There was wellness before there was a wellness industry.
Before watches counted our steps. Before supplements arrived in monthly subscriptions. Before sleep scores, cold plunges, red-light panels and morning routines became things to optimize.
People walked. They rested. They gathered plants. They prepared food. They sat together. They bathed. They prayed. They tended to women after birth. And when someone's body hurt, another person put their hands on them.
Massage belongs to this much older idea of wellness.
The instinct to touch
When something hurts, we reach for it.
A hand goes to an aching neck. We rub a sore knee. We hold our belly when it cramps. A parent instinctively places a hand on a child's back. Someone grieving is held.
Long before we understood fascia, mechanoreceptors, circulation or the nervous system, human beings understood something about touch.
It changes how we feel.
Today we have language that helps explain some of what happens during massage. We know that the skin is a sensory organ continually communicating with the nervous system. We understand muscles, connective tissue, circulation and pain with far greater sophistication than our ancestors could have imagined.
That knowledge matters.
But it doesn't make the older knowledge irrelevant.
Sometimes science gives us language for something humans already knew through experience.
Touch matters.
The body is not a project
Modern wellness can make the body feel like an endless improvement project.
There is always another number to watch, food to eliminate, supplement to add, exercise to perform or habit to perfect.
Even rest can become something we're expected to do correctly.
Massage asks something very different of us.
For an hour, there is nothing to accomplish.
You don't have to stretch farther. Lift heavier. Breathe better. Improve your posture. Reach a goal.
You lie down.
Someone else does the work.
That experience of receiving can be surprisingly unfamiliar, particularly for women who have spent much of their lives being capable.
Women carry children and groceries and careers and households. We remember appointments. We prepare meals. We tend to other bodies. We keep moving through menstrual cycles, pregnancies, postpartum years, perimenopause, menopause, injuries, grief, aging and ordinary exhaustion.
We become remarkably good at carrying on.
Sometimes wellness is another thing we're carrying.
Massage doesn't have to be.
Women's bodies have always been tended
My work has increasingly brought me toward traditional approaches to women's bodies.
Mayan abdominal massage. Sobada. Traditional healing practices. Plant medicine. Spiritual bathing. The ways women have tended to one another through pregnancy, birth, loss, illness and change.
These traditions aren't interchangeable, and they shouldn't be flattened into one romantic idea of “ancient wisdom.”
They come from particular people, places and ways of understanding the body.
But studying them has changed the way I think about massage.
They remind me that hands-on work doesn't always need to be organized around a problem.
A belly can be touched because the belly deserves attention.
A postpartum body can receive without being treated as something that needs to “bounce back.”
A woman moving through menopause doesn't need to be returned to the body she had at thirty.
A tired body doesn't necessarily need correcting.
Sometimes it needs tending.
Modern knowledge belongs here too
Choosing holistic approaches doesn't require rejecting modern medicine.
I don't believe those worlds need to be placed in opposition.
There are things I want modern medicine to do extraordinarily well. I want imaging when imaging is needed. I want physicians who recognize disease. I want surgery when surgery is necessary. I want medication when medication is the appropriate tool.
And I also believe there is a vast territory of being human that doesn't begin or end in a medical office.
How comfortable do you feel in your body?
How much do you move?
How deeply do you breathe?
When was the last time someone touched you without wanting anything from you?
Do you feel rested?
Do you feel connected to your belly?
Do you feel as though your body belongs to you?
These aren't replacements for medical questions.
They are different questions.
There should be room for both.
The nervous system notices
One of my favorite moments during massage is not dramatic at all.
It is the exhale.
Sometimes it happens five minutes into the session. Sometimes twenty.
The breathing changes.
The jaw lets go.
The shoulders become heavier in my hands.
The belly softens.
A client who was talking suddenly becomes quiet.
I don't need to manufacture that moment.
In fact, trying too hard would probably interfere with it.
The body has simply received enough information to do something different.
We often call that relaxation as though relaxation were the least interesting thing massage can accomplish.
I think it is one of the most interesting.
A body that has been bracing gets to experience not bracing.
A person accustomed to producing gets to receive.
A nervous system surrounded by input gets rhythm, warmth, pressure and repetition instead.
Nothing spectacular has to happen.
The body settles.
That is enough.
Massage does not need to justify itself by becoming medicine
Massage therapy has worked hard to be taken seriously.
Understandably so.
We study anatomy and physiology. We learn pathology, contraindications and clinical reasoning. We develop sophisticated techniques. We work alongside physical therapists, physicians, chiropractors, doulas and other health professionals.
All of that has strengthened the profession.
But sometimes I wonder whether, in proving that massage is legitimate, we have become reluctant to say something much simpler:
It feels good to be touched well.
That has value.
Relief has value.
Pleasure has value.
Feeling more comfortable inside your own body has value.
Walking out of a room with your shoulders lower and your breathing deeper has value.
Not everything meaningful needs to become a treatment.
An older kind of wellness
The older I become, the less interested I am in wellness as optimization.
I am much more interested in relationship.
Relationship with movement.
With food.
With rest.
With the natural world.
With other people.
And especially with the body we are actually living in—not the one we had twenty years ago, not the one we think we should have, and not the one someone is trying to sell us.
Massage fits beautifully into that understanding.
It is remarkably simple.
A room.
A table.
Warmth.
Time.
Two hands paying attention.
And a body allowed, for a little while, to receive.
Maybe that is why massage has survived every wellness trend we've invented.
We keep discovering new ways to measure the human body.
But sometimes the body still wants the oldest thing in the world:
to be touched, tended and allowed to rest.
