I’m tired after a long week. Mira offers me a session of Integrated Energy Therapy (IET). I accept. I lie on her massage table. She covers me with its sheet and blanket. Restorative instrumental music plays from a unit she purchased. She sprays Jasmin around. I close my eyes and relax as she begins. First, she asks what my intention is, saying that I can say it aloud or silently. I choose the latter, and I say “stress relief” to myself, followed by “trust.”
I doze off. Dreams of “Breaking Bad” and “Avengers” characters arise. I hear a whistle-like intake of breath, and I realize I’m doing it. I awaken to a relaxed state. Her hands move, contorting into various positions as she touches neck, arms, hips, kidneys. I feel the subtle waves of chi flowing through me from her touch. She rotates around the table. I continue falling in and out of sleep. Then, she finishes.
I open my eyes and rise up. She has me place my hands on opposite knees as she cleanses me of excess energy. I feel a heaviness in my arms and a slight grasping at my throat, leading to a tender tightness in my chest. And I feel sad. I recognize it. The residue of all of the disappointments of a younger me. A pre-adolescent boy witnesses his Camelot home crumple through the raging of an alcoholic, emotional-abusing mother and a co-alcoholic, wife-beating father. I’ve worked through so much of this through the years. But I’ve never worked at the memories I imprinted in my own body, and as Fr. Thomas Keating says, “the issues are in the tissues.”
This arisen sorrow remains. I stay with it, instead of “forcing it back into the cave.” I sit with it, a skittish child crying in the dark. In time, I may draw closer. Touch him. Wipe a tear from his face. Embrace him. He is the echo of heartbreak I remember in muscle, blood and bone. He is what’s left of who I was, staring at the grimacing face of a menacing father. Staring at a smug, shattered mother with a fresh black eye, lying on a lenoleum kitchen floor. Desperate to stop him and shield her. Strangely satisfied that she lies there after she spent the day tearing me apart with every word. Ashamed to even acknowledge such a thought.
The exhaustion of the week remains. A fresh experience of an old sadness still unfolds. But somehow, I am already more recovered than I was before. I await to see how much more I will be.
low tide
reflected twilight
in each ripple
Frank J. Tassone 
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