ABSTRACT
Before I entered massage school, I was firmly of the opinion that the mind (or spirit, if you prefer) and body were inseparable. I thought that the pervasive Western separation between the two was an arbitrary dichotomy that had outlived its usefulness, if it had ever been useful at all. My belief in the unity of the physical and the spiritual, however, lacked emotional conviction until I stood in front of a class while an instructor read my life history from my body. Although most massage therapists (at least among themselves) speak of “reading the energy” of others almost as frequently as Pagans do, here the basis of the reading was unmistakably grounded in the physical. My slightly collapsed chest and forward head posture suggest the years I have spent typing at a computer and poring over books, but my rounded shoulders also echo a history of depression, my attempt to shelter my heart. My walk and the easy sway of my hips tell of dance lessons, while an uneven standing posture and turned-out feet show my body’s attempt to adjust to an old injury. My willingness to make eye contact, the set of
my mouth, the tilt of my head-all the experiences of my life have come together in the way I hold my body. For the first time, I realized fully that energy-or spirit-is in no way separate from the body itself.1 What I, as a practitioner of Paganism, often spoke of as others’ “energy” was my intuition’s attempt to process incredibly complex information about their physicality and present it in a way my conscious mind could use. Yet my massage school crash course in the many possible causes of postural deviations showed me only the tip of the iceberg of what I am able to perceive. My highly social mammalian brain processes an enormous number of details in every interaction with another person, making judgments of which I am only half-aware.
