Look, if you're out here in 2025 resolving to get healthy and improve your quality of life, wonderful. Do you want to exercise more, eat healthier, sleep better, and make other positive lifestyle changes? I salute you, commend you, and yes, you can and probably should incorporate massage in support of your wellness goals. But as a someone who has spent time massaging literally hundreds of bodies, the thing I want you to remember is that your body is valid right now, as it is, in whatever shape, age, size, and ability level it may be. You're OK right now. You're more than OK, you're a rarified, complex, miraculous marvel. You are (presumably) alive as you read this. Your body is breathing air, pumping blood, digesting food, performing a million different necessary metabolic processes in order to keep you alive without you even having to think about it. Your body is the only creature on this earth who will support you 24/7 from before you were born until the moment that you die.
From my time spent studying the human body I know how beautiful we are in places we will (probably) never see--the arch of your aorta as it leaves your heart, the transverse sprawl of your liver, the contractions and expansions of your larynx as you speak--it's stunning, all of it. The more I observe and understand about the form and function of the human body, the more awed I am.
I know, maybe I haven't seen your body. But I can tell you after having massaged hundreds of other bodies, I already know that is as unremarkable as it is miraculous. (Spoiler: It's both very unremarkable and very miraculous).
Spending hundreds of hours palpating hundreds of bodies has taught me that even as we are all perfectly unique, we're not really all that different. We vary on fat and muscle composition, bone density, size, age, and health, but the structures and systems are all roughly the same. Even as our needs are unique, they are also, largely, the same.
In a world that viciously commodifies bodies, where body sizes and styles and shapes are pushed in and out of fashion to funnel money to corporations profiting off our self-loathing, please take a moment this January to simply observe and appreciate your body.
Consider what it has done for you, keeping you alive from birth to present, how it has carried you and housed you and borne you through every joy and pain. Your body has changed so much from birth, and will continue to change until you die. Change, including aging, is its fundamental nature, and there is nothing wrong or shameful in it.
As you gear up for a new year and make wellness goals, please do your best to approach your aspirations from a place of love, gratitude, and nurturing to your flesh and blood home. Block out the advertisements, social media posts, corporate messaging inviting you to spend your time and money and energy in a crusade of self-loathing and corporal mortification. This body is your home, your temple, and your greatest ally. Care for it, be kind to it, and give it the gentleness, food, and rest it needs.
If you find yourself on my massage table in the coming year, know that I consider the opportunity to work with you a privilege and inviolable trust. Here, you have nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be proud of. You are just you, in a way that is as unremarkable as it is miraculous.
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