Sacred Studio

I spent a good bit of this morning drafting a guest blog post for Sacred Studio, the yoga and movement studio where I have taken classes since they opened just over a year ago, growing my own little yoga and movement practice alongside the studio, and where I have recently started to practice massage.

The draft rapidly devolved into a sappy love letter, hearkening back to when I first got in touch with Dara, the studio owner, the ways in which her thoughts on movement resonated with me deeply, both in terms of inviting movement into my life and in terms of my approach to massage. That draft is still in the works, and I was thinking I’d post it here, too, but then I looked back through Sacred’s blog archives and realized that I loved the studio before it existed precisely because Dara puts things so eloquently, and I’d really rather share this old invitation to Sacred’s grand opening.

Way back before the studio opened, before I’d ever tried hot yoga or heard of Qoya or Core Rhythms or many more Sacred offerings, I got a Christmas email with this blog post inside, the invitation to come dance and do yoga (and all sorts of beautiful things – read the post!) and these words big and bolded:

If you are too big, too tight, too old, too young, too far gone, too sick, too outside, too clumsy, too shy, too busy, too scared, too wrong, come on in!  It’s very simple. This place was made for you.  There is a space for you.

And I waited patiently for the studio to open, walked through the doors, and never looked back. As someone who wanted to get moving (don’t we all?) I loved receiving this message at the time. As a massage therapist, I have days when I feel like this is all I want to say to potential clients (or those who are already there, for that matter),  like I want to shout it from mountaintops. I love talking about muscles and posture and pain patterns, and I love talking about five element theory and shiatsu meridians, and I could probably talk about fascia far longer than you’d care to listen, but, at the end of the day, bodywork for me is about acceptance, holding space, freeing up the places in your body that are stuck so you can be and feel your best. Which is why practicing massage at Sacred, with its repeated charge to come as you are, feels more right than I can say. It feels like coming home.