The other day I was working on a women giving her her normal regular scheduled massage and her tension in her neck and shoulders was so tense I had to wonder what had just happened. I continued to work on her as she has been a client for a few months now and thought, this is unreasonably tight. She was very quite this visit, as there is usually a happy, bouncy demeanor about her. Then, as I got to her mid to upper back she said, I think I am going to cry. I realized I was right on the back of her heart area. I said, please do lets let this all go. She said she had just broken up with a long time friend and was having a hard time dealing with it. I talked to her about how out bodies hold onto certain emotions and if we don’t let them go we can carry them around with us and leave us an uncomfortable burden, that will turn and develop into pains, or problems in our bodies. We store emotion in our muscles. Have you heard of the statement “muscles have memory” well this also goes for emotional memory too.
This sends me back to a story I heard in massage school over 16 years ago, back in Denver, Colorado. In our training we had to “guess” what aliments our clients had from taking a client in take form and working on them hands-on and hopefully come to a conclusion. My anatomy teacher told us a story about man when he was in school when he had to do this same thing. It went like this….A man was in a taxi with his girlfriend heading to the airport, she was heading home back to San Francisco as he was staying in Denver…they had a long distance relationship. During the taxi drive the man proposed to his girlfriend as he just couldn’t bear to see her go again and wanted to get married and be with each other everyday. She said Yes!! With great love and excitement they hugged and were excited to start planning a wedding. She however, still left the taxi and got out at the airport to head back to San Fran. As the man said goodbye he felt extremely sad for saying goodbye again, but so happy to be spending the rest of his life with her. An hour went by and the man decided to take the taxi for a long ride home, all around the city and he saw things in a different light from his excitement of being engaged. Then over the radio a news report came on saying the Denver airport will be closed due to a plane that had run off the runway during take-off because of something had exploded in the plane. The plane was reported to be going to San Francisco. He mans heart dropped…He thought, could this be the same plane his now fiancé was on. The radio came back on and stated the planes flight number and to his dismay it was her flight. The man started crying hoping everything was ok, and thought could he had just lost his future wife? He called her cell hoping she would pick up…..and she did. She actually did not get on the plane! the Man now was jumping for joy thinking he was so lucky, but how and why did she not get on the plane? What caused her to miss her flight? They were at the airport in plenty of time. Then her voiced changed over the phone and got very soft, she said she was too chicken to tell him in the taxi, but she doesn’t want to get married, and skipped her flight to turn back around and tell him that she actually had only wanted to break up. She saw his face when he asked her to marry him and didn’t know what to do as in her mind she was about to tell him she wanted to go back to San Francisco and never see him again. Now, this man has gone from super happy from thinking he was getting engaged, to super sad when he thought the plane exploded, then super happy again finding out she was alive, to now extremely low and sad thinking she doesn’t want to be with him….he asked the taxi driver to pull over as he was sobbing and sobbing in the back seat. The radio changed to music and a Beatles song came on which made him even sadder because it was “their song” he got out of the taxi to grab a pretzel from a street vender, and as he got out he didn’t see the broken glass on the ground because his eyes were too blurry from his tears, he cut his foot from the broken glass as it went straight through his flip-flops….he now is limping on his right leg and is exhaustedly saddened and just wants to go home.
This man came to the clinic 10 years later to get a massage and said every once in a while he gets a pain in his foot and gets a limp…that he could’t figure out why….that Beatles song came on that was “their” song in the practitioners room and he said all the sudden his foot hurt and got extremely sad…as my anatomy teacher continued to work they discovered together the root of what happened and they massaged his foot at the site of the glass injury, and up his leg that made him limp. he realized as he worked and worked on his leg a flood of tears came over him, and he began to let go of the emotion he was bottling up for so many years. That song triggered him every time without him even knowing it…just because of the turn of events happened 10 years before. He is now free of his foot pain and doesn’t limp anymore and when “their” song comes on the radio he is no more saddened or feel a feeling of despair.
This is how our muscles hold on to emotion, something our brain can block out or forget, but everything we do throughout our lives gets stored in our bodies. We can release these old emotions, old patterns just from getting a regular massage, some are stored a little deeper in muscles as some get released right when you touch them. As for my client the other day, her coming to see me right when she had a break-up was the best thing she could do for her body, as we were re-programing her body to let go and not hold onto any sad feelings to get stored in the muscles.
Nurture your Jewel, your being, inside as well as out. Take care of you, as we only get one of these bodies to play with in our lifetime, and isn’t it better to let go of old pain, patterns, and live our fullest and happiest life possible. Schedule your massage today!!!
