UpClose & Personal - Steve Capellini

Recently, I've been thinking that life has a strange way of tantalizing us through all of its various stages, as if the power of biology and the continuity of the race were programmed into some of our thought processes. Life goads our bodies on to each new stage, as if there really were someplace to go, taking us along for the ride with it. Have you considered recently the way you feel about the particular stage you're in right now? Are there recurring thought patterns that define you to yourself concerning how far along you are on the path of your own life?

Following these stages in my own existence, I've come to see and appreciate a certain ironic quality to the steps life takes us through, and I believe that they may help elucidate the stages of your massage career for you, because if you are a dedicated therapist or you're thinking about becoming a dedicated therapist, there's no way you can avoid experiencing life's varied stages through the vehicle of your massage therapist-ness.

So, here are the stages, and at the end I've added some ways you can look at this as it applies particularly to therapists. If it at all helps you, please let me know.

THE STAGES

Stage One: LIFE EMBRACES YOU COMPLETELY, BUT YOU DON'T KNOW IT. You're a baby and a young child. There's really nothing in any given moment that you want because if you want something you scream and scream until you get it. And in the screaming is a certain satisfaction. You can see it in their eyes.

This is a great stage. It lasts for several years, and I'm not knocking it, but the awful catch here is (and this is something we discount all too easily for some reason) babies and young children hardly remember anything about this idyllic phase. In fact, for many of us, some of the first and sharpest memories alive in our psyches are the ones that tore into our blissful unconsciousness like the searing slash of a saber into flesh. The steel of the world colliding with our soft selves.

After that, you gradually enter...

Stage Two: LIFE SEEMS LIKE IT HASN'T FULLY STARTED YET. This is the stage encompassing the pre-teen, teen, and early adult years when you're constantly waiting for life to happen. You spend many frenzied hours doing things, going places, accomplishing goals, but then when you're alone in your bed at night (or alone the next morning), you think to yourself that there must be something MORE, that the real life that you're meant to be living is just around the corner, and if you could just speed up a little and get to it you would be much better off than you are today.

Poor frantic beautiful young person. You have not yet reached...

Stage Three: LIFE HAS STARTED BUT NOW YOU'RE TOO BUSY TO ENJOY IT. When you finally do achieve that elusive something you've worked toward all along, right about the time when other people start to look at you and you recognize that friendly greedy gleam as their eyes try to suck something out of you and bring it into them (you don't have to worry because this is impossible but it feels kind of weird), you suddenly understand, as Jack Nicholson did in the movie, that perhaps this is "as good as it gets." The rest of this stage is about maintaining a sense of calm amidst the overwhelm as you head into...

Stage Four: LIFE STARTS TO LOOK MORE BEHIND THAN IN FRONT OF YOU. This is a great stage to freak out in. It's when men with balding pates buy Boxster automobiles the shade their canaries should be. It's when women trek the Himalayas. Hey, we can afford it now; we've worked hard all our lives to get where we are gosh darn it, and so on. If we don't watch out, in this stage we might even "retire" and chalk our lives up to one big misunderstood adventure. With ironic smiles, we head for the links, seeking to become one with nature and our own bodies like we were back as children before all of this started.

So, in light of this segmented summary of human existence, do you see how it might apply to your life as a therapist? In stage one as a therapist, nothing can hurt you, and everything is great. Your plans for the future are non-crushable. Perhaps you're still in school. Then in stage two you're out in the work world for a while, and you can't wait for your career to get started after everyone has recognized you for all your talent and hard work. When you finally get recognized and end up in stage three, you're so busy you can't sit back and enjoy it as much as you could have if you'd had it when you were in stage two. Then, when you become wise enough to slow down and smell the roses and yet still keep working enough to sustain the recognition and fulfillment you've ached for since leaving the bliss of early childhood, it's time to start looking for your first Medicare check, and we scream out at the unfairness of it all.

What can we do about this, you ask me? In my opinion (at this stage), I'd have to say there's only one valuable answer to that question, and it is this: Delve fully into the stage of your massage career you are in right now and embrace it completely, including all of the pain, every last ounce of the grief and frustration and not-enough-ness that you carry with you as the "other," as "something else," as a part extraneous to the real you. Because only in living as the total you can you live totally fulfilled. Ironic as it may seem, you must embrace and go through hell to know heaven.

Or, as the wise martial artist Grand Master Pan Qing Fu said in the book, Iron & Silk, "You've got to know bitter in order to appreciate sweet."

So, the best advice I can give today is to read Iron & Silk, by Mark Salzman. And then read David Whyte's book, The Heart Aroused. It's about work in corporate America, but in a sense all work is corporate work because work is what can, at times, take us away from who we think we are. What we end up doing for a living (yes, even bodywork) can take us away from our center, unless we consciously reconnect to that center, then move forward, accepting all aspects of the stage we are in, turning nothing away, bravely embracing our total incomplete selves.

Good luck to you.

Steve

www.royaltreatment.com

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