This weekend we began a new class who will be here each Saturday all day 8:00am-5:45pm for a year. On the one hand this is a tremendous sacrifice – but we remember that means “making sacred”. So it’s, on the other hand, a “SERIES OF SACRED SATURDAYS”.
And as I was welcoming them this first morning, I recalled rather suddenly how I had spent four years of Saturdays in high school, going to the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, every Saturday during high school. It was heaven. Playing music together, learning new things on our instruments, getting in touch with the deep roots of our humanity as one finds them through folk musics of the world. It was like 4 years of music camp…heaven.
So is this one year of massage school – a camp, a series of heavenly experiences, a sacrifice, a series of sacred Saturdays. Aldous Huxley inspired the early days of Esalen talking about the “non-verbal humanities.” Indeed what we learn from massage school at its best is the enormous missing piece of our education. What was left out? – emotions, body, and the relationship of these with the mind and the spirit.
So these people who all WANT to be in class get to study the very roots of their being; get to experience this in an embodied way through touch, not just academically or abstractly. They achieve a qualitatively new level of knowledge of self, knowledge of others. With eyes wide open how could one not proceed to become the hero of his or her own life? I look forward to the personal and professional triumph of each one of these fascinating people.
Miss out on the Saturday schedule? We still many options for class schedules – CLICK HERE to see our upcoming class schedules!