I’ve just received a Thai massage from an innocuous looking masseuse. She asked at the outset whether I would like gentle, medium or strong and I, in my naivete, opted for strong. It was a decision I was to spend most of the following hour regretting, as she trod, pummelled and racked her way over my body.
A while into the massage, I noticed that the pain was proportional to my resistance. Where the muscles were relaxed, things were relatively bearable. Where there was chronic tension in a muscle, on the other hand, it was truly excruciating as a knee or elbow or foot kneaded it into submission.
I write all this because it seems to me that life is rather like this Thai massage. When we do not resist the flow of life, when we melt and meld to life’s ever-changing contours, there is no suffering. But when we are stiff with resistance, rigid in our beliefs about the way things should be, the suffering can be intense. So let’s abandon ourselves to life; for otherwise, existence will beat us into submission as uncompromisingly as the masseuse worked on my body.
And now that the massage is over, everything feels wonderful!
