My body is honest.
I went for that massage today from the guy I went to high school with. He left the room when I undressed and got under two white sheets on his massage table. When he got back, there was a lot of chuckling and shifting as he tried to make my position just so without exposing me. I was, at first, relaxed. But, when he started, I began to get anxious.
I’m never totally sure of my level of comfort with my body. Sometimes, I’m willing to show it all, run around naked, the whole nine yards. Others, I just sit there picking the poor thing apart and deeming it unworthy of public consumption.
So, today, I started to apologize for it. For the little bit of peach fuzz on the back of my thighs, for the callouses on the bottoms of my feet from two months in the third world, for this kink and that crack. And, while he assured me that my body was perfectly acceptable and fit and that he had massaged people weighing over 250 pounds so I was just fine, I just could not help but feel reluctant about sharing my body like this in the first place.
But my body had no reluctance about me. He repeated back to me the things that it was telling him. That I liked to run. That I kept my stress between my shoulder-blades. That I sometimes got lazy and didn’t stretch after exercise. It was unapologetic, uncensored. It told the good and the bad, sang praises of me despite all the times I had put it down. He was just the messenger. My body was talking to me. And it was being so terribly, beautifully honest.
At one point, I was on my stomach and he pulled my leg back. He was surprised to see when my heel touched the back of my head. It was as if my body were saying, “now look what I can do.” And when he had to push the muscles around my shoulder-blade around for how tense I’d allowed them to get, it was as if my body were urging, “now look what you can do.”
My body is honest. It’s been trying to talk to me. I’ve been too busy to hear it, but I think it’s about time that I start listening.
And maybe being honest with it, too.
