The bliss of the Sunday massage I give myself

Dear reader,

Most Sunday mornings, between about nine and ten, I give myself a forty-five-minute self-massage on the bedroom floor. The practice has, over the last three years, become one of the small most reliable structures of the weekend. The oil is warm. The lights are dim. The phone is in another room. The body, by the end of the forty-five minutes, is in a state that no other Sunday morning practice quite produces.

The setup

A folded towel on the floor — the same small thick wool towel I have written about elsewhere, dedicated for this use. A small ceramic dish with about three tablespoons of body oil — usually almond, sometimes with a few drops of an essential oil added — that has been gently warmed by sitting the dish in a small cup of hot water for ten minutes. The bedroom door closed. The window cracked open about five centimetres for fresh air. No music.

The practice

Lie on the back. Start at the feet — five minutes of slow attention to the soles, the arches, the tops of the feet, each toe individually. Move up the calves — five minutes per leg of slow attention, the hands going where the leg asks. Five minutes per thigh, paying particular attention to the small specific areas where the legs hold tension.

Sit up. Five minutes on each arm, from the shoulder down to the fingers. The hands themselves — the palms, the small muscles between the bones, the tips of each finger one at a time. The neck and the shoulders, as best I can reach with my own hands.

Lie back down. The belly, slowly, in clockwise circles. The chest. The face — the temples, the small muscles around the eyes, the jaw, the small specific points where the face holds tension.

Forty-five minutes. The body, by the end, has been touched everywhere it could be touched, slowly, by hands that were paying full attention.

What this does

Several things at once. The skin is fully oiled and faintly perfumed for the rest of the day. The body has had a small specific kind of attention that no other practice provides. The mind, having been the one doing the attending, is in a different state at the end than at the beginning. The whole rest of the Sunday proceeds at a different speed than it would have without the forty-five minutes.

There is also, more importantly, the small specific psychological effect of having spent forty-five minutes treating your own body with the same slow care that you would, hopefully, give to a friend. The body responds to this. The relationship between you and your body, over years of these Sunday mornings, becomes a small specific kind of caring relationship that most modern bodies do not have with the people they belong to.

If you have not done this kind of slow self-massage, try it for a few Sundays. The instructions are above. The cost is the cost of a small amount of body oil. The benefit, accumulated across months and years, is one of the small reliable supports of the project of inhabiting this body well — and one of the small most luxurious-feeling practices you can give yourself without leaving the house.

Until next Sunday,

M.