Confessing to hour of massage therapy also a stress reducer - Northeast Mississippi Daily...

[massage]

A few days ago I got an hour-long, deep-tissue massage. It’s been a busy, stressful summer, and my body was as rigid as a rusted iron bridge.


Maybe you judge me for getting a massage. Maybe you say to yourself, “What’s that ruggedly handsome columnist and former preacher with the receding hairline doing getting a massage? I thought massage was for ladies and sensitive dudes with berets and Birkenstocks, not tough journalists like him.”


I will admit, I felt a bit guilty, almost secretive, about getting a massage. It felt wonderful, but it seemed a little silly and self-indulgent for a grown man to go lie down, in the middle of the day, in a candle-lit room and listen to new-age flute music while a stranger rubbed my back.


It’s not the kind of thing I’d walk into the hardware store and start bragging about, and it’s not the kind of thing the straight-laced church folk of my upbringing would have been comfortable with either.


My people reddened and averted our eyes whenever we saw a store mannequin indecently dressed. Our swimwear tended toward the Victorian, and we had mixed feelings about mixed bathing. The idea of paying to get undressed and lie down for a stranger would have struck these good, modest folk as a textbook example of what the King James Version called “lasciviousness,” which is just a fancy way of saying “doing dirty stuff.”


It’s certainly not the kind of thing my grandpa would have done either. His remedy for stress was a ‘dish of cream’ tonight and hard work tomorrow, and he managed pain by ignoring it. I have watched him, on multiple occasions, remove a splinter from one of his thick, calloused fingertips with his pocketknife by carving and then removing the pink plug of skin around the splinter, the way you’d cut the top out of a pumpkin to remove the stem.


He would have been mortified if someone asked him to undress to his level of comfort (taking off his hat) and lie face down on a fancy massage table. He would have been as bewildered as a calf staring at a new gate to learn that not only is massage therapy a real thing, but that people pay good money to experience it.


The thing is, massage actually works, at least temporarily, to lower stress and relieve pain. Amid the numberless remedies we seek for the human condition, massage is one of the most organic and benign. It’s way better than the prescription meds one out of four women and almost as many men in America are now taking for stress and anxiety, and certainly better than the cripplingly addictive opioids for pain, for which prescriptions have quadrupled since the year 2000.


Unfortunately, even deep-tissue massage cannot permanently remove stress from the life of a person who habitually chooses stressful thoughts, habits, environments, and relationships, and who refuses to do their own hard work on the soft tissue between their ears, and the deep, subterranean work of the soul.


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