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I rekindled one of the big loves of my life this week, a kind of “first love” I’d neglected and forgotten about for many months, a love that made me feel happy and healthy and well on so many levels. I’m talking about massage: plain old clinical massage, laying on a table, getting rubbed.

Massage is a relatively recent discovery for me, something from the past five or six years of my life, and while I wonder why it took me four decades to find it, I’m really glad I did. I wonder how I could have forgotten that I need to do this for myself from time to time. A couple of weeks ago, I ran into this old love again and we got reacquainted. I made a commitment to myself that I would try to get a massage every two weeks, without fail. It’s nothing different for me than a commitment to eat leafy greens and walk every day. It’s just a piece of what I need to be physically well.

If I were to design a religion from scratch, massage would be a sacrament. It is a mystical and sometimes mystifying thing for me that takes me deeply into the experience of both “self” and “other.” It has been a primary, if not the primary, path to wholeness for me on a body-level and an essential part of my spiritual life.

I can experience massage as soothing and comforting, or a form of extreme challenge, and I often experience both, in wide swings, within the same 90 minute period. Massage is one of the places I have learned how to breathe into what is difficult, to lean into the stretch, to embrace things that are physically and emotionally challenging not by contracting in response, but by breathing and softening into them. It’s a great place to practice “stretch.” Deep massage can make physical contact with the our most vulnerable places, our raw edges, in the same way that a good psychotherapist can find those spots in an emotional plane.

When I remember to breathe and to go towards the touch, to lean into more challenging touch, my body will often relax into the table in a way that makes me feel like I am merging with the earth on one side of me and the hands of the masseur on the other. And when the touch is comforting, then allowing myself to receive, to open and take in, is something which, surprisingly, is not always instinctive or easy for me. Sometimes I have to practice it.

The reason I downplayed or even scoffed at the idea of massage for so long is that I used to conceive of receiving massage as a completely passive activity, like having your fingernails buffed. It seemed a ridiculous and trivial indulgence. I could not have been more wrong.

While I suspect most people think of massage as being about touch, I think of massage as being about relationship. Massage is a form of active partnership. I’m fifty percent responsible for what happens to me, and in me, during massage. Whether I contract, pull away from and hold my breath in response to a stubborn muscle being coaxed, or whether I expand, go towards and breathe into that moment creates two completely different pathways with two completely different sets of scenery.

And developing a trust-based relationship with a masseur is no small matter. Occasionally, for example, it might be necessary to say, “that’s a little too much there, could you go a little easier on me?” Surprisingly that is no easier to say in my masseur relationship than it is in my marriage, even though I am paying one person to be in the relationship with me while the other does it as an act of (great) charity. Asking for what I want is something I still need to practice, in both relationships.

It’s been surprisingly difficult for me to learn how to discern fine points in the relationship, like the difference between “this is challenging, but I want to engage this, so I’m willing to breathe into this challenge and ride with it” vs. the stoic, detached, “lie there and take it” response to something I don’t like and don’t want. Finding the challenge balance–that perfect mixture between what makes me feel good vs. what helps me grow, balance or recover–that requires quite a bit of skill and quite a bit of practice.

Massage is also one of the ways in which I keep myself balanced as a carrier of Touch Practice. We can’t do for anyone else something we can’t or haven’t done for ourselves, and I’ve written about many aspects of this.  We can’t sit and hold the emotional journey of a partner if we’re projecting all over them; we have to have engaged our own emotional lives enough and be psychologically self-aware enough that if we sit in Touch Practice with someone else, we’re relatively clear of our own stuff. We can’t offer support to someone else on a spiritual journey if we are not attending to our own spiritual practice. And, on the physical level, we can’t hold or touch without an agenda if our own physical needs to be held and touched aren’t being engaged and met.

So getting massaged by another person, while I just lie there and breathe, without attempting to give something back to him, is an important practice for me. It helps refill the tanks and charge up the batteries. Even if I weren’t doing as much Touch Practice as I do, I know that my physical body would not be as happy and balanced without regular massage, and without a regular massage relationship with someone I trust.

If you’ve never investigated massage, I recommend it highly. If you’ve always thought of it as an indulgence, think twice about it. If cost is an issue, many schools of massage offer either greatly reduced or free sessions so that students can practice their craft. Try to seek out someone who carries this as a practice, or is learning to.

You may even be able to work out an exchange with a friend, but I suggest a couple of things: first, don’t try to give and receive a massage on the same meeting, but alternate meetings, so that one person receives one week, and the other the next. This allows you to focus more clearly on the partnership between giver and receiver, both sides of which are complex. Second, have a good understanding of physical boundaries, make sure you’re grounded, and be clear about what you’re looking for.  Third, make sure it’s someone you can trust deeply, and someone with great skills.

Once you develop a relationship with a skilled, trusted massage partner, you will find that not only is a massage worth the money, but, in fact, the relationship that the two of you build becomes priceless.

Have thoughts you’d like to share?

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