LIGHTNESS

Commonly after a bodywork session, the client stands up and says, “I feel lighter!” During the hour the person has not actually lost weight, so how do they feel lighter?

The sensation of weight is not a function of mass. The sensation of weight arises largely from tension. The extent to which we are tense determines how heavy we feel.

The dissolution of heaviness and the restoration of lightness result from the free flow of water - as we are mostly water. Our therapy uses the enlightening power of touch to facilitate this free feeling.

The human world is often in danger of becoming too solid. Our upbringing, education, culture, and the ways we tend to think and live can make the world seem resistant to change, opaque, heavy. It is important for us to share and cultivate compassion for this feeling of weightiness in living. Gravity, Ida Rolf said, is the therapist, but in some senses gravity is also the problem. What can we do with the sense of spiritual heaviness, the perception of the world as too solid and beyond change?

Science helps us out. We know that open space is predominantly what there is. All matter is dissolved and flowing within open seas of energy. I was once working with a Doctor of Radiology and he was talking about how excited people in his field were with all the new things they were seeing, thanks to MRI’s and CAT scans. I asked him, “What are you seeing?” He said, “Mostly we don’t know what it is!” Surprised I asked, “What do you think it is?” “We think,” he said, “it’s water.”

The writer, Italo Calvino said, “Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.” We are now seeing the apparent solidity of the body dissolved as we develop the ability to look and work more deeply. As bodyworkers, we have a deep intuitive loyalty to energy as well as structure. The experience of energy dissolves the solidity of the world.

Therapy helps to restore the flow within form. As we feel energy flow within us, we experience greater lightness. Our work is often a source of dramatic illumination for body, mind and spirit. Sudden insights, emotional breakthroughs, dramatic shifts of self-image, or accelerations to new levels of spiritual connectedness commonly accompany the most successful moments of our sessions.

Perhaps the inner light turned on by graceful human touch is the bodily-felt answer to the question - What does it feel like to live an unforced life? After all, clients often seek bodywork when they feel life has become too difficult. Touch therapy dissolves our illusion of the world’s solidity. We see the light, not just opacity. We are open to change. We don’t need to force it. The goal of healthcare is true ease in this highest of senses, not merely the absence of dis-ease. In structural and energetic balance, we have a bodily felt experience of peace on earth.

Pavel Tchelitchew - Vaso d’Oro