Photo:  Pam White

There was a beautiful article this week in the New York Times Style Magazine.  It was written by Abraham Verghese about a journey to visit his birthplace in Kerala. The last part of the article was about his experience of having a therapeutic oil massage by a kalari masseur.  Verghese is a physician and a novelist.  His reflections on his body after the massage were wonderful to me:

I have been a physician since I was 24 and taught taught medical students the catechism of the body for over two decades, just as it was handed down to me by my teachers. Yet suddenly I was filled with uncertainty about the validity of everything I had been teaching. The kalari way of “seeing” the body was as foreign to me as Chinese meridians or a shaman’s way of seeing spirits or auras. And though the Western method in which I was trained is the anatomical way, the scientific way, it seemed to me that our way of “knowing” the body leaves the patient feeling that the visit is not about his body but instead is about the images and other surrogate markers of function that stand in for the body. At the level of doctor and patient, at the level of the handling of the body, and at the level of what transpires when we put our hands on patients to examine them, I wondered if we often fail our patients.

Standing there in my loincloth, it was as if I were a Talmudic scholar, or an exegete whose life was given to understanding “Finnegan’s Wake,” only to wake up decades later to find I had no deeper knowledge of God or of James Joyce. My text is the body, and at that moment I felt as if I knew so little about the body and even less about my own body, the specific collection of skin, bone and organs from which, by some alchemy of cognition, emotion, a beating heart and a functional larynx, my words, my text and these fears emerge.

But this was the surprise: the one thing I had felt fairly certain about, the Western craft of medicine, now seemed lacking and superficial. I had done some exploring of the soul, but the study of the body would have to begin again with new purpose and vigor. God give me mastery of the body, is what I prayed on the flight back. Give me body and soul. I took a vow.

My text is also the body.  I have taught dancers the catechism of the body, the holy book of movement for most of my life.  Looking back on the years of teaching, I also feel that at times I have failed my students.  In the beginning, what I transmitted to them was how to achieve a perfection of form, a physical ideal.  Ultimately, that did not work well for me.  I could not achieve that perfection myself.  What I am teaching now is how to push into the mystery, how to listen, how to wait, how to allow the body to reveal its delicate truths.  So Verghese’s revelations were precious to me – like meeting a fellow traveler on the path.