Tales From the (Massage) Table: Doing The Work Of Angels

Recently, I met with a mentor massage therapist woman who is one of the most grounded individuals I've ever encountered.  She lives a completely different life than I do, in that she does not have the same reference points as I do.

I have kids, and am a teacher to kids, so my words and actions are being watched by them (and their parents), and I try to keep things PG.  She does not.

I'm into the modern world of TV, Netflix, cell phones, Facebook, blogging, etc.  She does not even own a TV, and just recently figured out how to text.  She's pretty bad at it.

She finds it easy to believe in many things that I can't yet bring myself to entertain, such as plant spirit healing, all kids of alternative and holistic therapies, lots of 'crunchy' hippie-ish stuff.

However difficult I find some of that stuff to believe, I can't dismiss the experiences I've had, and so I have to try to understand.

For instance, I've had the experience of being in a near-hypnosis state during a massage (giving one), and suddenly notice that I'm experiencing a thought or an emotion that was utterly out of the blue and not me-like at all, then the client will say or do something that reveals that the thought or emotion I had been feeling had been theirs.  Was I just picking up subtle clues from their still, quiet body?  How?  I have no idea.

So, getting to the title of this post, I was recently working on a lovely woman who was a new client for me.  She was holding lots and lots of tension in her upper back (which is typical for most folks), but as I worked and became more relaxed myself, I started thinking about children.  Toddlers.  And cold houses.  And fear.

Then the client shifted and started talking. She is a social worker of some variety, and she works with families with children from birth to age 3, and one family in her care had recently revealed to her that they had lost the heat in their house, and the mother was afraid to tell people for fear they would take her children.  So she was keeping them all in the living room around the fireplace, bundled in blankets.

This client had immediately begun to make phone calls, and within a day, they had their heat restored, had a social worker visit the house to make sure everything was ok with the kids, and they had been given vouchers for a local food pantry. But she was running that scenario over in her mind, being disturbed.

As I put hot stones onto her back, I found my mind repeating "you do the work of angels" to her (silently).  She gradually relaxed enough that she fell asleep, and woke refreshed and relaxed and feeling cared-for.

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So, how do you explain that?  Is it magic?  Psycho...something?  Telekewhatever?  Does it matter?  Maybe not, but this stuff weirds me out sometimes. And other times, it seems as normal as anything else in my everyday life.

What do you think, though?