Healing in the most unlikely of places

Helloooo beautiful people,

My apologies, I have to keep this first intro short because Gmail will clip it if it’s too long! But ahHh I’m screaming, crying, throwing up that you’re here, officially. A huge part of me is nervous, another excited, but all of me is wildly grateful— to be received in this way. This month’s piece is titled Massages, just under 9 pages. (Promise they won’t all be this long.)

It’d mean the world to me if you shared my writing with people who you think might enjoy it. Screenshotting and tagging me on socials is more than welcome. (All the vibes to help me manifest my book deal! Eep!)

Thanks a ton for being here.
Here’s to being seen and safe,
Amy

Word count: 5,752

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Massages by Amy Lee

The first of every month, on a massage bed on Eagle Rock Boulevard with essential oils wafting in the air, beautiful Thai ladies perform surgery on me at Rejuvenate Organic Spa*.

Let me explain.

I was 28 when I went to journey with Mother Ayahuasca in the Amazonian rain forest. I had first heard about this medicine when I was 15 and knew I would eventually work up the courage and openness to experience the medicine. I viewed it as almost the Olympics of spiritual healing (in addition to extremely psychedelic symptoms, the physical ones include severe vomiting and diarrhea). And when I arrived at the facilities, it was truly like a spiritual bootcamp— the program required us to have colonics, eat a pretty clean diet, and also attend certain trainings and seminars on working with the medicine all prior to journeying with it as extensive preparation.

The shamans and licensed physicians explained that there were four types of main potential experiences. One of them was: surgery. Apparently, the medicine could take us on a journey where we felt like we were on an actual operating table in legitimate surgery. I did, in fact, experience this type of surgery on one of the four nights we took the medicine. As I was lying on my twin bed in a hut full of perhaps 50 other twin beds for participants going on their own individual journeys, in the late hours of the night, wrapped in a blanket burrito, it would have appeared to random passersby (thankfully, for us in the ceremony, there are none) that I was just peacefully sleeping. 

However, it was quite the opposite. In my mind, I quite literally heard machines buzzing and beeping and also physically felt the sensations of my body being incised open and my heart being sutured by a team of doctors who were hovering over me. I saw the white fluorescent light beams over me as they operated on me and could barely move, slipping in and out of consciousness throughout the whole surgery, high on type of morphine that was supposed to knock me out completely but failed to. I reached out slowly with great fatigue, as if I was dying, for the hand of my slumber neighbor, Osamu*, an incredibly kind and empathic 38-year-old Japanese man who looked like and had the spirit of someone who was in his early twenties, who reminded me of a long-lost brother, and was journeying on the same medicine just a foot away from me, on his own twin bed, just like my own. On the medicine, though, he was simply one of my visitors who awaited my safe recovery for me outside of the operation room.

“Osamu…” I croaked, as the surgery continued.

At 2 AM, as the lights turned on signaling that the ceremony was closed, Osamu and I would eagerly discuss what we experienced that night. I told him about my surgery, how he was my visitor, and in great contrast to the initial anxiety and apprehension that permeated the dense, humid air every night before our ceremony, we found ourselves to be miraculously and extremely chipper and full of energy, feeling completely renewed. 

Almost instantly, we felt the healing that Mother Ayahuasca would do for us every night. 
We couldn’t explain it.

A year before then, I decided to get a massage. 

As I had been on a healing journey for the past six years, I’d always been looking for new modalities to try, or in all honesty, just some more ways I could get myself to fucking relax. I’d been such a high-strung, anxious person always, and I acknowledged that the healing modalities didn’t all have to be so intense or epic as Ayahuasca— sometimes it was reiki or yoga or… a massage.

I had only gotten maybe three or four massages  in my entire life up until that point. Each time was a Christmas gift or some random Korean lady scrubbing me who happened to also throw in a massage at the Korean Spa that my mom dragged me along to. And every time, I don’t remember ever having a positive or fun or enjoyable, let alone, relaxing time (and to no fault of the massager, might I add). More than anything, massages felt uncomfortable and seemed to cause more anxiety. 

“What the fuck am I going to do for AN HOUR!”
“Wonder where she’ll massage next.”
“Just relax…”
“Ouch that hurts.”
“Just breathe…”
“Does she think my thighs are hugE- Ouch!!”
“Is she judging my arm tattoo…”
“When is this gonna be over?”
“Did I turn off my curling iron?”

Sometimes when the masseuses hit too close to my thigh, I would get nasty goosebumps and feel dirty all over again. While I wouldn’t necessarily get flashbacks of a particular incident that happened to me when I was around four, I would feel the same type of ickiness all over again on the massage bed. Because that’s what sexual assaults will do to its victims. Have you in some sick sort of loop about something that happened so long ago yet make it appear as if it’s happening over and over again in present day.

With my back straight and my anxiety teetering on the edge on that fateful Thursday afternoon, I walked into that Thai spa, rather courageously, and said, “one combo massage for one hour, please.” 

Here we go. We got this.

Almost instantly as I started undressing myself, the mill of intrusive thoughts began, but even so, I was able to make it through. As my first foray into the world of massages in my adulthood, (that is, of my own volition,) it was neither all that relaxing nor enjoyable. 4 out of 10. That’d be my rating. I was proud of myself, mostly, for just going through with it.

