Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/1208028
have no idea how other people perceive me, physically, anymore. When people say I'm 'slender,' I think, 'What? That's not me.' " As Rebecca works to learn and be at home in this new body, she says that only now, years later, is she beginning to understand the relationship she'd had with her body before and how that relationship affects her work. "As my body changed, I became more aware of how I'd abused it and allowed others to abuse it. Making a safe space for others became a way of making a safe space for myself. Clients aren't here for me to advance my own healing, but that is what happens." A significant number of the people Rebecca serves in her practice are women who have just received plastic surgery. She knows there is something about these clients that is triggering for her. "Something about fat and being fat and having fat. Fat is a cell we have naturally in our bodies and yet has become something we've started a war against." I ask Rebecca if she thinks this a female thing or a "wellness issue." She replies, "This is a whole society thing, and I think it's a 'the way massage is taught' thing. We don't really understand that the body is not separate. We think we have a thinking, theorizing mind and our body just drives it around, so we approach the body like a car. If you do that with yourself, of course you do that with clients. "Now, if you understand that your body, mind, and spirit are not separate, that the way you are in the world is a direct result of what you do and what you think, it means you develop an understanding that you take up space and that's OK. You also understand that your body does stuff like belch and fart and make fat and that's OK. The way that we're taught massage—we go to work out stuff about our own body—I would love to see massage schools open to that and really do something with that." Rebecca feels that the most important thing we can give our clients is attention— real and fully present attention. When she is more present to the sensations of her own body, she is more able to spot the discomforts people don't even know they have. Those discomforts inform the treatment plan. "It doesn't have to be something we discuss out loud, but my job is to help people feel their bodies, to have an awareness of when something needs attention—when something is broken, about to be broken, tender— and doing something about that." Having taught anatomy and physiology to both yoga and massage students, I can say with some confidence that it is necessary to break the body down to teach its parts and functions. What we're really bad at doing in bodywork education is putting it all back together. Your body is not the dumb car your brain drives around. It's you! You are not a collection of organs and individual muscles, of fat cells and neurons. You are a single amazing, complicated, and unique organism. And so is each and every single person who ends up on your massage table. It would be easy to write this entire article about Amanda and Rebecca. Eighty- one percent of ABMP members identify as female. The average American woman has been conditioned to have an antagonistic relationship with her body, especially around weight. But I think Amanda's and Rebecca's stories are illustrative of something deeper than gaining or losing weight. It's about being a human in a body that never quite matches the catalog specs. Tim BODYWORK AND PERSONAL HEALTH Tim has been a massage therapist for 30 years. He has lived with chronic illness for at least that long. "My prior work had been all over the place, but a good deal of it was hard physical labor. So, as a young adult I was unusually strong, but then a health crisis caused me to change career paths. I landed in massage school. There, I discovered many holistic, complementary, alternative, integrative therapies that heightened my care, appreciation, and awareness of my body. I also recaptured some of my previous strength and health, and worked long but happy hours as a massage therapist." Tim has an interesting perspective about his relationship with his body and his work. "I would say that the overwhelming 64 m a s s a g e & b o d y w o r k m a r c h / a p r i l 2 0 2 0 "I would say that the overwhelming feeling attending illness is being tired, and tiredness can be distracting. In tiredness, it can be harder to connect with another person."