May 6, 2011

Fact #299: It's fun being good at stuff

The difficult should become habitual, the habitual, easy, the easy, beautiful. -- S.M. Volonski (from Stanislavski)
It always cracks me up when a massage client says with surprise, "Wow, you found all my knots!" Um, of course I did. I'm a trained professional. 

But when I think about it, that actually means a lot.

I remember a moment early on in my MT training program when the instructor was teaching us how to feel imbalances in the body. I was working on one of my fellow students and he asked me which side of their back was more restricted. I moved my hands around in circles (very much like the Karate Kid practicing his wax on/wax off) then I randomly guessed it was the left side. Honestly, I had no idea.

Well, I do now. After massaging hundreds of people, after working on thousands of muscles, my hands feel things totally differently. I don't even have to think about it consciously, it's second nature now -- your knots are like magnets to my fingers.

That's the fun of getting really good at something. At first it's hard, but you practice and you practice until it's in your bones.  And it becomes easy. Then it becomes something else. It becomes intuitive. It becomes beautiful.

On a not-entirely-unrelated note, I'm so ridiculously, amazingly excited that I get to study acting non-stop for the next two years! (Acting and massage, people. I will always find a way to connect them.)


Til tomorrow!

2 comments:

Q Schroe said...

You know, for all this time that I've had a trained professional masseuse as a sister, I've never gotten a massage... That's gotta be breaking some law, don't you think?

Laurel said...

I s'pose I do owe you for fixing my computer!