The Burrow

I was Rolfed this afternoon.  This was my second appointment, and I liked it even more than the first one.  I'd resisted the gift certificate for nearly a year; I went, the first time, to assuage my guilt over an un-used gift from a woman I see every week.  By the middle of the session, I was hooked.

Talking about it is confusing; it's been done with me, on me, to me, but never at me.  The practitioner finds my psoas and follows it along its merry path, while I breathe and move my knees to one side and my head to the other.  It's not a process for amateurs.  The sensations are deep and unusual and sometimes require sending the breath to the part that is talking the loudest.

And that's the part I like the most of it - talking to my body and having it talk back.

A massage therapist in Marin insisted that TBG learn to love his basketball damaged knee.  She encouraged him to speak of it kindly, to rub the soreness with kindness, to think of it as a valued part of his body.  He snickered and continued to be pissed at it.

Twenty years later I heard the same thing from a physical therapist at the Rehab Institute urging me to embrace the mended bones, the regenerating nerves, the muscles strengthening even as I galumphed across the floor.

Twenty years before Marin I'd heard the same thing from a friend who was powering through an aerobics class as I gasped for air beside her.  Put a smile on your face and tell yourself you're having fun was the secret, so I did and I did.

And so, leaving my second Rolf inspired experience today, I was not surprised to be given these instructions:  Talk to your psoas; touch it here and here and here.  Remind it about lengthening.

Being an obedient client, I leave you now to commune with my psoas in that epsom salts bath I never got to last night.