The massage I trade with a friend
A small letter on a long-standing arrangement with a friend — we trade hour-long massages, monthly, in alternating apartments — and on what amateur loving care does that professional skill does not.
Dear reader,
Today I want to write about the small monthly arrangement I have had, for the last six years, with a close friend who lives about ten minutes' walk from our apartment. The arrangement is simple. Once a month, on a Sunday afternoon, one of us goes to the other's apartment, and we trade hour-long massages. Neither of us is a trained massage therapist. We are both, however, attentive amateurs who have been doing this for long enough that we have, in our own small way, become good at it.
Each session is two hours of total time. The first hour, one of us is on the table — a folding massage table we bought together six years ago — and the other is working. The second hour, we switch. The work is slow, unhurried, and entirely improvised. There is no fixed sequence. The hands go where the body asks. The breath, during the giving, settles into the same rhythm as the breath of the person receiving. The whole two hours is, in a small way, one of the most reliable parts of the month.
What amateur care does
Different things from what professional work does. The professional has technique, knowledge, training, and the small specific touch of having worked on hundreds of bodies. The amateur has nothing of this. What the amateur has, when the amateur is a close friend, is the small accumulated knowledge of years of friendship — the small specific knowledge of which areas the friend carries tension, what kinds of pressure they respond to, what the small signals are when something needs more attention or less.
The amateur also has, in some specific way, the small loving care that the professional cannot have. The professional is, by structure, doing a job. The amateur is, in the trade arrangement, doing a small specific act of friendship. The body, on the table, responds differently to these two kinds of attention. Neither is better than the other, but they are not the same. The professional reaches structural depths that the amateur cannot. The amateur reaches a small emotional warmth that the professional, however skilled, mostly cannot.
The combination of the two, in my own practice, is what works best. The monthly amateur trade with my friend, plus the occasional professional massage every two or three months, gives me both kinds of attention in a sustainable cadence. The body, given both, does better than it would do with either alone.
If you have a close friend with a body practice that overlaps with yours, consider proposing a small trade arrangement. The investment is the cost of a folding table, which can be small if bought used, and the time of the monthly sessions. The return is the kind of small ongoing bodywork that no professional schedule can quite reproduce.
Until next month,
M.