“All Sickness is Home Sickness” is the title of book by acupuncturist, Dianne Connelly.
It may be a watchword for this pivotal year we are entering. How many of us are fully at home in our bodies? It is often quite a challenge to take the best care of ourselves while we juggle work, child-raising, time for recuperation, etc. Excess busy-ness, excess stress, with less recuperation time ultimately is perhaps indeed the major indicator for illness.
This is one of the reasons massage therapy is so important. There is no other therapy which gets you at home in your body so quickly, efficiently and thoroughly. As the poet Kabir said,
Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place for your feet.
Think about it carefully!
Don’t go off somewhere else!
Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of
imaginary things,
and stand firm in that which you are.
What do you need? Of course, we need cardiovascular exercise, strength training, and flexibility training. We need a healthy diet. We need to cultivate psychological health. We need healthy interactions in our home life and community. Ultimately we need our environment to support this health – this larger home is as important as the immediate bodily one.
For us here at The Lauterstein-Conway Massage School, we see in our classes and our student internship sessions the fantastic kick-start and support that massage gives people on their pathway, on their road home to health.
Massage benefits flexibility; it helps remove accumulated tensions in specific muscles, ligaments and joints that we can not get at as specifically through exercise. It clears our minds and heart of worry and the negative impacts of held-in feelings be they ones of anger, grief, or fear. It balances out the autonomic nervous system – whose imbalance sometimes compromises our relaxation, sleep-abiity, rejuvenation. By helping you be more in balance in body, mind and spirit, it acts preventatively. The best and most powerful medicine is that which helps you stay well.
How good it feels to be at home in oneself – in one’s body, mind and spirit. To the extent that we all experience and relax into that healthy commitment, to precisely that extent the whole world becomes a better home for all! In the wonderful words of E.E. Cummings – “your homecoming will be my homecoming.”
Happy New Year from all of us here at “TLC”!