Returning to Magic

On melting armor, and allowing what seeks you to find you

The man who lowered himself into our tub—midmorning on our second day at the hot springs—was thin but deeply tanned, his hair tiny tufts of white.

This was late winter 2012. I’d stayed out of the hospital for almost two years.

If you had asked me then whether there was magic in my life, I would have blinked at you. During those months, I was something of a machine: working not only my own job as the youth services coordinator at a sexual health clinic in Boulder, but serving as the interim director of the department, too, after my supervisor abruptly followed her partner to another city.

All fall I had worked nights and weekends on my graduate school applications, but suddenly it was hard to imagine a life beyond teaching sex ed, reporting data to the state, untangling electronic health records, supervising medical assistants, sitting on committees, and answering teens’ sex questions via text.

I worked early. I worked late. I worked.

At some point, I was gripped by the idea that I needed a hot springs retreat down in the San Luis Valley. The wide, flat plain—larger than Massachusetts and wedged between the dramatic San Juan and Sangre de Cristo Mountains—was cold, sunny, windswept, and bubbling with healing waters. The manager at our clinic was always going down to sleep in a yurt and soak beneath the stars.

But I couldn’t afford the gas and rental on my own. Normally my Sunday-Monday weekend made it difficult to coordinate with friends, but this time I reached out to the right people—two college friends who worked in the service industry down in Denver—and suddenly we were driving south, stopping for cider doughnuts, carrying our duffels into the yurt and giggling on three slender beds.

Of all the times I have been to the San Luis Valley, I could find only this hazy photo a friend snapped in college. But it’s the right time of year, the right energy.

The man who joined us in the pool on that second day was clearly a local. At first his small talk seemed natural for the setting, but then his questions took us aback.

He wanted to know whether we were in romantic relationships. Then he wanted to know why not.

We exchanged glances. This was not a socially appropriate question.

But I answered him. I’d had a partner, I told him, who I lived with for a year and a half, but I kept getting sick—almost dying—and he’d had his fill and left. And now I had such a busy job, where I worked only with women…

“Excuse me,” he interrupted me. “May I shake your hand?”

Again, the request seemed strange, but it seemed rude to refuse. I narrowed my eyes, extended my hand.

When he gripped it, he pushed his thumb deep into my palm—someplace intensely painful that I hadn’t known existed. “Ah,” he said. Bracing blue eyes locked on mine. “That’s what I thought.”

And then he began to tell me exactly how I was in relationships.

It was a portal moment, one in which all I could see was his eyes, and all I could feel was the eerie, chest-opening vulnerability of someone reading me to filth. All these years later, I can’t tell you what he said. But he was absolutely right.

The man talked for a long time, telling each of us about ourselves, talking about the energy of the body, and we were transfixed.

But after a while we needed to move our stuff out of the yurt, into our cars. We broke the spell: apologizing, slipping out of the water, wrapping ourselves in towels.

“Well, my name is Grant,” he said, as we pulled on our sandals. “I’m actually the massage therapist on duty today.”

In the twenty months since I had gone septic and almost rotted alive—in the two and a half years since my first heart surgery—a pain had locked my body up in burning. I’d booked with a few acupuncturists, massage therapists, and chiropractors, but nothing touched the pain beyond a few hours, and they were all so expensive.

I’d heard myself tell friends I was looking for someone in particular—a person who would guide me into my own body—and I hadn’t found them yet.

Now here he was. The knowing deep and clear.

“I don’t know what the fuck just happened,” I told Brian once Grant was out of earshot. My body buzzing with something between electricity and terror. “But I have to have a massage with that man.”

Grant met me at the front counter later that hour. Instead of taking me into one of the standard massage rooms along the spa hallway, he walked me outside, toward a small room at the end of a block of hotel rooms. “So, how did you get that scar?” he asked as we walked, glancing down at my health history form. I told him about the genetic cardiac condition, my defibrillator. When we reached the room he shrugged and said, “I don’t care about your stories—I just care where you go for them.”

The room was cool and mostly dark. Above the massage table a giant painting of a bison stared at me, red and gold.

Grant looked at me squarely. “What is the thing you least want me to know about you?”

I gulped. Paused. Said the thing I had never said to anyone, ever.

“I made myself sick. With my self-indulgence.”

He smiled. “Self-indulgence is in your nature,” he said.

---

What Grant did was not massage, not exactly. He spoke quietly as he worked, bending parts of my body back, exposing parts of me I’d had no idea held pain. Somehow he could read me—my fears and patterns mapped across my body.

“I forgive myself for ever holding back,” he whispered, as something in me moved with a whoosh.

It was beyond pain: total and exquisite. For the first time I watched myself tighten my body in response to touch. I order to not feel the pressure of his fingers in the back of my hip, I’d tighten its front, or tighten my back. I built an armor. Anything to not feel. “Breathe,” he commanded. “Breathe into it.”

He was not the one creating the sensation. I was. And only I could release it.

