On Bodywork ( and the current revolutionary quality of time )

I enrolled in my first massage class in 2001, naively reasoning that it would eventually provide a steady part-time income whilst I pursued making the art that I considered my true calling back then, but what I learned about Zen Shiatsu quickly took me in a direction I never anticipated. I wonder if I would have even believed my future self had he appeared and explained that beginning to learn the form and structure of treatment, memorising points and meridians and exploring the subtleties of the Traditional Chinese Medical system would eventually take me all over the world, for work, study and connection with the likes of people I couldn’t have even imagined existing back then and ultimately indelibly beyond-the-point-of no-return altering the way I perceive and experience the very fabric of life and nature of our existence.

One of my early Thai teachers, the late Pichest Boonthume, always said with characteristically blunt wisdom that you should heal yourself before trying to heal anyone else, and at this stage, I’d humbly offer myself as a short-listed poster boy for that philosophy. What started with a simple and rather short-sighted intention to make the money I needed to survive has ebbed and flowed and unravelled as a long, sometimes arduous, but massively expansive spiritual journey of such intense and unfathomable challenge, beauty, surprise, drama, and release that I am, I admit, even at this point still struggling to understand and accept the depth of privilege, peace and freedom it has blessed me with.

Over time, thanks to the blessed collection of incredible teachers, colleagues, companions and interconnected friends I’ve amassed, that healing has enabled my physical treatments to become a heavily cross-pollinated symbiosis of spirit and science as much as a proficient display of traditional healing art. Elsewhere on this site, I have somewhat poetically described my sessions as multidimensional stories, a bold and creative statement that made me self-consciously bristle when I wrote it down the first time and that I sat with for a long while before posting out to the world, but one that, at least to me, succinctly ties my studies and cultural synthesis of the last 20+years together. In that time, my expression of massage, bodywork and the healing arts has not only quite naturally become the uniquely inflected offering it should have done but also come to fundamentally underpin and support my narrative arc of personal discovery and reconnection, which itself has been aided, abetted, and is thankfully now increasingly reflected by, the ongoing collective upsurge and interest in Holistic medicine and spirit work of all kinds.

So, at this point, I’m undoubtedly in it for life. But to be straight, I have never considered it approached it as a career. In fact, at times, it’s barely been an income, and, perhaps indirectly because of it, a lot of commonly anticipated things we all expect to appear in our lives never showed up for me. But what has manifested in their place is an unconventional, non-linear, spirit-led journey to self-acceptance that continues to bloom into a centre and boundary-less journey of discovery, far beyond any ideas I ever had about myself or the possibility offered by the world as I understood it when I started down the path. And ultimately, I’m here to communicate and make some essence of that available for anyone looking for my help whenever they need it. Which brings us up the present moment and the current quality of time.

Last week, I sat on an overground train, and out of nowhere, I found myself welling up, fighting hard to retain my composure and contain the sort of wracking sobs that I recognise and associate with profound trauma release. It took me by surprise. I think the relentless tension we’ve all been absorbing and carting about for so long caught up with me, triggered by the waves of collective uproar and disbelief at the catastrophic destruction and suffering currently being enabled and permitted in Gaza. I don’t follow the news anymore and certainly don’t have a TV, but the intense, insidious energy soaking deep into the collective consciousness right now in ways it hasn’t before still unavoidably finds its way to get at us wherever we are, and it’s almost inevitable to start feeling hopeless and overwhelmed eventually.

It wouldn’t be melodramatic to say our critically dysfunctional society is teetering on the brink of darkness, and we urgently need extraordinary levels of seen and unseen multidimensional unity to pull it back. Thankfully, there’s a lot of genuine revolutionary sentiment flying about right now, and I’m absolutely, positively there for most of it. But while I’d love our psychopathic governments to crumble and a divine army to awaken and sweep humanity into an entirely new paradigm, we have a hella long way to go before it actually happens. In the meantime, we each have different individual roles and personal medicine to embody, unique signals which we all urgently need to tune in to and amplify to see that it does.

For my part, I’m out here as an unpretentious, boots-on-the-ground spiritual practitioner whose primary public expression is private Bodywork. Unfortunately, over the years, and for many different reasons, the reception of my expression became a luxury pastime for those privileged enough to afford it. To altruistically combat this and at the same time keep my own ego in check, I’ve always worked on a sliding scale system, volunteered, and managed to offer designated low-cost treatment options within my practice that sat aside my regular higher rates. But recently, demand has begun outstripping supply, so I’m increasing my availability and reorganising my rates when you visit me in E5 to hopefully offer better-placed, more affordable support and navigation for everyone wanting and needing it.

For anyone wondering about motives – because let’s face it, there’s nothing radical or revolutionary about starting a blog or working harder – I’m putting this out as a quiet declaration of intent and reemergence, baby steps to seed the beginning of a new beginning in a brave new world. It’s a personally regenerative commitment to own what I do in ways I haven’t, show and step back up and offer support and inspiration that will hopefully provide and allow opportunities for mutual alignment and healing, however small, both in the present moment and as an increasingly meaningful interrelational contribution to the momentum and acceleration of the ongoing collective shifts that will ultimately enable us all to disentangle from and reshape our current realities, come together and, perhaps, eventually, rediscover, reunite, and reclaim our true nature as we walk each other home.

📸 Kyoto 2023 @bojan_babic