The Dragon Under Your Skin
And Other Truthy Ponderings of My Life as a Massage Therapist
It lurks in the shadows of the deepest of deep tissue.
Beneath the skin, below the fascia, underneath each layer of muscle and bone. Only when it can lurk no further, when it runs out of body or the body runs out of skin, only then can you find the root of the watching thing — the thing I call the dragon.
Underneath my hands, it feels like a slow and stalking shadow.
Like an unblinking eye that follows my movement up and down a person’s body, keeping close watch on its fleshy domain — but it is not of flesh itself. It is underneath and inside of flesh, a palpable energy, a primal presence that hardens and softens, pulsates, and throbs and recoils through the body like the tentacles of a squid.
Not every therapist feels this dragon. Some specialize in more clinical matters, matters of function and machine and body. Those therapists are godsends because some problems really are about math and not about the existence of some metaphysical dragon.
Some problems, however, very much are. That’s where I come in.
The division happens sometime in massage school.
They can teach you all about the muscles. Where they come from and where they go, what they move, how they move it, and ultimately, how the systems work together to support and control the magnificent machine that is the human body.
They can also teach you how to use touch to relax these muscles: how to use a palm to compress, an elbow to sink, a thumb to melt, a relaxed hand to glide.
But what they cannot teach you, what no one can teach you, is how to get quiet enough to close your eyes and feel.
If you can do this, you will start to realize you are in communication with something bigger than the body. Something bigger and far more complex. Something that exists underneath consciousness and that something is the dragon.
If you can not do this, you will probably go on to work with a chiropractor or doctor and make a great deal more money. The point is, it isn’t a choice for a therapist to make; it is one their dragon makes for them.
Don’t worry, this whole dragon thing isn’t about God — well, it’s not about God exactly.
There are about 10,000 different models of consciousness based on a variety of perspectives and schools of thought, and I do not intend to go on a long meandering exploration of even one of them unless somebody wants to buy me some acid and meet for a camp out in the woods.
My point here is that both eastern and western philosophy views consciousness as a layering of selves wherein there is a primal seed self at the center (or underneath) multiple layers of less subtle forms of awareness — yoga’s koshas, or Freud’s model of the mind, for example.
After doing absolutely no research, I have concluded the dragon is not basic enough to exist in one of these layers alone — Oh, no, that would be far too easy. Instead, it lives in all and none of them at the same time because that’s the way of the dragon. It is the melted cheese that holds the divinity sandwich together without which the whole thing would simply fall apart, and by fall apart I mean not exist because dead people do not have dragons.
In the living body, the dragon is a resting tension. It is a compulsive holding, an insistent pulling, a chronic and undiagnosable pain that lingers in your aching bones, bones that ache because it fills them like a wind fills a windsock.
In the mind, it is the undercurrent. A compulsive awareness. The thing that keeps your focus drifting back to every single last to-do any time you try to get still and do something crazy, like meditate.
Dreams. Nightmares. Love. Vices. These are all the flutterings of the dragon.
The dragon is everything from the twitch of the nervous system to the churn in the belly, to the place that exists between sleep and awake, and it looks and feels and breathes like you, but it’s not you, it’s the lurk of the dragon.
Each time I start a massage, the first thing I do is greet the dragon.
I nestle my hand at the small of a stranger’s back and feel it rush to meet mine. I feel it press itself up against the very edge of its ivory container, leaning in to investigate the meaning behind this unfamiliar presence. It snarls in spirals and huffs in test, feeling and judging and trying to decide whether it wants to trust me, or more aptly, whether it likes my dragon.
I may not be the best therapist in the world; I may not get out every knot every time, and I may not be the one to talk to about math, but if there is one thing I can do, and I do it rather well, it is to earn the trust of a huffing old dragon.
This trust earning requires a good deal of design, style, and finesse. It’s about creating an experience that appeals to all layers. It’s about variations and subtlety in touch. It’s about pacing. Movement. Slowing down and waiting.
But what it’s not about, what it can never be about, is fighting the will of the dragon.
It has never served a human being in all of history to fight a thing so primal. It’s too formidable an adversary, disguised in soft and vulnerable skin. Better to make friends, I say. To sit down, stay a while. To rub the soles of its tired and scaley feet with a little patience and compassion because even though brute force never works, there are ten thousand and one ways to train a dragon.
A damn good massage? That’s only one of them.
