Frying pan to fire?

Receiving a Thai massage tends to be athletic and surprisingly tiring for an activity ostensibly executed while prone and relaxing. And I'll be the first to vouch for its efficacy, it's just an interesting to the western mind that "relaxing massage" is oxymoronic.

And then I started a course in massage. Jump from "athletic and surprisingly tiring" to a point halfway between "exhausting" and "now activating self destruct."

It's surprisingly easy: follow the energy lines up and down with a series of pressures that open things up. Starting from the feet, you work up the calves and thighs, walking up with pole-stiff arms, waking up blood flow with body weight--it's a close cousin of wheelbarrow races at a summer carnival. And then it gets fun: each leg is worked in isolation, bent in various positions.

Here's where the Western audience gets weirded out--the victim's leg is in a figure four the entire time, save during the exciting moments when it's getting flexed and stretched.

It is disconcerting if you're not prepared--first, while you're on your back, your left foot is tucked up in your crotch with the knee splayed to the side in an organic figure four. It's easy, from here, to open up the circulation down the inside of the leg. But then the masseur picks up the leg and starts doing lunges over the poor prone body--imagine standing on the sideline and hugging your knee up to your chest. It's that movement, but you're laying down and someone is lunging your knee to your chin for you.

It's hard enough work when you're on the bottom, but when you're on the top, it's not just that you're holding someone's leg pinned to your hip while you dance around them, it's that you're doing so while on your knees amid the protests of their muscles, judgment, and instinctive self-preservation. And while your right hand is holding their left knee to keep their foot in the crook of your right hip (bad explanation? Yes, but a helluva lot cleaner than the execution) you're doing deep lunges back and forth, and your left arm is posted at various pressure points as you seesaw around.

No mention of the sheer volume of tissue you're digging through to get to the pressure points you're supposed to hit. Really, even if someone isn't Iron Mike or training for a martial arts competition, the thigh has a lot of tissue to penetrate before you're getting to the juicy stuff.

It's one thing to post pole with your arms and dig into something, to go wheelbarrowing around a room, but it's another thing entirely when you have my whopping body weight to penetrate through someone's fat and muscle to hit the sciatic cluster, especially if you're kneeling on your toes and swinging their leg around.

But it's a good thing from any angle: I'm getting to use my arms and body, and in "Help me, Omni-Ibuprofin, you're my only hope!" morning pain. Which is a helluva lot nicer than the aching bones and muscles I've been waking to, not to mention the gastric wakeup calls.

It also gives me another tangible for my time here, with almost as many stories as a good scar.