The last session I had with Kento Spanos, my friend and also someone I do bodywork with, made me feel insane in a good way. As I lay on his table, I could feel different emotions in different parts of my body as Kento pushed his weight into them, or gently held them. One half of my body—the right side specifically—“felt blue”—something I thought repeatedly during the session and told Kento afterwards but still have no clue what it means. But it still feels true; as if my mental traumas and grief had coalesced in my right arm and shoulder and Kento had found them there hiding, cowering as if they’d just robbed a bank and hoping no one would shine a flashlight on them.
I used to think most body-based stuff—meditation, acupuncture, massage—was kind of useless for mental health. But then it started working. Almost a decade ago I was struggling with persistent PTSD symptoms. I did therapy. I took medications. But it was really acupuncture and massage that finally made my nervous system calm down. Fast forward to about a year ago, I thought I was mostly “cured.” I’d stopped going to yoga, I’d mostly stopped meditating. Probably not coincidentally, I had started having more panic attacks.
And then I met Kento at a party and he told me to come in for a session at his massage studio. Boy was I wrong about being healed!
Kento is a somatic bodywork specialist, which means he does massages that aren’t just about working on pain or issues within your body, but also your mind (but really these two things are not separate at all, as Kento and I discuss below).
After most sessions with Kento, I’d feel grief, like things long-buried had been surfaced. Sometimes I’d even have a panic attack on the table. It felt as if Kento was literally touching my traumas through my skin, or at least showing me where they were.
It’s always a struggle for me to balance my interest in “woo woo” things with wanting to remain critical of any modality of healing. But I’ve come to believe, at least for me, that these things are deeply effective. And, really, why wouldn’t they be? The mind and body are not two separate entities. It is a relatively recent phenomenon that we think of them as such.
I wanted to talk to Kento about his practice, about the politics of bodies, and how we all can stop shoving our traumas and discomforts into vaults or caves inside our body—and how that might lead to our personal and/or societal liberation.
[This interview has been edited and condensed]
Last time I came to a session with you, what exactly was happening on your end? Because on my end, I felt so many weird sensations in my body. I felt almost like a darkness on the right side of my body. It was such a strange sensation. Were you feeling any of that?
Yeah, I mean that session was informed by a few different things, including the fact that we were resuming this work together that we’d done in some depth last year. I think what I picked up on was what I was able to sense in your muscles—how you were holding them, where they were tense or had more resistance. And that’s tied to the nervous system. Your muscles can be sore from working out, or stiff from certain movements or from injuries, but I think the majority of the tension in our body is connected to our thoughts and mind. And so when I linger in certain places, like during last session, it’s an invitation partly for you to join me in holding that muscle, focusing on it, and observe what’s happening with it, and then connect it to something that might be coming up for you mentally.
I feel like the the connection between the story in our conscious mind that we always carry with us, versus what the body is telling us, the body’s story, those two things are often separate—and this is an opportunity to have them converge in this really novel way that we don’t often get the space to do.
I guess what I’m asking is: are you feeling the same things I’m feeling when you’re touching me?
Well, I’m definitely not a mind reader. I can’t intuit your thoughts. But I can intuit shifts. Like really subtle shifts in the body. And so if I see a shift in breathing for example, or if I see a shift where your shoulders might be from one moment to the next, those are the kinds of cues for me to ask questions or check in with you, because that shift is happening often because something is coming up for you.
It’s not the case in every session but in some sessions I notice that I might be really focused on a muscle or working on a stagnation of release somewhere specific, and then I start to have certain emotions come up for me that relate to my own life. When that comes up out of nowhere, especially while I’m working, I know that’s a cue that maybe that feeling isn’t exactly mine, or that there might be this unfolding or sharing of a feeling that’s coming up for the person I’m working with. It’s always a cue for me to be incisive and allow people to notice what might be happening in the moment.
When you do notice these things—a shift in muscle or a sign of tension in the body—what, exactly, does that signal for you?
Sometimes I like to use this metaphor that this type of body work feels kind of like excavating, or climbing, or exploring, an internal cave. And my hands aren’t doing that for you, but my hands or the pressure I’m applying is kind of a headlamp that points out something that might have been previously in the dark to your conscious mind.