This Is About Your Butt
And Other Truthy Ponderings on My Life As a Massage Therapist
If there is one thing I have learned in my ten years of being a massage therapist, it is that regardless of age, race, political ideology or social status, everyone, and I mean everyone, gets a little weird about their butts.
Take me, for example.
To date, I have given over 3,597 massages, and consequently have seen a wide range of butts and I can honestly say not a single one of them stands out in my memory, and yet I’m still a little sheepish about getting a massage from a co-worker because I, too, am weird about my butt.
I mean, what if I have a pimple or something?
So when a woman who looked like a Carol Small, aged about 56 with tight lips and a sharp nose came in for the first massage of her life because of what she called “god awful lower back pain” it didn’t surprise me to learn that she landed on the more conservative side of the fear-butt spectrum.
I don’t know what happened, Carol explained nervously as she twirled her silver necklace tightly around her pinky. I was cooking breakfast when I dropped my dishrag and when I went to pick it up, I must have done something because suddenly, I felt this terrible pain in my low back, and it’s just stuck around for days. My doctor suggested I get a massage, so my husband and I looked around and we found this place, and here I am. I’m hoping you can fix me.
Well, I don’t know about fixing you, I told Carol, but I’ll certainly try to help you out.
I’ve learned over the years it’s important to manage people’s expectations when they’re doing crazy things like pointing them at you. To set them straight right from the start. I wanted Carol to know I don’t consider myself in the business of fixing people. I think of myself more as a facilitator of healing. A holder of space. A wellness enthusiast with a license to touch.
That’s not to say I don’t know my shit.
I know every single bony landmark in the body and most every muscle that attaches to it and I have been trained in an ungodly number of advanced techniques and fancy pants modalities because when I learn something, I have a tendency to get rather obsessive.
You want to know what kind of student I am?
Right now, at this very moment, I have a life-sized fully articulated medical grade male skeleton in my closet that is labeled with masking tape and purple Sharpie and is just waiting to either serve as an explanation for the work I want to do or to scare the bejesus out of the next unlucky soul who goes to get an extra blanket.
His name is Stan, and he has been without a doubt the most consistent man in my life.
Anyway, that’s not my point.
I know the body and I also knew I could help Carol but that I sure the hell couldn’t fix her because the body must be healed. It can’t be fixed like some broken down sedan.
Jumping straight into the business, I said, I think we should start face down. We’ll start at the QL, then move onto the hamstrings and the glutes and then we’ll flip and..
Wait a minute! Glutes? You mean my…my… my butt? She took a step back and looked me up and down with an expression of horror as if I had either propositioned her for sex, or suddenly drawn a weapon.
I tried my best to hide my smile. Well, that’s one word for them, yes.
Oh, that won’t be necessary. Maybe you misunderstood. It’s my low back that hurts, not my, she looked to the right and then to the left… not my butt.
There was a time earlier in my career when I might have tried to explain myself to Carol. A time when I might have gone to get my anatomy book and made clear the relationship between the muscle groups. When I would have tried my best to at least plant the seed that her butt was, as a matter of fact, part of her low back.
No more. Those days are gone. I guess in massage, as in everything, you learn to pick your battles.
Instead I said, Ok, sounds great. No glutes today. I’ll leave you some space to get ready and I’ll be back in a minute. And with that, I smiled really big and turned on my heels and walked right out of the room because truth be told I have no deep burning desire to touch Carol’s butt; I was just trying to do my job and help her the best I could.
You may think I did Carol a disservice by not being more assertive about explaining to her why I was talking about her butt in the first place, but in that moment I recognized something about Carol that I had seen in many clients before.
There are two types of people who come to get a massage: those who want to learn about their bodies and take some control over their health (self-care people) and those who were told by someone else to come get a massage but they themselves aren’t that keen on the idea (everyone else). With absolutely no judgment, it has been my experience that people who want to learn rarely hesitate to ask questions and they don’t damn near faint when you talk about working on a muscle group. I was pretty sure which camp Carol landed in and, as with everything, I had a five-point philosophy on how to handle clients just like her.
Point 1–5: With clients like Carol, you can talk until you are blue in the face, but it will not do a lick of good until you earn their trust. See, the problem wasn’t really about Carol’s butt anymore than my problem with getting a massage from a co-worker is about my theoretical butt pimple.
Did you know butts don’t exist in the same place on the body for everyone?
I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true. They don’t.
See, the perception of where the low back ends and the butt begins is more of a philosophical question than a physical location.
It is based on what someone understands of God, religion, and decency. It is a question of personal relationship to the body, as well as to the rest of society. It is instead an abstraction. A place associated with shame and vulgarity. It is, pardon the pun, the seat of our vulnerability.
The point is, who the hell was I to tell Carol where her butt was or what it was or was not doing? Don’t you think she knows better than I do?
The best I can do is play by her rules and give her butt the respect it deserves and the space that it needs and the most she can do is acknowledge my effort and let go just enough to trust me. Then I can get the anatomy book, and roll out my boyfriend Stan, and then she might (MIGHT) listen to what I have to say. That is, if she so chooses.
And that, my friend, is massage therapy in a nutshell.
It’s a game of trust. A practice of respect. A dance of wills and a conversation of and about the body as best two people in different skin can have it. It is Carol telling me the most intimate truths of what it means to be a Carol and it is me taking myself (and my ego) out of the equation enough so I can tune in and listen.
A few moments later, I knocked on the door, and Carol told me she was ready.
She was lying face down on the table in the prone position underneath a mound of sheet and blankets. The morning sun coming in through the blinds created long lines of shadow on the back of her body that moved like waves to the rhythm of her nervous breathing while the sound of pre-recorded wind chimes glittered all around us. I donned my therapist’s voice to ask, Is everything feeling ok?
Everything feels amazing. I feel like I could just fall asleep right here.
It looked like things were going to turn out all right after all.
I placed my left hand at the base of her skull and my right at the base of her spine, the small of her back not yet turned butt because Carol is nothing if not a lady.
I stood like that for a few moments, feeling her breath, her temperature, her energy spike upon contact then slowly calm down and settle as together we walked through the torii gate of her body, two perfect strangers, on a journey to discover and learn something new about ourselves and each other.
Or just to work on her back pain. You know, whatever.
Listen, I’m not going to lie to you. I don’t always feel so philosophical and mushy about my work.
There are days I don’t feel like I can do it anymore. Days when my hands are tired and swollen and I’m on my period and I get my third 280-pound man with muscles as dense as frozen meat whose ass smells like shit and curdled cheese. (Wellness Tip #1: It does not matter what your butt looks like, it does, however, matter what it smells like).
But if you want to know why I do what I do — day in, day out, cheese asses and everything. That space. That moment. That’s it. I’ve learned everything worth knowing right there, the closed gap between two people.
When I first lay my hands on someone with the intention to help or to heal, and that someone is able to let down their guard and is kind enough to usher me in, I rediscover the tether that keeps me bound to hope, the deep and subtle pulse of humanity — the softness and innocence waiting patiently underneath all the no good, awful, terrible very bad things that happen all around us.
That connection, the closing of the gap — there is no lying in that space, there is only truth and story, and the moral of the story is we all get a little weird about our butts.
