"Why do we pay for psychotherapy when massages cost half as much? ~Jason Love

Tonight I had the extraordinary experience of living deeply in my body. I went to a Korean spa for women in Los Angeles where women of all colors, shapes and sizes soaked, steamed and scrubbed themselves all together in one ancient healing ritual of the bathhouse. Naked bodies are beautiful in a way that clothing disguises. Size and shape are just what they are when we are nude.

It is a rare experience for me to live so completely and deeply in my body. My mind is always wanting to give other instructions, which mostly serve to distract and often in retrospect, make little sense to what my body needs or wants. Tonight I was just listening to the wisdom of my body, which does quite well without any mental interventions.

I was treated to the full Korean spa experience under the trained and powerful hands of Yang (pronounced yah) and truly, it was a deep mother earth kind of healing to be scrubbed cleaned of excess skin cells and massaged with such acuity and grace that all I could do was feel deeply and gratefully. To have one's head and face rubbed with both skill, precision and power is almost like an orgasm for the neural pathways in the brain.

Aldous Huxley wisely wrote: "What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera." I knew this on a cellular level tonight when my usual brain meanderings slowed to the rare imperceptible place and all that worked was feeling the body. What a joy it was to experience muscles opening up and releasing. What a relief to know that this kind of touch lives in the world.

I felt so deeply loved and so incredibly grateful to have been the subject of so much generous physical attention. The only thought that kept cycling through my mind is that all we need is to touch each other... the rest would probably fix itself.