May 17, 2003

• I’ve been reading a book called T’ai Chi Classics, translated and with commentary by Waysun Liao.
  
  I found it this way:
  
  I went for that massage a few days ago, and had what’s called a ‘release.’ A big one. Like, a tremendous one. As in, I laid there on the massage table weeping for a while.
  
  I ‘blogged about another release I’d had, but this was different.
  
  The newagers say that the body stores grief and other ‘negativity’ in the form of, say, poor posture or chronic disease. I don’t buy into that. My belief is that releasing these points of tension creates a sensation for which the mind must somehow create a meaning, and most mind/bodies seem willing to connect the release of tension with grief or sadness or old memories, or ecstatic bliss. Emotional states seem to be a sort of middle-state between sensation and understanding, a place where bodily sensation can be buffered while the mind figures out what it all means.
  
  Anyway. My friend the massage therapist (in training), by doing her work, showed me where my nerves go, what muscles are connected where, and how they all interrelate, within the span of an hour. I felt her getting closer and closer to pin-pointing the Real Deal Place, the lint on the velvet on the throne on the dais in the great hall in the castle of the city that is the Seat Of My Abdominal Problems. A shooting ecstatic pain. I told her while I was trying to breathe deeply and keep from twitching, “That is a singularly unique sensation.”
  
  Then she moved on to the lower back, the muscle groups that connect the floating ribs to the pelvis, and the pelvis to the thigh bone. I felt something white hot move from below my kidney to the tips of my toes, and all I could do was cry. Her fingers were the bottle opener prying the cap off a bottle of ecstatic sadness. Perhaps Jesus wept because being crucified pulled a muscle into alignment.
  
  The feeling passed, and I could feel the blood flowing through my side. I could feel the muscles rubbing against each other. I could breathe deeply in a way I haven’t been able to for a while.
  
  Later, I went to get some dinner at a restaurant next to a bookstore. Waiting for the food in my belly to digest, and being able to feel what was going on therein for the first time in quite a while, I went into the bookstore. I wandered aimlessly, and ended up looking at the spine of ‘T’ai Chi Classics.’
  
  I’d done a little reading about t’ai chi in the past, as breathing exercises and internal martial art, more than dance steps. I sat in a chair and read a chapter on a whim, because it explains a lot about the relationship between chi and jing, which I’d never really understood. I think I get it now, and it was especially easy to understand after the bodywork.
  

  • 5:12 am
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