser rivers, the confluence was an effortless merging. And yet the force, the surge of power I felt in the experience was breathtaking; the whole seemingly greater than the sum of its parts - using the word 'power' here not to refer to my power but the power I felt I tapped into riding the alchemical combustion of emotional energy meeting physical touch and movement. Quite a wave.

Anywhoo. I'm stoked. I'm a lot excited. I'm a little intimidated. I don't know where this is going, don't have a picture of how this training experience will manifest theoretically, logistically, professionally, or personally - it remains part of the Mystery, the big Unknown. Yesterday I noticed I got a moving ache in my head as my mind tried to lasso the energy I was feeling pumping through my body, trying to make sense of where it/I was going rather than just ride it through. I'm glad it's the weekend so that I can breathe into a little space, a little time to integrate, get quiet, find stillness to support all this movement.

This week I also crossed the half-way threshold of the program. Six weeks remain in Portugal. On the edge of my seat to learn more most days. Other moments, ready to return to the gentler, more familiar rhythms of home. Guess I'm big enough to hold the confluence of these two rivers also. Everything, afterall, eventually finds its way back to the sea.