As those who’ve kept in touch with me personally know, six months ago I was regularly doing yoga once – and sometimes twice – a week. For various reasons, I’m not doing yoga anymore (although I sometimes think about getting back into it). Despite yoga, I still have some of the tightest hamstrings on the planet, can’t touch my toes, and can’t do half moon. At least I got crow down.

Fast forward to this past week. I have some knots in my back that’ve been annoying me, variously, while working out or moving my arms in the wrong way. Thinking I could just get this “taken care of” like a routine physical check-up, I made an appointment for a massage this past Thursday. It was the first massage I’ve had. Although it was a good experience, the masseuse said (and I could tell) that I have a whole lot of tension, the type usually associated with stress (neck, shoulders, back, jaw; the tense hamstrings are who-knows-why). She made the comment afterward that she could’ve done a deep tissue massage but it would’ve been very painful on me because I hadn’t learned how to relax and receive a massage, and I would’ve been sore for days afterward and wouldn’t've liked it very much. She also said, finding that I work for Microsoft, that having a lot of Microsofties come through the spa, and being married to one, it is clearly a high-stress job and people who don’t figure out some way to deal with the stress, after ten or so years of it their body ends up being destroyed by it. This was not the first time I’d heard this (and I think I can point to people at the company who are examples of this).

I noticed a lot of similarity here to yoga practice. The point of yoga was to get to the end and do savasana, which allows your body to completely relax, after limbering up your muscles and tendons through yoga. Though there are various types of yoga, throughout it you are supposed to be focusing on your breathing, the impermanent and necessary taking and giving of breath, and going through the poses to loosen yourself up and be centered in your body and in your breath. Although they are of course radically different, both massage and yoga are meant to bring yourself back into your body and work on relaxing and loosening up all the various parts that are tight (usually because of stress, or just misuse). Then you start carrying that practice through the other parts of your life.

The point of all this, and something I’ve been learning, forgetting, and relearning over the past year, is that who we are is deeply tied up with our bodies. Learning to relax isn’t a purely mental exercise (as if there were some differentiation between mind and body), but it’s a physical exercise. Relieving stress isn’t an exercise on being mentally relaxed, it’s an exercise in healthiness. You are your body. I am my body. My personality is some combination of the biochemistry of my physical brain. What I do and how I act is some combination of the biology of my body interacting with the biology of my brain. That’s it. To be what I want to be, to be healthy and balanced and whole means affecting my body just as much as my brain. There are many different ways of being whole and balanced, and I have a pretty clear idea of the way I want and the way that suits me best, but it is a coherent symphony between body and mind, which are inseparably tied up together in that thing I call myself. I’m going to schedule some massages once or twice a month so I can get to the point of learning to be relaxed and undoing all the knots of stress I carry, usually without realizing it, to the detriment of my body an myself. And I may need to throw yoga back into the mix.