Why Healing Touch is Better than a Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Why Healing Touch is Better Than a Grilled Cheese Sandwich

When I tell someone I have a healing touch practitioner, I still have the impulse to apologize — to feel some misplaced, new age shame for saying my magnetic energy fields need realignment, or even to speak of having them at all.

It’s silly. You’d think that after 30-odd years at the spiritual salad bar — self-help books, yoga, rosaries, meditation and finally the path of sobriety — that I’d just come out with whatever I’m doing now to keep myself in check with no concern about the possible woo-woo factor. I send my dog to day care, for God’s sake. What kind of shame about my life choices can I possibly have left?

A little, it’s true. Deep inside of this post-millennial searcher is the voice of the Greatest Generation that helped to raise me, that says — with love — that a grilled cheese sandwich, a beer and maybe a movie will fix what ails me, so stop my bitching. But that’s been proven disastrously wrong. So I’ve learned that when the magnetic energy field or whatever I call it today is broken, I’d best try to fix it by whatever means necessary.

I feel like I do at the end of savasana in yoga — the unwillingness to roll over and break the spell.

Thus I found myself on my friend Margaret’s massage therapy table, as her newest healing touch client. She told me she could investigate my chakras with a body scan, then use healing touch to fix me.

Those were not her exact words, to be clear, but I always hear the word “fix” when I’m edgy and winter weary, writer’s blocked and burnt out. So when she told me she needed clients for her required certification hours and it was only $40 an hour, I was on board. Even if it turned out to be a weird crock, I doubted it could hurt me.

Margaret’s massage room is so cozy and warm. There are inspirational quotes on the walls but not goofy ones — wise words from smart people like Gandhi who know from good energy. The table and the blanket are heated, and Margaret’s very presence is calming, as it has been since I met her on a job 15 years ago. She believes in things like the body-mind connection and wellness restoration, but she is funny and endlessly patient with me babbling on and on, which I seem to do automatically when I lie on her table.

This experience was different from massage; she doesn’t go at pain points directly, hands-on. She doesn’t stretch out my hamstrings and work out the laptop-crunched nightmare of my neck. This time she has a string of crystals which she dangles over my body from feet to head, focusing on chakras that allegedly control various functions of body and mind. She listens in closely for…well, I have no idea what.

I roll with it. I listen to the music. I try to check out. I get quiet. This might be a little weird, but I don’t have any other solutions today, and lying still in the presence of a comforting figure who wants me to feel better is way better than knocking around in the world with a head full of mental chatter.

She puts the crystal down and moves on to hovering her hands over the chakras, I guess. Somewhere between my sacrum and my solar plexus, I feel something. I can’t remember what she said about that part, but it’s clearly a little kicked up. I have feelings there, possibly related to solar plexian thoughts. Her hands hover over what is probably the worry center, or the “how in the hell did I end up with six freelance jobs why is my COFFEE COLD AGAIN?” center.

I’m feeling this connection. I start to think there may be something to this. She moves her hands up over my heart, throat and brow — the seat of third eye Intuition. I sense that thing someone told me yesterday wasn’t true. I also remember I need to pick up milk on the way home. I may in fact be a medium, although I acknowledge this may be grandiose thinking.

When she makes it to the crown of my head, she hangs out there for a couple minutes, hands on my temples, and I hope by this point that she will never stop. I feel like I do at the end of savasana in yoga — the unwillingness to roll over and break the spell.

There is also the distasteful matter of getting up from a heated table and going back out into the cold. We chat for a little while about my results while I lie there. She confirms that my stomach and solar plexus have it going on right now, the seat of personal power, intimacy, purpose, and goals, among many other heavy-ish things. This is the worry spot; this is the place to focus on in meditation, to send better energy to, to heal.

The good news, she says, is that the crown of my head is free and clear. I’m higher powered, which sounds as stupid as it does true and comforting. The answers are there, if I can hang out in ambiguity for a while, or forever, or until the next big thing becomes clear, whichever.

Meanwhile I should probably just come back next week.

Before I go back out into winter, I tell Margaret that I love her and I’m grateful and I mean it. I don’t know if the magic is in the specifics of chakra alignment, or just in the connection with a trusted human being whom I believe is a healer of the highest order. It’s a privilege I get for 40 bucks and a good personal connection. When it was over, I may not have gotten any direct line of divine communication that I can prove, but there’s a power in the laying of hands from a person whose main interest is my innate well-being, disconnected to domestic or romantic partnership — and it’s real.

It’s good energy, infinitely better than what I can generate on my own, in my solar plexus or anywhere else. And there is everything right with that.

Next for X, sponsored by #disruptaging

(Photo: Stocksy)

Originally published March 10, 2015

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4 Responses

  1. Editor’s Note: Sun Salutation | Tue Night

    […] Why Healing Touch is Better Than a Grilled Cheese Sandwich […]

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  2. jana

    Magic, I tell ya.

    Reply
  3. Adrianna Dufay
    Adrianna

    Ahhh, this brings me back to my days doing Alexander — a very light touch, meditative kind of chiropracty. Being in a serene environment and being touched by an empathic adult did wonders for me.

    Reply

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