[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Knots

I lie on my stomach on the padded table, warm flannel blankets covering my 
nether reaches. The room I am in is cosy; meditative koto music plays 
quietly in  the background. Sarah's strong, capable hands work over my 
oiled shoulders, finding the muscle knots and drawing them out. Like most 
people, I tend to store tension in my shoulders and neck; moreover, I spent 
20 stressful hours last weekend at a non-ergonomic computer, producing a 
detailed report from a webcast on a very tight deadline. By the end, I 
could barely bend my neck and my shoulders felt like planks. And so I am 
here under Sarah's hands for the first time in most of a year. We joke that 
there are knots on my knots -- metaknots, as it were. It will take more 
than half an hour of massage to get them out, but at least it's a start.

I tell her that my other-daughter talks about having knots in one's head, 
and Sarah likes that. So do I. It's a good comparison. Nobody believes that 
having knotted shoulder muscles is in any way a sign of inferiority or 
something to be dismissed contemptuously; they're a sign of stress, 
perhaps, but quite understandable. But "he has a mental illness", "she's 
got 'personal problems'", "he's got his issues," "she's all screwed up" -- 
these phrases are apt to be dismissive, or a warding-off, a warning, a 
diminishing of an individual's (self) worth. They're often used to justify 
scapegoating or psychopathologizing -- shredding a person's character under 
the guise of compassionate psychological insight. It's an easy way of 
avoiding our own part in the problem, whatever it is. We concentrate with 
pity or contempt on the knots in another person's head in order to avoid 
contemplating our own.

I do not know one single person with no knots in his or head; if I think a 
person is free of head-knots, it's because I don't yet know them well. I 
know people who struggle with major knots who are wonderful people; I know 
others who are real jerks. Like shoulder-knots, head-knots are no indicator 
for-or-against of a person's character. They may say much about a person's 
ability to function; they say nothing about the state of his or her soul.

What I do know, from bitter experience, is what happens when we try to deny 
the knots in our heads. We've accepted the judgment that head-knots say bad 
things about us as people, and we try to pretend they aren't there. I know 
a delightful woman, intelligent and charming, whose child was sexually 
abused by a family friend; beaming radiantly, she says she's so grateful 
that nothing really awful has happened in her life -- and what does that 
say to her son?  I know a man (actually, I've known several) who, when his 
compulsions destroy yet another relationship, heads off on retreat or tries 
a new spiritual practice; his "faith" instead of bringing him into the 
Light, helps him hide from himself in deeper darkness. I know people whose 
response to their own head-knots is to focus exclusively on the head-knots 
of their nearest and dearest, a wonderful way of destroying a child's or 
mate's self-esteem.  Head-knots aren't spiritually positive or negative; 
it's what we do about them that matters. A problem may just be a problem, 
but denial is very bad stuff. It cuts the problem off from any possibility 
of real healing, and it does great damage to innocent bystanders.

Somehow we've got to dissociate head-knots from sin and failure, because 
we've conflated the two, just as in ages past people conflated epilepsy 
with demonic possession. Head-knots are not something a person has deserved 
or courted, and they are rarely an excuse. Many of them are pure biology -- 
something we're starting to understand as we begin to map out the complex 
relationship between mind and body.  Others result from the failure of love 
on the part of major people in our lives, or from other circumstances 
beyond our control: an abusive situation, a predatory schoolteacher, early 
losses. And then knots-upon-knots, like the metaknots in my neck, come from 
the collision of our head-knots with the world, in lost jobs and failed 
relationships that further erode our sense of worth. The sad thing is that 
it's often the most intelligent, good, and sensitive people who suffer the 
worst.

So what's the solution? Acknowledging the knots in the first place, and 
accepting that we may not be able to work them out without help -- that's 
the crucial step. I could not massage my own shoulders; I needed Sarah's 
professional hands. It would greatly help if our societies took mental 
health as seriously as physical health, and doing so would probably pay for 
itself in the long run. We might have to reduce other expenditures; I 
suggest military spending would be a good place to start. But simply being 
conscious of one's head-knots helps, acknowledging honestly that we do 
struggle with our emotional baggage and being willing to do something about 
it. If we don't, we only make things worse.

Sarah had me turn over and she got to work on my neck, pressing and 
stretching out the muscles. "As bad as I think?" I asked, "Yep," she said 
cheerfully.  "But we'll get 'em all worked out. It may take time."



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I'm about to hit some sacred cows, and they moo so badly. -- Phyllis 
Tickle, aka The Divine Miz T.