Namaste

I was sharing with some students recently how I was having roadside conversation with one of my students from the South class. I was glad to hear that she is practicing, but not so glad because as she spoke I could see myself writing about her story, and I had promised myself to back off on the writing as I am working on a project that deserves whatever time I usually dedicate to keeping you guys aware of what you already know.

Alright, let’s tell the story. She was recommended to do a massage for a friend of someone she knows. The agreed price was TT$200. She did the massage. In the end the client criticized her work and suggested that TT$200 was too much for him to pay. The price eventually changed to TT$150.  Actually, he had insisted on TT$100, but eventually paid TT$150. Just hearing this is hurtful to me. Who are these clients who work at the Bureau of Standards and know exactly what a Therapist’s time is worth? Well, she is a peace-loving person so no fuss was made. She was thankful that there was an exchange, but she does not intend to be of service to that client again. Given that she is not yet certified, I understand that she was just giving herself a stipend by charging so little, only to cheated in the end. Yes, there are Therapists who charge TT$150 for a massage, so she could be content, but she is she, and other Therapists are other Therapists. Everyone determines their own value as there is no organisation to determine it for us at this time.

She had another client who was charged and paid TT$250. This massage took us down the road of energy exchanges. Upon entering his premises, she felt the heaviness of the place and spontaneously remarked that she will do his massage quickly and go home to sleep. The comment displeased him, rightly so, as she could have been more tactful. But like some of us Therapists, he was only listening with his ears. That which was blurted out came from somewhere. What exactly was she feeling that caused her to make such a statement? She was feeling the negative vibes that she had to work with and a part of her was resisting the challenge. We are all human.  These are her stories, so I don’t want to get into the twisted reasons both clients put forward for what constituted a massage that meets their satisfaction that contributed to her feeling the way she did.

The massage was done and she went home to sleep. Sleep evaded her. To be tired and can’t sleep is never a nice combination. When sleep finally arrived, it only stayed briefly as morning came soon after it. She awoke feeling exhausted but with more awareness that the energies she had absorbed needed to be dealt with. So, she spent some time in prayer to clear herself and asked God’s protection on her family as she has children and children are like sponges. They innocently take on whatever their parents bring home. How many parents would have left work tired and went home to be greeted by their children with hugs then notice that instead of resting they did all manner of chores? Where did the energy come from? Where did the tiredness go? We need to be a little more creative and stop offloading on our children. A physical bath is not always convenient, but there is always prayer, or visualization, or whatever works for us.

I then shared with her a recent experience I had. I went to the home of a little lady…petite. The way it was arranged for me to be at her place made me aware that it was about more than massage, so I opened my heart to the flow of energy necessary to facilitate balance in that environment. The lady was pretty, and sexily (she might say comfortably) dressed. I sat and listened to all that ailed her while she stood and gesticulated to get over her point. Fine. When she was ready for the massage, she said she had nothing to hide, so she slipped out of the piece of cloth she was wearing and bounced onto her bed in panties only. No draping. It was our first meeting and she was a bit pensive at first, but soon relaxed. In the end she complimented and paid me. I got on a bus and headed for Port of Spain.

For about 95% of my journey I was asleep. I don’t sleep in public transportation, but in this case the parasympathetic nervous system took over. Whatever had transpired under the guise of massage was tantamount to moving heavy machinery and my system automatically shut down to regroup. When I was through with my errand in town and got home, I had a bath, ate and went to bed. For two hours straight I was dead to this world. If I had scheduled another client after that lady, I would have had to cancel. It was not that I felt tired, because it was mostly energy work, but the adaptations my cells had to endure while that energy flowed had its own toll on my body. After such a session, how fair is it to a Therapist for the client to decide that they cannot pay? It means we definitely have to operate like shopkeeper: after you hand me my money, you get your goods. If you don’t like what you got, you have seven days in which to return it. Ha!

Anyway, in contrast to the petite lady with whom I spent an hour, I did a two-hour massage on a very tall man who is so heavily built that his heels are sheer callouses from all the weight they have to carry. When he lies on his back without a pillow, his belly is much higher than his head. When I need him to turn over, he has to go to one end of the bed then roll over so that he does not fall off the other end. A king-size bed. The session went from about 8:30-10:40pm. I got home about 11:30pm, and, since I was neither tired nor sleepy, I dedicated some time to my project, and went to bed about 1:30am. I was up and alert by 5am and went out to do my exercise then returned to prepare breakfast and lunch and run into town, etc. What I am saying is that by physical comparison, massaging the burly fellow should have left me exhausted, but it was petite lady who had the baggage. Life doesn’t owe us an explanation for why the book should not be judged by its cover, but if we live long enough, we learn not to.

