The Second Massage....

If I wasn't a believer before, I'm a believer now.

One of the things on the list of "things to do" when I get back to Thailand for good is to continue getting a massage every few weeks.

The second time I went, I was barely recovered from the first. This is one type of massage that really seems to get to the depths of who we are, pulls it to the surface and gets rid of it. It's similar to Rolfing.. or even Reiki.

When I went for the next treatment, it was with the same guy. He remembered well enough what had occurred the first time and went easy in some respects and but was even more challenging in others.

He sat on me, he pulled me, he put me in positions that no 56 year old, arthritis-riddled body should have experienced. They were actually contortions.

Still, I stuck with it and kept doing it because I knew it was important.

One of the most significant things that occurred is that I began recalling old memories, things I'd buried years ago. The memories that were stored in the cells of my body started coming into my consciousness, vaguely at first ~ then more clear as time went on. They were snippets really, glimpses, but I knew they were real.

Before anyone cautions me about how dangerous it could have been, I'll say outright that at no time did I bring anything to the surface that endangered me in any way.

Some of you know, some of you don't, that I have dissociative amnesia. There are things in my background that are like a blackout, similar to a drunk who wakes up the next day and can't remember what he or she did the night before. For me, it is chunks of time, years, that are unknown to me.

Still, our bodies are wise. There is no way I would have captured a memory that I was not ready to process.

This brings me to certain conclusions, certain things that seem so clear to me now. The first is that our bodies, as I said, are wise. They store information in the core of our muscles and organs, information that for all we know could go back generations. It's awfully hard to tell at this point whether some of this stays with us through DNA, ancestral memory. I lean in that direction though.

It appeals to my logic.

I'm not a believer in talk therapy. I've done it plenty in my life and never found it particularly satisfying. What is the benefit in sitting and talking to someone about memories I don't have? It also just didn't work for me because of other factors. I know it works for some and I'm all for it ~ as long as it produces desired results. For me, it just doesn't.

The massage does work. The herbal treatments work.

I'm not going to say I think the massage will cure all that ails me. Dissociative amnesia is a complicated issue that is outside my knowledge base. There are parts of my past that will always be inaccessible to me and most of the time, that's perfectly okay. Still, if these massage treatments are detoxifying my body of old crap that I've been carrying for decades, I'm going to stick with it.

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