Full Body Cast – 20 Massages in 2 Months (Massage #18 continued)

Muscles on the right side of my neck were clenched painfully as I arrived for Massage #18 with Karen Joy.  Kundalini, the energy that drives spiritual change, has done more during this massage marathon than bring hours of muteness and right-handed, backward writing.  In microcosm to events in the Middle East, kundalini is facilitating a personal revolution within my own energy field, a process of change in which the controlling tendencies of ego - symbolized by my inner attorney - are being asked step aside and allow for something new.

As the world watches uprisings in the Middle East, many hope for the best, for a more peaceful revolution.  As I watch Mubarak and Gadhafi, who also seem to symbolize the ego and the brutality too often inflicted when selfish blindness rules, I wonder how these revolutions, the inner and the outer, will resolve.

In reviewing events leading up to Massage #18, it is as if the moment - as I jammed to Hendrix’ “If 6 was 9” and my neck froze up - was, in metaphor, the moment when Mubarak, in the face of angry throngs, refused to resign, or the moment when Gadhafi declared he would rather die a martyr than relinquish control.  

The significance of these moments of defiance is that, as within me, change in the Middle East is inevitable.  In these confrontations between those needing change and those resisting it, time stops, and the tension between opposing forces creates a pause in which all things become possible, all things except returning to the old way.  At these moments the question is not will change come, but can injury and violence be avoided in the process?

In microcosm to events in the Middle East, I felt myself perched on a precipice of change, all things hanging in the balance, as I arrived for Massage #18.  Prior to my neck seizing up I had been asking myself what - if this personal transformation is indeed is a product of the same flow of energies creating social upheaval in the Middle East – am I to expect, when my inner-attorney refuses to step down as he is in fact seeming to do?  And how any internal violence, as manifest in unexpected neck pain, be managed and its destructive potential reduced?

(Here I want to share that in the course of this massage marathon, though I have not mentioned it until now, there were a few days when, after being released to the float dead on the Ganges in Massage #6, my inner-attorney seemed transformed.  He had gotten rid of the brown suit and the sweaty, overwrought demeanor. Instead, he was humble, dressed in the robes of a priest, ready to have an honest conversation about who he had been and what now was required of him.  However, a few weeks later he returned argumentative and domineering in the QL muscles and I have not yet again seen him as the priest.) 

The truth is, I am hoping for a more peaceful revolution, for myself and any peoples who stand up and request change for the better.  Another truth is, I need my inner-attorney with me and I need him healthy and life-loving. To exile or execute him - rather than heal and integrate him into my personality - is to split and fragment the self and therefore to do violence to the self, an act which ultimately diminishes personal and spiritual power and potential. How is it, then, that I am to move forward without hurting myself, given that change is inevitable, he is apparently unwilling to reform and everything hangs in the balance?

While questions of war and violence are complex and have no easy answer, my immediate solution to the question of how to (1) achieve peaceful, non-violent change within the microcosm of me, and (2) get my neck back in working order is massage, energy work, meditation and reflection. 

During Massage #18 Karen Joy worked my neck muscles.  At first this was painful and then the muscles began to relax and the pain to decrease.  As Karen worked, I noticed two changes in the symbolism of energy on the left and right, or feminine and masculine, sides of the body.  On the left, instead of dancing quietly while shut away in her studio, my feminine was now up and shouting vociferously at my inner attorney.  She was shouting that she is not going to do this anymore and that change will come.  Within this her determination was unadulterated.  By contrast, on the right side of the body – although I am not certain how he got this way - my inner-attorney lay in a hospital bed, subdued and in a full body cast.

I left Massage #18 in with less pain, greater mobility in the neck, new insights and a deeper curiosity about how my inner-attorney, in his incapacitated state, will ultimately be persuaded to reform.