Admittedly, I might be a massage ‘ho. Recently I had two massages in one week. Maybe I need to consider starting a Massage Addicts Anonymous group for myself. (Anyone want to join me?) I’ll borrow a page from Scarlett O’Hara’s book and think about that tomorrow.  Or next month. In the meantime, I’m going to keep indulging my massage mania, because I find massages delightfully relaxing and incredibly useful.

The basic benefit of any mind-body connection strengthener is the resulting connection to your own inner wisdom. The more your mind and body are in sync, working together, the easier it is to translate those intuitive hits, gut feelings, and moments of deep knowing into understandable, actionable directives for your life. Your inner wisdom is always on your side, helping you to create the life you want.

When you first start using mind-body connection tools, you will likely face stored emotions, unheard intuitive truths, and other uncomfortable information your body would like to share with you. We usually disconnect ourselves from our bodies to avoid this kind of discomfort, so it makes sense that reconnecting means facing that discomfort.

Think of the different elements of your mind-body system as having different jobs. Your body and emotions are the conduit for your inner wisdom/intuition, while your mind is the translator. It translates physical awareness of inner wisdom into language so you can understand it and use it in your daily life. Once you have moved through the initial phase or reconnection, your mind-body pipes, so to speak, are pretty much cleaned out. Your inner wisdom can then flow cleanly and easily through your body and into your conscious awareness. This means that nearly every time you purposefully connect to your body, you’ll probably get pure gold: creative ideas, solutions to problems, directives for the next steps to take, and insights.

This is where the mind-body way of living gets really fun and massage becomes your creative workshop. As you lie on the massage table, enjoying the heavenly bliss, you’ll find the idea stream opening up to maximum flow. This can be a little disconcerting if you’re trying to relax, but don’t stress. You don’t have to do a single thing about the flood of ideas coming through. Think of it as mining for gold – there’s a huge stream of water, silt, and other stuff flowing, but you’ll be sifting through it for the true gold. To do this, you don’t even have to work. Your inner wisdom itself will sift for you, and you’ll remember only the truly inspirational, useful pieces.

I take a notebook with me to my massages and leave it in the car. After the massage, I take a few minutes to sit and write down everything I remember from that rush of creative, intuitive information. I trust that whatever I remember is what I need most, and whatever I forget is something unnecessary or something that will surface again when needed. I end up with blog post ideas, workshop ideas, things I want to tell friends and family, questions I want to explore, and ideas for everything from business to health to hairstyles.

All of the mind-body tools have this effect after you’ve used them for a little while, because they are all designed to connect you to this source of creativity and insight – your own inner genius. However, I love the absolute decadence of treating myself to ninety minutes of bliss and getting amazing creative flow as a result. In fact, I’m off to get another massage right now.