Somewhere in the kaleidescoped, quilted pattern of my life, my career as a body worker emerged about ten years ago and I became a Rolfer. Been doing it ever since. For those of us who enter the temple of the human body through touch, changing someone’s structure soon loses its place at center stage and is then up laced by an element so difficult to talk about that we rarely do except among ourselves. It is the magic. It is the miracle. It is the song sung through our hands in chorus with human fascia, melting away layers of armor and discomfort in concert with the light of the person living inside. So that the game we get to play, you see, Peek-a-Boo with the human spirit. And it’s a kick, I mean to tell you. If it’s not the mason you start working on bodies, it’ll windup being the mason why you never quit. As with most things, this magic, this miracle doesn’t happen all the time. But it does happen often enough. Just enough. Such a time happened on my last trip to Tulsa.

Already I’d done eight Rolfing sessions on a very bright, very cute seven-year old girl and still I felt as though I didn’t know her, that even thought I’d touched her body each time, easing her shoulders, straightening her lower back, bringing her legs under her to support her, somehow I’d never really touched her at all. There was a wall we had built-I had participated as much as she that I couldn’t break through. Our sessions together were not unpleasant, just incomplete, and I kept feeling as though we were both there to get through it, get it over with and get away from each other. I have Rolfed many, many children in the past ten years but had never had an experience like this one. I felt no love from this little kid, a foreign feeling for me and, equally foreign, I felt no love for her. We coexisted in a struggle, sparring with each other, jabbing for the right words to say, ducking our own feelings, both of us carefully guarding our hearts.

Frustrated by what felt like my own lack of ability and my own fear, I sat with my friend Marjorie on her deck in Tulsa and talked about this. I am not a child psychologist. I am a Rolfer, trained to work on people’s bodies and, indeed, was doing everything I was trained to do. And her body was responding, her structure looking better, freer and easier all the time. Still, something was definitely missing and I was overwhelmed by my need to draw her out, to find the missing link and build a connection between us.

A long time meditator, Marjorie gently suggested guided imagery, using pink light, the color of self-love, to surround the child and me and melt away the barriers between us. Then she told me of her pink light excursions with her granddaughter’s kindergarten class, taking the children on fabulous trips though the meadows of their imaginations, guided, surrounded and cuddled by a fuzzy pink light. Sounded good, I thought. Couldn’t hurt, I thought. Anything would be better than what we have now, I said, and certainly worth a try.

I saw the child again at 9:00 a.m. on Monday. Something new today, I told her, something we were going to work on while I worked on her body. I asked her to shut her eyes and think about her heart as I laid my hand gently on her chest and lightly patted, repeating, “lub dub, lub dub, lub dub” to the rhythm of her heart-beat. She squirmed and wiggled and protested and whined, not wanting to play this game or see pink light at all. Not pink, she said, not pink all, only red would do and she repeated this over and over. Then she saw red around her heart and a Butcher knife in it stabbing her heart again and again. This was shocking, scary and distressing information and I was instantly terrified that I’d cracked open a Pandora’s Box which I was in no way qualified to handle. So I went back to pink, coaxing her, inviting her back to the color of self-love. She kept one arm over her eyes as I worked on the other one and talked to her and what I could see of her face under her arm was distorted and twisted, a painful, uncomfortable grim mace, too old for as even year old. So I talked pink, I talked soft, I talked clouds, I talked love. And then her face changed. It became peaceful and sweet. Softly, slowly, she started to speak. I leaned forward to hear her words. She said she saw a forest and her heart was right at the entrance. “How big is your heart?” I asked her. She said big, really big, bigger than the sky, bigger than the earth, if you put her heart in front of the earth, you couldn’t see the earth at all. Then she zipped right back into red and wanted to take a gun and shoot her heart, to pop it like a balloon and it would take all the bullets in the gun to do that, she said. Uh oh. I felt like we were on a rollercoaster, up and down, valleys and peaks, terror and love. And, just like being on a roller coaster, once you get on, you’re on, with no place to get off until the ride is over. So here we went again – I talked pink, I talked soft, I talked clouds, I talked love. And she came right back out to meet me again, not only with pink around her heart this time but purple, too, (her idea), a spiritual color and a nice touch, I thought. Then she filled her heart up with cotton candy and candy canes and snow cones with rainbow colors, all of which was her idea. A shift. We’d made, I felt it in my hands. We’d changed gears without even having to look for the clutch and now we were both just along for the ride. The room was glowing, my heart was humming and I felt immeasurably close to this little girl. Thank you, God, thank you, God, I said over and over in my head, please don’t ever let me forget this feeling as I shut my eyes for the moment and listened for the sound of angels dancing around. A few minutes or a century later, I came back to the earth, back to the room, back to the moment. I finished up my work on the little girl’s neck, leaned over and kissed her forehead. Sweet blue eyes look up at me. “Nice trip”, I said, “thank you.” And she grinned the goofy, Jack-O-Lantern grin of a seven year old. What a time.

When we walked back down stairs, she had her arm around me, her blonde head close against my ribs and we played with some toys on the floor until her mom came to pick her up. I told her mother abut the session and explained how to do the pink light exercise, that I felt it would be an important one for her daughter. She agreed and thanked me. I wondered what it would be like saying good-bye this time, since so often before I’d felt the child’s urgency to get away from me and, regrettably, my too often equal feelings toward her. This time was different. I was sitting in a chair when she walked over, wordlessly, and stood in front of me. I looked at her and smiled. She smiled back, a knowing kind of smile saved for those who’ve held your hand and loved you anyway as you’ve passed through the eye of the needle. Then, for the first time since I’d known her, she hugged me. I held her close, grateful for the lessons I’d learned from her. “See you next month”, I said, and felt silky blond hair bob an up-and-down yes against my cheek. She scampered out the door, all seven years old of her, on her way back to school or the park or life and I sat in the chair feeling dumbfounded and blessed and ablaze with the sweetness of it all. My heart felt hot, almost molten, and it even occurred to me that maybe my shirt was on fire. But I was wrong. It was much, much simpler than that. Silly me. It was the magic, I knew it at once, as I looked down to see the remnants of a fuzzy pink light on my chest and the imprint of a tiny heart bigger than the sky.