Feet to Brain

Let’s make this fast.I was molested when I was a child and then I wasn’t anymore and then I skated competitively as a kid and then I quit skating and then I started drinking when I was a teenager and then I quit drinking and then I started therapy when I was an adult and then I married and then I still had therapy and then I had children and then I still had therapy and finally I decided I was tired of all this therapy, all this talking like a talk machine.

Feet to Brain

Let’s make this fast.I was molested when I was a child and then I wasn’t anymore and then I skated competitively as a kid and then I quit skating and then I started drinking when I was a teenager and then I quit drinking and then I started therapy when I was an adult and then I married and then I still had therapy and then I had children and then I still had therapy and finally I decided I was tired of all this therapy, all this talking like a talk machine.

I had young, old, middle-aged, Gestalt and Freudian therapists. I had a woman who was getting her Master’s in social work. I had one guy, very early on, when I was a junior in college — I think he was a student volunteer — who couldn’t have been more than 23. I talked to a lot of nice women and one young man. But finally it was like, enough already, it’s not sinking in.

I looked up “hands-on healing” on the Internet and read some of what hands-on healers do, that they move the energy in your body around and make you more balanced, clear the bad stuff out. They touch you with an intent to heal. This is not the same thing as going to a doctor; doctors touch you with the desire to examine you, and then they use their brains to figure out what to do. This is fine, but right then it wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was to lie there and not use my brain and believe someone was trying to help me, also not with his or her brain. I had been trying to use my brain on my problems for 20 years. I was over my brain. I was over everybody’s brain.

And so I decided I wanted to try to find someone who could do this. The one person I found was a man, but I couldn’t imagine going to a man. I waited a month or two, but the desire for this hands-on thing did not go away, and finally I screwed my courage up and called this guy, Vincent, and said I was interested in having a healing but worried because he was a man and also because he worked out of his apartment. So we arranged to meet at a coffee shop just to talk about the possibility of my having a healing.

I felt as if I were having an affair, going to this meeting. I didn’t tell anyone about it. I made sure I got to the coffee shop early so I could watch Vincent walk in. Vincent told me he would be wearing a tan coat, and he was. I watched him kiss an Asian woman goodbye. I thought that was a good sign, watching him kiss her. Usually ax murderers are single, I thought. So he came in and sat down across the table from me, and he had this smile that was very soft and bright, and we talked awhile and I told him about the pedophile, and that I was scared to work with him.

He listened to me, and then we worked out this plan where I would come to his apartment for a healing, but his girlfriend — the Asian woman — would be there, and she would stay there the whole time.

So at the appointed time on the appointed day, without telling anyone, I walked in the door of his apartment and I met the girlfriend, and she asked me if it was O.K. if she sat and typed on the computer during my healing, and I said absolutely.

Then I sat with Vincent and told him a little bit about what was going on with me, sort of as if he were a friend, and then I took off my shoes and climbed on his massage table, as his girlfriend clicked on the keyboard and I worked up the courage to close my eyes.

Vincent explained that he would hold my feet for a second, and then the rest of the time he would not touch my body, but his hands would be near my body. He would touch only my feet.

I was wearing socks. He touched my feet. The keys clicked.

After a minute he let go of my feet and moved his hands somewhere else, I don’t know where. I lay there as Vincent moved his hands in the air around my body. And I began to see that I wasn’t just there to experience whatever a hands-on healer could or could not do. I was there to demonstrate a belief to myself, a belief I had never been able to articulate, a belief that actually never seemed that important but that was very important now, and it was this: I do not begin and end at my skin. I go much farther out than that, and farther in, and farther back, and I know this, in part, because I had a pedophile. And the time had come to just — do something more than believe it. The time had come to feel it, and to feel how big I could be, and how far I could go, in a world where you can find hands-on healers who don’t touch your body and pedophiles who do, in a world that is nothing but impossible and fantastic and where I was bound, over and over, to discover that.