The first thing I noticed walking out of my first massage was the initial wave of guilt I felt. 

How dare youuuuu? It began.

For so long, I had been programmed by my parents, peers, and probably just society as a whole, that massages were indulgent and deliciously frivolous. A rare luxury only reserved for the rich, retired, or disgustingly privileged. How dare youuu? A daughter of once-impoverished Korean immigrants feel so deserving of a massage on a random Thursday afternoon! While your own mother slaves away at her corporate job? You should be ashamed of treating yourself so well! You didn’t earn this!

…

Ugh! How rude! I scoffed, immediately snapping back to the onslaught of guilt and shame that my Inner Critic tried to beat me down with. I’d been a slave to my Inner Critic’s abuse my entire life, but had been healed enough to: 

1) acknowledge its presence as not my own
2) and deem it futile, aka tell it to, respectfully, shut the fuck up.

Wiping away the crusty residual mascara that had transferred, I hopped into my car and slammed the door shut, reflecting on the internal dialogue that I’d just witnessed. In a defiant, almost pouty manner, I vowed to myself, in that moment, that I would routinely get a massage every month as a means to re-program my brain and shed myself of any ancestral and societal guilt that had been passed down to me. I decided— I do deserve a massage. I 100% do. Also that it would probably be physically healthy for me to address any “tech neck” symptoms too. 

I sat quietly in my car to process the grief that comes with accepting how accustomed you’ve become to mistreating yourself that you can’t even feel good about getting a damn massage. I hadn’t even enjoyed receiving the actual massage, which made me even sadder. It’s a certain type of unique anguish, almost like a black cloud of smoke that hovers and pollutes all the air you breathe unbeknownst to you, when you realize how difficult it is for you to simply receive. 

It would become my goal to not only feel comfortable receiving massages, but also feel absolutely totally and completely worthy and deserving of them afterwards. To relish in relaxing, to relish in treating myself well.

When I got home and told my therapist, she reveled in the victorious energy of me taking this small but mighty step. She of all people knows that healing doesn’t necessarily always come in moving these giant mountains altogether, but rather in the minutiae of our spoken or unspoken intentions to better our lives that are required in the process of that steep, arduous climb. She affirmed that the guilt and shame, while valid, was totally stupid and rude, too.

“Amy, I would absolutely recommend getting massages routinely, if you can afford it, of course, as a part of your treatment— the same way you do talk therapy, here,” Dr. Kim stated, blinking her two big eyes in that calm, matter-of-fact, psychologist type of way. “I think it’ll be really good for you.”

After I logged off our tele-therapy session, I immediately wrote it in down in my calendar and that next month, with diligence, I called again to book another one.

And in that first massage, the first of many surgeries to come had been completed.

The Thai ladies step on your back. And I didn’t know it for the majority of my life because I was so TRAUMATIZED!! and instead, took pride in having high pain tolerance (a symptom of trauma!!), but since pursuing recovery and being more attuned to my body, that pain tolerance has lowered super drastically, and as a result, I now know that I am and have probably always been very, VERY sensitive. To almost everything. Noises (I startle easily due to my hyperviligance), feelings and energy, all types of drugs (alcohol gives me hives and I instantly vomit after one shot), touch (when my hairstylist brushes my hair, my scalp is so sensitive, tears well up in my eyes from the pain)! So when these ladies started walking on my back, which is just customary to a Thai massage, it hurt so badly I wanted to scream.

But I never did. 

Eventually, I learned to exclude the walking portion out completely. But for the first few times, because I thought the pain was normal and that it was good for me, I wouldn’t speak up, despite the fact each massage starts off with a soft-spoken “Let me know if pressure is too much for you.”

There was a brief moment in time when I wanted to up the ante and luxuriate myself even more by going to a fancy popular boutique spa in Los Angeles. It was a real treat mainly because I truly loved the interior design. If it were on a real estate brochure, the description would probably read as: “Tulum-inspired living.” It was a much more trendy and hip place with their own signature fragrance that came sold in handmade candles, which I bought. The masseuses also were often young people of many different ethnicities, and I noticed that there, I was less afraid and more likely to speak up and tell them how painful my massage was. It was still difficult, of course, because as a victim of emotional abuse, I felt like I was burdening them with a complaint when they were just trying to do a great job. Though it seemed that getting massaged by, what felt like, a peer made it easier for me in communicating. Unfortunately, however, the quality of the massage always differed at this boutique spa, sometimes missing the mark, whereas the Thai ladies were always consistent, so I found myself abandoning the hip boutique spa for the ladies on Eagle Rock Blvd. 

When I initially came back to the Thai women, I noticed I would get more triggered, anxiety higher and my body more stiff, than at the boutique spa and was curious about what was coming up, what was being asked to be addressed, processed, or healed in that specific environment— no matter how daunting or confusing at first. 

I realized so often because it would be an Asian lady the same age, give or take a few years, as my mother, I would feel extremely uncomfortable communicating to them how painful it was. So much so that I just wouldn’t. I couldn’t.

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