A Metaphor for Progress

A man I know has magic in his hands. Perhaps it's not magic at all. Perhaps what he possesses, in reality, is simply knowledge of the body and how to read it. More than once he has taken a knotted muscle, the pain that radiates from it, and disarmed it through targeted pressure and precise manipulation. The process goes like this: palpate the skin through massage, and when you come to the muscle in question, the one that is clenched and balled up upon itself, press hard, relentlessly. You will know you have the right spot by the intense pain that emanates from it. Press and keep pressing, through the pain, through the tension, until the muscle unclenches, submits, surrenders. The moment of relief is without a doubt a moment of magic, well worth the ones that preceed it.The key to all this is that one must move through the pain, and in order to do so one must embrace it. The relief from the pain is its own ecstacy, but something also happens to the one who moves through it. There is a moment in the process of pressing in which the ache envelopes, and the promise of something more than relief flutters into focus. Release, perhaps. Release.