BODYWORK AND SALVATION

I had a music composition teacher who said to me at a time when I was second-guessing and doubting everything I wrote and didn’t know what to include – he said, “INCLUDE YOUR DOUBTS!”  That has stayed with me deeply ever since. So first I include my doubts right here. I am not claiming that what I say below is true. I have my doubts. But I also think it’s important to consider some of these ideas. And I invite you also to include your doubts, but keep an open mind and heart!

So let’s start here. Can we really lead healthy lives without religion? Not talking about religion as in an institutionalized system, church, or any established belief system. Let us consider religion as a kind of natural human behavior, a natural belief and emotion. Isn’t it natural to feel religious, as to feel awe, anger, grief, fear, or love?

Religion and this possible need for it are considered controversial and often private topics, that would not ordinarily be discussed or taught in school. Yet, for now, replacing the word religion with Spirit, I’d like to return to something I quoted in a past newsletter: “An educational system that does not present Spirit as the central Fact of our existence is offering ‘avidya’, false knowledge.” – Paramahansa Yogananda in “Autobiography of a Yogi.”

Something as important as spirit should not be detached from education, even if it is challenging to discuss.

In an essay, “The Relation of Religion and Health,” the philosopher, Paul Tillich said, “Religion is the relation to something ultimate, unconditioned, transcendent.” We could say then that religion is the relation to Spirit. This can lead then to rephrase the initial question to, “Can we live healthy lives without a relation to Spirit? And what is spirit?”

Assumedly at least, it is the experience and awareness we have that there is life and a reality beyond oneself – perhaps an intelligence or life force underlying or beyond us. The philosopher, Hegel, identified Spirit almost as a Being evolving into new forms and contents over the course of history. In many religions and philosophical traditions, spirit is closely allied to breath, to chi, to prana, etc. Thich Nhat Hanh emphasizes more or less as Spirit the realm of “interbeing” which takes into account the ways in which all beings are connected (and seeing beings only as separate individuals more or less a mistake we make).

In any case, spirit seems to be something that supports us, is within our individual body, and that goes beyond our individual body, emotions and mind. This naturally evokes a healthy humility. There is something beyond my ego, beyond all egos, which we may believe exists and in which we can have an intuitive faith.

This spirit perhaps is something we begin to understand more when we think of how we heal. There seems to be in all living things a shared momentum toward health. All organisms in body, mind and spirit seem to want to perpetuate themselves and to overcome less healthy symptoms, less clear experiences with healthier states of body, mind and emotion. The fact that this is a common natural momentum perhaps brings us one step closer to Spirit and natural religious feeling. From whence comes the healing momentum? Do we really know?

Finally, in thinking about the momentum for healing we share in common, we can now consider the relation between spirit, healing and salvation.

In the above-mentioned essay, Professor Tillich reminds us that in early eastern and western thinking “salvation is basically a cosmic event: the world is saved.” The word “salvation” itself is derived from words that mean “healing” in many different languages. The same origin holds true for “salve.” We can see salve applied, like the anointings in the Bible, like oil to the individual body, also to the larger “body:, the interbeing of nature. Salvation is basically and essentially healing, the re-establishment of a whole that was broken, disrupted, disintegrated. Mythologies see not only man but also nature is sick and needs healing. “In sections of the Asian Mahabharata the kaliyuga is described as the last, most disintegrated period of a cosmic eon. In it nature itself is sick.”

The idea of salvation in the sense of making whole or healing, here is applied to the social disruption of mankind as much as to cosmic disintegration. “Nature, society, and soul are subject to the same principle of disintegration. They all are possessed by demons, or, as we should say, by psychic forces of destruction”

How does this relate to and perhaps illuminate the practice of massage and bodywork?

Of course we connect to the idea and motivation to help healing. As Dr. Fritz Smith, Zero Balancing’s founder, has said, we can help clients override less well-held fields (of sickness, confusion, trauma, etc.) with stronger, clearer fields.

Social movements can do this as well for society as a whole. Massage and bodywork are part of this movement. The so-called “human potential movement,” in which touch therapies and embodiment have been an integral part, is more important than ever, even if it has been overshadowed by the technology-potential movement. 

Dr. Smith recently suggested, “In each session, consider dedicating one fulcrum to the betterment of the world.” Perhaps we need to do that every day and at many moments in every activity. Perhaps that is as close to natural prayer as we ever come.

We work with individuals in the field of world salvation with our dedication, our prayers, and our hands guided by spirit, potentially inspired by and with every breath. 

More to the point of salvation, it is easier than ever to see that health is not a property of an individual, even though in the current medical model and most people’s thinking, health and sickness are treated as individual matters.

But the pandemic, climate change, war – all are informing and warning us that health is as much a property of a community. We can see and feel the communities in which we are participants from many perspectives: one’s neighborhood, a city, state, country, ecosystem, all living things, the planet. The human potential movement has become, more consciously and of necessity, the world potential movement.

With each perspective come certain duties and responsibilities. Even though the effects of our work may have an infinitesimal effect on these systems, on the whole world, it benefits us to take a broad as well as individual view of our work.

Certainly the message of bodywork is extremely relevant to this time in history. Each of us is a unity of body, mind and spirit. When we feel healthier, we experience and appreciate this wholeness. We often will feel this wholeness not only within ourselves but in experiencing a deeper connection with the world around us. If we keep in mind and heart the wholeness of the communities of which we each are a integral part, perhaps the healing process will spread to the greater whole beyond ourselves. Health is a restoration, through saving graces, of unity.

When the whole is sick, when nature herself is disrupted, we all feel this impact, even viscerally. The world needs “salvation.”  Tillich again, “salvation is a cosmic event, the world is saved.”

In trying to save the world, we may feel and think about political change. Of course, we need change in the body politic. In turn, that change needs us, needs the lessons born from our hands, from touch, from fulcrums inspired by a greater width of vision.

This is not an invitation to be grandiose, but a willingness to allow the widest impact of our work and the messages it conveys, to inspire and empower us. We need this world to be healthy within it. This world needs us as well. Since humankind is in many ways the origin of many disruptions, we need to be the origin as well for healing, and not rule out or underestimate the role we may play in saving grace and in salvation itself. 

References:

Tillich, Paul. The Meaning of Health. Richmond, California: North Atlantic Books, 1981.

Yogananda, Paramahansa. Aubiography of a Yogi. Los Angeles, Ca.: Self-Realization Fellowship (1946).

Paul Tillich