I have been revisiting the concept of Chi and looking at it with fresh eyes, as some time this year I would like to start teaching a short course in Reflexology…the project I mentioned earlier. The first idea was to do a workshop, but the more I explore the concept, the more I see that a workshop would be leaving too many stones unturned. We have looked at energy and its role in Massage Therapy which led us to the Chakra System and touched a bit on the Meridians. In the case of Reflexology, a better knowledge of the Meridians is required as here is where most of the blockages occur, and as they become denser, the Chakras are affected to the point where they may close up and physical disease results.

Judging by our sight, negative energy sometimes seems quite an unlikely thing for nice people to project, yet they can be in possession of tons of it which they carry around waiting to drop it on some hapless person. Where does it come from? How could a nice person have such baggage? Our food is a good place to start. The ‘development’ we have experienced over the past few decades have done much to alter the structure of our foods so that when the body is through metabolizing, the resulting energy is insufficient to supply our energy system. So that we eat enough to be physically satisfied, but that’s all. The insufficiency builds up, added to that are the various unusable chemicals, and we end up with large amounts in negative or incompatible energy in our space that has no place to go.

We are told (since many of us have never seen such under a microscope) that banana contains phosphorus which our bodies need to keep youthful. When exactly is this fully ready so that it matches our energy needs? When the banana is ripe? Technology allows for us spray green bananas and speed up the ripening process, but does the process result in the same quality of phosphorus as if the banana was left to become naturally ripe? Well, banana is banana, so we eat and are satisfied, but our bodies know the whole story of the incomplete phosphorus they have to grapple to make sense of while the blood awaits its share of nutrients and the energy system registers exhaustion at getting a lot of nothing, again. We live in the space between Heaven and Earth, and just as man shall not live by bread alone, man cannot live by spiritual food alone. So that which we feed on from both Heaven and Earth needs to be available in suitable amounts to keep us going. Heaven continues to give us of its best, while we spend our time on Earth sabotaging our growth through food experiments.

Another example is that of ice-cream. Well, some of us don’t eat it. For those of us who have a love affair with it, we may be better off blending up our own ingredients and putting it to freeze than buying top brands with daring claims of being healthy choices. One of the additives in commercialized ice-cream is Diethyl Glucol. It is a cheap chemical that is used as an emulsifier instead of eggs, and is also used in antifreeze and paint removers. And that’s just one of several additives that our systems have no use for. So after enjoying the delicious ice-cream, our bodies have to wrestles with secret ingredients that trusted brands could not spare the time to tell us about.

We can understand why ignorance is bliss. This kind of knowledge could be aggravating as we really don’t want to feed our bodies this stuff, but we don’t have time to grow all our food then prepare all our meals from scratch either. But if we are truly in the Aquarian Age, the knowledge will bombard us until we start making changes to our diet and lifestyle. If we were to bathe in a pool then try bathing in the sea, we will notice that there is more buoyancy in the sea water. The energy of the sea is different, and better feeds our spirit, but we can argue that the pool is clean and aesthetically appealing. And this is what we do each day; wrestle between what looks good and what our intuition says is good. All the parts of us want to be fed, and will insist on being fed until we start paying attention.

As if the food issue is not bad enough, our thoughts also contribute to the negative baggage. Hurtful, vindictive, angry, envious, spiteful, mischievous, etc. thoughts swarm in our energy field with no place to land but on our physical bodies. Then we drop ourselves on a massage table and complain that we are stressed out. And some unaware Therapist sees the opportunity to make a dollar and touches us and gets caught in the Venus Fly Trap of our lives then his/her life unravels for the next hour or day or week until he/she finds a way to clear that energy and ground themselves. But life holds no victims. Knowledge abounds, which means ignorance is a choice. An expensive choice. There are persons who through their ignorance have stumbled onto a dark patch (in the name of helping someone else) from which it took years to emerge. We don’t know not because we couldn’t know, but often because we don’t want to know…as yet.  We have befriended denial. And that’s okay. Wisdom suits the aged. If we acquire it too young it can turn us in to very sad persons because it makes us not only see things, but also see through things, and what we see is often void of the superficial aesthetics.