Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/943527
tell that hold up your beliefs and ideas about who you are and how you fit into it all. You get honest about how most of what you're doing is not influencing, but simply witnessing. Another friend and mentor, Gayle MacDonald, says, "Love needs fewer or no words and silence can be as supportive and welcome as conversation." The time has come to be quiet. Break up with your inner-fixer. (That relationship was never good for you anyway. Ask any of your friends who love you.) Listen more than you talk. Stay open. Be curious. See the people you touch with new eyes and beginner's hands. They want your presence more than your expertise. And, for cryin' out loud, please be kind to yourself along the way. Resist the temptation to pile more and more capital letters behind your name or to chase CE credits and specializations to try to fill your holes. Learn and keep learning, absolutely. Just notice what you're after and do it all with your eyes and your heart wide open. Get to know yourself. Become friends with all the stories you tell and why. Getting to the ease I now experience with most of the people I work with is hard, and some days I still miss the mark entirely, but my work and my life are more human than I ever knew they could be or than I ever thought I wanted them to be. More real and fragile and vulnerable and nuanced than my limited ideas of helping and loving and touching could have held in those first months and years of "doing massage." And I wouldn't trade any of it. Being with humans is a good gig if you can get it. That's your job and that's plenty. Stop wearing yourself out making it anything more than that. Bodies do what bodies do. We know so little about what they really do and why, it's mind-blowing. Get honest about that and you might be on to something. I know now that while it looked like an accident, some deeper wisdom probably propelled me to pursue massage therapy. I don't go in for all that "everything happens for a reason" malarkey. I'm just saying that, in hindsight, I know there was a deep longing inside me to be so truly myself that, as spiritual teacher and author Adyashanti says, "All that will be left of [me] will be a tendency to shine." Massage school was the first step on that path for me. I feel lucky to have learned early that kindness is, and will always be, my primary tool, but that was just the beginning. Poet Naomi Shihab Nye removes our romantic notions about kindness and reminds us of the cost of its cultivation in her poem "Kindness." "Before you can know kindness as the deepest thing inside / you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing." Kindness does not come from our desire to help, nor does it come from politeness or manners, nor is it one of the trappings of good customer service. Kindness is what's left when you've plumbed so many of your own depths that you know them well and intimately. Kindness is what grows up in the place of the stories you used to tell about how "I'll be better after …" and "If only I could …" when wisdom invites you to stop telling them. Kindness is deep. It sees through appearances, and it lets you work and live from a place of truth that's not up for grabs. The assertion that one is a "healer" or someone who can fix the unfixable or know the unknowable— these are prevalent and dangerous stories in the massage therapy community. No matter how many specializations I have, no matter how many fancy- pants massage celebrities have taught me their magic tricks and copyrighted modalities, every body in every moment is unique and worthy of kindness before and above anything else I can offer. When people come to me for massage, they're coming to be seen and to be loved. Even if they have a rotator cuff injury. Even if they have plantar fasciitis or diabetes or IT band "issues." Humans are aching for other humans to touch them kindly and without agenda. When you are open to the mystery of being human—of bodies and their breakability—dying and death are no more sacred than living and life or health and illness. You see through the stories you Lauren Cates is an educator, writer, and speaker on topics ranging from massage therapy in the hospital setting to end of life and massage therapy policy and regulation. A founding director of the Society for Oncology Massage from 2007–2014 and current executive director and founder of Healwell, Cates works within and beyond the massage therapy community to elevate the level of practice and integration of massage overall and in health-care specifically. b r e a k a b i l i t y 4