How the Deepest Massage of my Life Brought me Back to my Body.

Originally featured on Elephant Journal March 28, 2017

A month ago in Dubai, I had the deepest massage of my life.

As the massage therapist stretched, pulled, and pressed on my sore exhausted flesh, I immediately knew this massage was different.

Like so many of us, I often walk around somewhere up in my head and barely notice my feet meeting the earth. This tendency to live in my mind is what compelled me to play competitive sports as a child, then find yoga and dance as an adult.

Although my habit is to live up in my comfy cerebral space, my body craves being lived in. Sometimes vigorously, but mostly just actively, even if it happens in fits and spurts. I’ll spend days not doing much intentional movement and then I’ll get the itch and dream of running—sprinting down my street. Or I’ll get the taste of cobwebs on my skin and I need to move. Now. Jump. Stretch. Shimmy. Climb something until my chest heaves and sweat makes dusty rivulets down my legs.

I love massage and I’ve had my fair share of them—in seven different countries. I adore the ritual. I crave the therapeutic benefits. I need the relaxation. I cherish the self-care.

My mother introduced me to the magic of massage when I was a teenager. After getting professional massages together as a birthday treat, my mom decided on a whim to buy a massage table. Her intention was to give me and my brothers all the benefits of massage from the comforts and ease of home.

I can remember one sunny summer day she set the table up in the grass of our backyard and gave each of us a sugar scrub rub that ended with a run through the sprinkler. Unfortunately her dream was…

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Whispers

Havelock whiteout

June 2012

In need of a welcome distraction from the heavy law homework I should be completing, I have chosen instead to ruminate on this last year. It has been quite epic. Not an obnoxious exaggeration I’m afraid.

As those who have braved my previous verbose blog entries, or those who have suffered through my long drawn out in-person verbal soliloquies can attest, a lot has happened.

It has been the most simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying year of my nearly quarter of a century.

It began with the serendipitous and charmed introduction of a special someone on a beach in India. A handsome someone. A funny someone. Someone whom I fell madly in love with. After 3 months of heart opening study of Odissi dance, this Irish someone stepped in and captured said heart with ease.

Since this extraordinary moment, we’ve travelled, we’ve laughed, and we’ve cried. We’ve said hello and goodbye too many times to count. We’ve kept track of time zones and schedules, immigration policies and transatlantic flights. We’ve made skype dates and lunch dates. We’ve spent harrowing times apart and blissful moments together. And yet, we keep choosing the efforts of love.

This is despite the interference of immigration and legal authorities. Despite two cancer scares in 6 months and numerous court dates. I have a new constellation of surgical scars scattered across the canvas of my belly and he  sports new grey symbols of a stressful year hidden amongst dark curls.
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Sometimes the boundaries of the world are deceptively thin. At times I believe I can reach out and touch the confines, beguile the world to reveal her secrets and her charms.

Other days, the world is a positively strange and terrifying place.

Besides the pain or loss of a loved one, my deepest fear is quite simply:

Immigration.

There is nothing more upsetting then being threatened with deportation for multiple hours.

This is after being detained by immigration and threatened with deportation for multiple hours.

So much to write…