Slowly I began to loosen muscles, to become vulnerable. I cried and cried until a snot puddle formed on the floor beneath the head cradle.

“Ah,” he said, pushing into the back of my glute. “This is your stubbornness.” Breathe. Breathe. He lifted his hand, snapped, swished something away.

Sometimes I cried out. Words on the edge of my lips: Makeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstop.

No. Stay with it. Feel. Breathe. “The war is over,” he whispered.

“Don’t worry about trying to remember what you hear. Your body is hearing it. It’s doing its work.”

At some point, as I wept and breathed, he asked: “Why don’t you like yoga?”

“I don’t like being adjusted,” I said out loud—the first honest answer I’d ever given to this question. But it felt hollow to my ears. “I feel shamed when they do it.” I paused. “That’s not legitimate, is it?”

“You are a person who needs a weekly, if not daily, yoga practice,” he said simply.

And he told me a story.

“The way they trap monkeys is to stake a jar into the ground. Inside the jar is a banana, and there is an opening the monkey can fit his hand through. The monkey cannot, however, fit his hand back out with the banana in it. As long as he is focused on that banana, he is trapped, and they can come up right behind him with a net.”

“The thing is,” Grant continued, “all around the monkey there are trees with bananas in them. If he can look around and realize there are other options, he would never get caught, and could have all the bananas he wanted.”

He stretched my arm back behind me.

“Someday,” he said quietly, “you will just want something else. You will want something more. You’ll let go of that banana.”

---

When he was done he wrapped me in the sheet, stood me up, and hugged me. I was a child, made new. I was without words. He told me he happened to have an office in Boulder, where his wife lived, where he spent half his time.

Of course he did.

I nodded mutely. He handed me his card and sent me outside.

For the first time in years I was not in pain, and for the first time I understood I didn’t have to be. The tightness in my body was an imprint of my emotional self, the particular way I protected myself. I would change. It would have to come through my body first.

The sun filtered warmly across the valley—mountains gleaming. I lay down in the sage, my back on the earth.

Later, as Kat and then Brian took their turns on Grant’s table, I felt the layers closing back in. Worse than before. The pain new, fresh, each time I tightened a hip, each time I clenched a buttock. Out of habit, out of need. When I spoke I felt false and hollow, with the shell clamping down around me again.

But I was seeing it. I was feeling it.

And because I could not handle this, I began to go to yoga.

---

There were poses, I discovered, that could take me into the exquisitely painful places Grant had opened. In pigeon pose, I nearly moaned. In low lunge, I lost my breath. The poses were excruciating, unbearable, but I practiced bearing them. I refused to ignore what was inside me.

“Any requests?” a smiling yoga teacher often asked at the beginning of class, and I always raised my hand.

“Hip openers!” I said, trying to be cheerful.

---

I found a way to see Grant each month during the weeks he was in town. I put groceries on my credit card to write him checks. Always Grant was searing in his indictments, correct in where he traveled in my body. I howled and sobbed. “Kati,” he sometimes said, “I’m barely touching you,” and it was true. I breathed into those places, and they disappeared.

“I thought I lost you,” he said one week. “I thought you wouldn’t be coming back after that pain.”

But it was the thing I knew I must do.

I understood by then I had been walking around carrying so much pain—without feeling it or knowing it, exactly—that I lived like a coiled snake, dampened by hopelessness, lashing out crazily at people in my life. The way a person braces before the impact of a car crash, I braced for the impact of living, as though tightening my body could stave off heartbreak or failure, could keep me in control in some way. I’d always thought of myself as emotionally intelligent, but in truth I’d been analyzing everything, staying above it, telling stories and thinking thinky-thoughts while remaining as numb as possible to the body beneath. I understood what was inside me was old: not just sepsis, not just heart surgery or rape, but the heartbreaks and terrors of my childhood.

Maybe I’d gotten sick because my body was full up.

Maybe sepsis—and chronic pain—were my body’s loud scream for change.

If I wanted peace, I would have to feel whatever was old that I was carried, and to no longer store up more for later.

Day by day, I grew lighter. Joy crept in.

---

I think, now, about how the magic reached me. Even inside the shell of urgency and workaholism—a moment when my job consumed the rest of my life. I knew I needed to go to that valley, and somehow I went, and I met the man I needed to meet for the rest of my life to begin unfolding.

Of course he had that office in Boulder too. Of course.

Later that spring, when a woman in the buffet line at a friend’s potluck told me she was a professional psychic, I felt the same feeling and smiled. Of course.

I booked a session with her for my twenty-sixth birthday. We would work together for years. She was the one to tell me I should go to psychic school, and which classes to take. I had stepped into a different flow.

I know now that as long as my body was braced against the world—as long as I was invested in not feeling—none of it could have found me. Or maybe it’s more precise to say: none of it would have penetrated. Magic is always trying to find us, but it pings off the hard surface of our armor until it finds its way in.

Sometimes that crack is trauma: a pain that can no longer be borne.

“Don’t worry,” Grant said. “You’ll never be the same.”