Thai Massage and Radical Self-Love

I just had a Thai massage after 2 months, and to be honest I’ll be surprised if I don’t have bruises all over my body tomorrow. It was extremely painful, which I was partially expecting considering the way I’ve been feeling this past week.

For the first time, I was actually freaked out by the size of the knots that I’ve been carrying around with me. One in particular, on the right side of my back, felt monstrous. I was literally gasping for breath as she pushed what felt like a golf ball up my spine and towards my shoulder. She took a break in the middle of working through that one and stood on my left glute for a bit, which somehow seemed to make moving the knot easier.

I’ve had several massages since I arrived here, in fact one of my earlier blog posts was about my first experience getting one. A lot of people I’ve talked to, even massage therapists, don’t like Thai massage–they think it’s too unnecessarily painful. I’m in a different school of thought: that they’re supposed to hurt, much like emotional pain, because once its felt and worked through it can be released.

The wild thing is how our bodies can adapt to holding onto this pain by numbing out, and then we don’t realize how much we’ve had pent up until we purge it. I’d rather be in severe pain for an hour and then be more spacious afterwards, because I know I’ll need to feel it all eventually…some way or another (then again, who knows how long these bruises will last?)

Emptying The Container

A teacher of mine said to me this week that we as human beings are a whole container. If we are carrying around our darkest emotions, there is less room for the light. So feeling the pain, which then allows us to release it from our vessel, is necessary in making room for more of what we truly are, our own essence.

That was really validating to hear, because this week for me has been a struggle. Normally, I’m quite good at feeling hard emotions with the knowledge that they’re teaching me something. But this week, the emotions I had to feel involved a whole lot of hopelessness, and even negative self talk.

Everyone is going through some variation of this right now. How can we not? Collectively, we’re purging centuries of pain and oppression that we’ve integrated so much into our structures that we’ve become numb to them. But like the enormous knot that I was carrying around in my back, it doesn’t mean they’re not there.

It was strange to have three or four full days of complete despair, and then be aware of the fact that I was moving out of it; like I was exiting a portal. I was looking around at the same stuff but it was so different than how I had been experiencing it eight hours earlier.

Radical Self Love

We’re all trying to love ourselves. We get engaged in activities that will help us get closer to that: a meditation practice, gardening, running, whatever it may be. But then sometimes we become rigid with it. We don’t want to address the underlying pain we’ve got, so we end up using these activities as punishment to ourselves. “I didn’t run today so there’s something wrong with me.” We get into a space of forcing and shaming, compounding the pain we so desperately want to address.

Radical self love is, of course, a lifelong practice.

Where I’m at now in my own journey, versus where I was this past September is astronomical. I’ve moved through so much, and my entire experience living abroad has been a process of feeling and releasing.

I’ve needed to make decisions that were the best thing for me, but that caused a lot of backlash and criticism to torpedo directly at me in the form of other’s opinions. In the past, I would have held onto these things, integrated them, but now I can just let them drift by basically unnoticed.

It was work to get to this place, but work that I barely noticed I was doing. I was just feeling things as they came and learning how to better support myself through the maze.

The gist of what I’m saying is that sometimes love and light theory doesn’t work. I’ve been humbled by what I felt this week. I admit to the fact that I’ve had loved ones tell me they were too depressed to move, and my naive response might have been: “just do [insert self-care practice]”. But it took me becoming too depressed to move to understand that, yeah, sometimes that’s a real thing.

I could end this post by saying: go easy on yourself. (Of course I always recommend that.) But, instead, I’ll just say that maybe there’s not much more you have to do in your journey to self love right now than just feel whatever you’re feeling. Forgive yourself if you cry in public because the Thai Post Office wants to charge you 1000 baht to mail an international letter (not that I’m speaking from experience or anything). Let yourself lay in bed all day if you have to. You’ll start to see that these things pass, while you remain: whether you discover this through mindfulness meditation or just chillin’ on the couch and feeling like crap.

Being alive during this time in history includes lots of pain, but there’s a reason you’re here now. And if you have the means to have a little Thai lady walk on your back, I would say go for it; it’s a great reminder that everything we hold onto can always be released.