Regarding the Laying on of Hands

I feel the need to share an experience.

A licensed massage therapist is often referred to as a "soft tissue specialist." We manually manipulate muscle and adipose tissue to stimulate blood and lymph flow in the body. It's rewarding and very physical work. I am often lifting, shaking and stretching limbs, jamming my elbow into shoulders, butts or legs, or scrubbing scar tissue like a dirty bathroom floor. My clients get off the table looking stoned. Good stuff.

However, a day like yesterday, in which I saw ten patients at the clinic (amounting to about five straight hours of all of the above), leaves me exhausted. By dinnertime, I could barely stand up straight. My forearms were killing me, my brain was completely finished with processing any sort of logic. Everything ached. I thought, "Geeze, I'm planning on making this my career? How the hell am I going to build up the chops to do this amount of work all the time?"

Today in one of my classes we decided to do some polarity work. Messing with the body's energy. Life force. Qi. Prana. Charge. Whatever you call it, I've never really put much faith into it, so I wasn't all that interested. I partnered up with my buddy Jen, who obviously wasn't feeling good... she was pale and slumped over, with no shine to her eyes or hair. Said she felt sick. Asked if it was okay if I just worked on her, so she could lay down a bit and zone out. I said that was fine.

Energy stuff involves, like, ZERO pushing or prodding or lifting. It's great for people with conditions involving the circulatory system, because you aren't moving blood around at all... in fact, much of the time you're barely touching your client. I put my hands on Jen simply with the intention to help her relax; touching her forehead, gently rocking her hips, holding her feet.

So here's the woo-woo-shaking-a-chicken-bone-and-hopping-on-one-leg stuff:

The minute I got my hands close to her and slowed my breathing down I could feel her. I could feel the hot and cold spots on her body, the tingle of her energy, or qi, or whatever-- it was all concentrated in certain spots, and missing from others. I could sense it pulsing into my fingertips, mingling with my own, swirling around and over my hands. It felt gunky, muddled in areas --like right over her abdomen-- so I just brushed it away, pushed on it, smoothed it out. I can't quite explain what this felt like to me-- I was soaring, far away in my own body and yet deeply rooted inside hers. Everything else surrounding us disappeared. It was incredibly intimate.

About halfway through, I suddenly felt awful. My whole body hurt. My head was pounding, my stomach started gurgling violently. I was overwhelmed with sleepiness. I mentally ran through my sleep patterns the night before, what'd I'd eaten for breakfast, whether or not I'd taken my vitamins or had enough water. Everything looked normal. My brain started to panic: what's wrong with me? And a split second later, I knew: This isn't mine. It's hers. This is all coming from her.

When I finished, and sat Jen up, she looked amazing. She was glowing-- there was all this color in her cheeks. She said, "I feel fantastic. Your hands... my stomach doesn't hurt a bit anymore." And she gave me the warmest, most loving hug I've ever gotten from her. Thanked me over and over. Practically skipped out of the room.

I went to my teacher, still buzzing with the duality of the filmy sickness clinging to my insides and the intense HIGH I felt from connecting so deeply with someone's body, and questioned him as to why I picked up all of Jen's gunk. He smiled (obviously he had planned this) and told me, "You haven't learned how to ground yourself yet. You let yourself float off too quickly; you need to remind yourself frequently of where your hands end and her body begins. But you can't do that too much, or you won't be able to have the healing effect you're going for in the first place. I didn't tell you to do it because I wanted you to experience what it's like."

Cheeky bastard. Got me hooked.