“A gifted bodyworker I’d met before, and turned to once after a challenging experience I’d had at an edgy party.
Her desire for the afternoon was to perform a dance as tribute to her friend’s newly released song, Devastatious, film it, and send it to the musician, Adey Bell, in gratitude for her work.
Totally up for being a spectator, I nestled myself into a red aerial swing and watched this human turn into a jaguar-snake right before my eyes. Her limbs seemed to uncurl from their joints, her back bending in directions I’ve never seen a back go. Her eyes locking in contact with the camera lens like a dominant seductress. She turned into the song.
It was a synesthesia moment: I was watching music.
When she finally came to a breathy end, she bowed deeply in reverence to the camera, the musician, the song, the moment, and thanked Adey for her gift to the world.
Seeing this moving expression brought one teeeeeny tiny little tear to the corner of my eye.
Which, if you know me, is huge.
I’ll watch episodes of This Is Us with my roommate Troy…him bawling through it while I sit there dry-eyed wondering if I’m a sociopath.
Crying is not any part of my day to day.
But the seal had broken, and that one tear laid the groundwork for what would soon be a flood of them.
After her performance, Michael and Raz asked if they could do some bodywork on me. Grateful for the offer, I said yes as I’d just done a front flip off a horse hours earlier and landed square on my back.
They pulled me into this amoebic tangle of limbs, using the long lines of their thighs to steamroll my IT band as they octopussed up my body and down the other side.
Several minutes later, I was face down on the futon, each of them running a giant buffer over my body. Yes, like a car buffer. They had wide, flat discs attached to them, covered in soft material. But the high intensity vibration ran through my fascia. I felt it in my teeth and bones.
After about 30 minutes of generous buffing, stretching, rolling, and massaging, we all collapsed into a heap of human meatsack, indeterminable arms and legs and sighs.
I rolled to my side and looked up at Raz the elf goddess and felt the vulnerability well up in my voice as I asked, “what do you do when you have a cry but you can’t cry it out?”
She started with the stock answer we’re all used to:
“I listen to a sad song or watch something sad.”
But what she said next was new to me.
“I also make sure I have the space on either side for the experience. I need to know that I have enough time beforehand to get into the feeling. And then I need to know that I have nothing planned for a while after it so that I can integrate.”
Knowing that I had several hours left on this date, I felt the spaciousness hang in the damp corners of my eyes.
“Well,” I thought, “here goes nothing.”
And I gave my sorrow over to the moment, knowing that there are few people in the world more equipped to witness the fountain of tears from a near stranger.
Hands never leaving my back or my side, I clenched my eyes shut and burrowed myself into the darkness.
”
~ Molly Pearson
full text at Medium