Human beings are social creatures. We need community to live, heal and thrive. We need an honoring of our abilities and limits within a mutually supportive system of relationships – human and more than human – that ensures all needs are met: shelter, food, water, rest, safety, comfort, love. Learning. Dreaming. Creating.

Our basic human needs include deep, restorative rest, and comforting touch, which seem to grow more rare as the shape and speed of our lives is increasingly dictated by algorithm. In addition to the age-old, soul-forging trials of our everyday lives – love, loss, struggle – we now all contend with a colonized world founded on insatiable greed, enslavement and genocide. We have been violently separated from ancient localized knowledge and practices that once kept us tied to the land from which our life force springs. Separated from the land itself by clearcut expanses of flat grey concrete. Separated even from meaningful relationships with other humans, as interaction becomes more transactional and less trusting. Our humanity is daily debated by those in power. Our natural ways of being and relating are vilified. A high toll is demanded at every juncture of connection. 

This alienation from the earth, from community, from each other, reaches inside us and attempts to alienate us from our own bodies. It fills our glands and veins with microplastics and heavy metals, and increases our risk of so many uneases. Loneliness showing up as a chronically tight chest, grief as retained water, rage as indigestion, anxiety as high blood pressure. 

Many of our bodily ills are reflections of the disharmonies in our manufactured world. We feel the imposed dysregulation of our lifeways within us physically as myriad pains and dysfunctions. But mother nature, foreseeing our need, gave us an indispensable gift: as social animals, we evolved with the ability to co-regulate via the parasympathetic nervous system. A safe, intentional, comforting touch from a caring soul can instantly activate this powerful healing magic inherent within our bodies. 

In this state of deep rest, the physical and energetic channels open, and life force flows freely, restoring systems to balance. Airways dilate and breathing becomes deeper. The heart rate is slow and steady. Blood becomes more oxygenated and flows through dilated vessels, delivering life to deeper cells and tissues. Cellular waste is filtered out. Digestion is supported. Muscles melt. The whole body breathes deeply. The mind clears and opens. The pupils constrict, bringing focus to here and now. Challenges seem smaller. The connection to a guiding, sustaining, unseen force is physically verified in the body. There is a feeling of being held and nourished, of belonging. A creative spark ignites. 

This is the soul coming home to the body. 

This is the power of massage.