How many times does bodywork give rise to spiritual or religious experiences?
About this level of life, the philosopher Wittgenstein said, “Whereof one can not speak, thereupon we must be silent.”
Well, in the silence of bodywork, something deeper sometimes “speaks”.
Call it what you will – soul, energy, bliss, spirit, God, just the right combination of neuropeptides and electrical flows – there is no doubt in my mind that what we sometimes inadvertently trigger in the client is possibly a life-changing contact with a deeper and re-inspiring level of life.
What is more important than the education and evocation of the spirit?
Yet, because the minute we try to speak of it, confusions start to juggle all around it, our education and our society as a whole leaves education of the spirit to chance or to the province of religion.
Still this underground education proceeds – in every massage that suddenly touches the person at their very deepest level and evokes that primal feeling of energy, of wonder, of bliss. In every yoga class that leaves your ego behind and just leaves you shimmering.
Wittgenstein was right; it is so beyond what language can fully capture. It is pure experience and one that lives deeper than words.
Wittgenstein was wrong. Whereof we cannot speak, we must try to speak. For sharing and developing the communication about the spirit, may indeed be the most fruitful and necessary way to meet the challenges facing us each as individuals and as a society.
We don’t need to speak just in words. The most important communications in life are non-verbal in any case (it’s said as much as 93% of communication is non-verbal).
Our hands speak volumes and in these volumes the spirit has its own modes of communication, its own voice, its own extraordinarily articulate silence. I think we can no longer afford not to listen. We can no longer afford not to speak.