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Writer's pictureIlene Antelman

The joy in the work



I’m grateful for the joy of this work.


As one who works with her hands, the pandemic meant losing the ability to use that carefully cultivated sense of touch, the visceral quality of connection with another was devastating.


In the many months of its absence, cut off from that sensitivity, was akin to losing a language. Language serves to communicate & without the other it’s simply a monologue. The years I’d spent training was suddenly knowledge of a dead language, one no one could speak.


“Touch comes before sight, before speech,’ wrote Margaret Atwood in The Blind Assassin, ‘It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”


It is when I make contact with my client’s body that language comes back to life. The dialogue that ensues teaches me anew why I do this work & what it offers. Together we trace the connection of pain in a hip to a high school sports injury that violently twisted the leg. How the past lives on in our bodies is embodied by my clients: how the tension in the neck holds a memory of a difficult birth, how a bike accident can show up as a rhythm in the feet mimicking the motion and how this work can allow the body to surrender those artifacts of the past.


(& yes, that’s Momo’s tail emerging from the covers!)









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