After-words

After your experience with me, the waves crash.

Perhaps.

Hopefully.

Maybe it was simply pleasurable on a deep level. This is the least the work offers. People often emerge from the process feeling some combination of light, calm, joyous and maybe ecstatic. Perhaps they tell me that the first sleep after the touch was the best in years, and that at work the next day their mind wandered to feelings not normally experienced or easily forgotten.

But maybe other things storm their bodies and flood their brains…

Like the soft echoes of thunder after the main lightning strikes.

….Thoughts, ideas, sensations, overlooked dreams, hidden dreams, arcs never bended, nascent dreams never followed. Deep touch has a way of pushing aside your rational brain, and stoking the dark side of the moon, the howls inside that have been tamped down by zig-zagging daily life.

You should listen to those howls. They are primal. They don’t care about your day-to-day life. They are the winds blowing through the soul, and they exist beyond the practical, beyond the measurable. They want you to be bigger, to be taller, to be everything your daimon (or unconscious) demands. They are the wild energies of creation, and deep touch summons them out of the background of your life, and into the foreground.

Phone and screen life generates what I call “the middle emotions.” These are the safe, predictable yawns of feeling that keep you moving along, but never really get you anywhere. You experience them repeatedly and learn to manage them in a way that a routine develops.

In my touch, I’m after something different. Something dramatic.

Mythic emotions, a primal roar, an urgent ache, a breakout from the normal.

This is why it’s called Knead. There’s a crack, a fissure, something scratching at you. You’re cranky, you’re itchy; you might even be bitchy. In my world, that’s perfectly acceptable, but it’s also a strong sign you need to get out of the middle and go somewhere else.

Me, I want you to plunge downwards, or ascend upwards.

Hopefully both.

One place is revelatory, the other is devotional. They’re both necessary to becoming a full human being, and just as importantly, to figuring out what your dreams are.

The plunge downward is to sometimes become filled with sadness, doubt, anger, vulnerability, disappointment, and even bitterness. These seem like emotions you want to avoid, but they are in fact fingers pointing at your dreams. They are the light pushing through the cracks in you. They’re your edge, the zone just across the boundary of your mind’s control.

If you’re sad, perhaps it’s because you’re not touched enough, or you’re in the wrong relationship. Perhaps you’re sad because you’re not appreciated enough by others, and you’re giving so much of yourself with little given back in return. Of course, you could just be sad because the world is now a big, confusing mess and you’re a sensitive soul. The difference is, you can’t do much about the first thing, but you can do something about the second one. Deep touch can bring up a myriad of feelings that can trace outline a bigger, more complete you where your senstivity is a gift instead of a burden.

In fact, deep touch can bring up a matrix of sensitivities buried in the emotional body for you to examine and ponder. The paradox is that unless you feel and process these sensitivities in a deep and direct way, you will never know that these feelings are the drumbeat of your soul. Pushing aside difficult emotions only works for so long, and the more you turn away from them in regular life, the more intensely the soul calls for you to assimilate them. .

Live in those difficult emotions.

Give them a voice.

They have your best interests at heart.

They want what your depth wants.

It’s your superficial and fearful self that’s getting in the way.

Deep touch dissolves the brain’s rule, and plunges you headlong into the beautiful, the dreamy, the soft ache of the soul, and jumpstarts the process of revealing a hidden story. No it’s not practical, and it might upend your life in a way that might drive you crazy, but once the dust settles your sadness or bitterness might be a little lessened because you’re closer to who you actually are, not who you think you are.

Now the great thing about deep touch is that it always embeds enough joy and pleasure in the process that it also pushes you up and not just down. In fact some people feel only lightness and deliverance from their aches and pains in receiving deep touch. They have travelled out to the edge of themselves in their bodies, and felt something close to ecstatic knowing as they float off the table and into the night. Very often, women are completely wordless after the touch, because they have been spoken to in a different language, and that language is ethereal. The pleasure can be overwhelming.

I can’t really say this any more plainly, but when touch is done with skill, art, and heart, it completely obliterates trivia, meaningless inner chatter, and superficiality, and pushes you towards big icebergs of emotion, mythic reality, and elaborate dreamscapes. Sometimes it can take you days or even weeks to unravel their meaning. Sometimes what you uncover isn’t pleasant for your ego, your circumstances, or your current relationship. It might ask big things of you: inconvenient changes, u-turns, re-directions, energies withdrawn from a grand project…everything and anything. A revelation demands clarity and focus to bring into being. You can’t help but feel awed but also obligated to pay close attention to your body’s responses and feelings in those moments.

All that heavy stuff aside, there are also the simple practical things that arise when experiencing deep touch, and after working in this space for more than a decade, here are some of the most familiar things that women say to themselves (and me) about what they felt either during or after the massage:

I don’t get touched enough
I don’t get touched well enough.
I wish my partner touched like this.
I wish my partner would learn to touch like this.
I wish my partner listened to me more.
I wish my partner didn’t make sex the primary form of touch.
This touch is delicious.
This touch is challenging
The touch is showing me stuff.
I feel great.
I feel complete.
I feel squishy.
I feel powerful.
I feel sad.
I feel confused.
I feel free.
I feel like a woman again.
I need regular touch like this.
Why doesn’t sex feel as good as this touch?
Why is this stranger’s touch more meaningful than my partner’s?
Since I had a child I haven’t felt myself. Like a woman.
I’m not doing enough with my life.
Why can’t I get past this problem I have?
I won’t live this way anymore.
I need to make a change.

And so on…

Deep touch takes people out of the daily and into the mythical. They float, they transcribe their dreams, they eliminate the trivial and the inconsequential, and they stop pushing aside their greater selves to satisfy their current lowered selves. Deep touch uses pleasure as a medium to move you into your body, and into its hidden truths and unconscious longings. A million feelings and questions can come up. Try and remind yourself: I’m actually feeling deeply.

So whatever you feel after the process, know that it is necessary, and it is beautiful, whatever it is. There is no right way or wrong way to feel. Women often say to me after “Is it weird that I feel…?”

….Crazy, happy, free, boisterous, buoyant, frothy, urgent…
….softer, kinder, gentler, grateful….

….restored, resolved, redolent…

Nope.

All of the above and more are fair game in my world.

You cannot continually wait for a rainy day to deal with the deep stuff of your life that has the unravelling of your story as its endpoint.

Do you want to know yourself or not? :)