I once heard of a study that said something to the effect that for people to be sane they need to have physical contact with other humans every day. I don’t remember the amount of contact involved but I do remember thinking that there was no way I even came close to that.

My family was never a touchy-touchy kind of family, and I’ve never really had boyfriends who were of the clingy type so physical touch is something that is still a bit of a foreign concept to me. The one thing I do know is that when someone DOES touch me I pretty much melt. Sometimes when I’m feeling really bad I’ll go to the cheap hairdresser place just to get someone to “play with my hair”.

About a year ago when I was feeling especially starved for human touch I was asking a friend if there was some sort of way I could “pay someone to touch me” and after the obligatory “rub and tug” and prostitution jokes they mentioned that perhaps I should just go for a massage.

I don’t make a lot of money but I found out that my local college has a massage therapy program and they have a practice clinic for the students at a very reasonable rate. The thing with it being a teaching clinic is that the students practice the things they learned in class that week and sometimes have goals to try and attempt to find a way to incorporate a new technique into the treatment of whatever ‘complaint’ you come in with.

Recently I’ve been having trouble with my hip and I went in and talked to the student and he did an assessment and said he was actually really glad that he got to work on my butt because it would be easy for him to complete his challenge for that week.

When questioned he admitted his challenge was to “use a body part other than his hands or fingers to perform a treatment”.

WaitWhat?!

At this point it took every ounce of effort to not look all pervy and start to giggle.

To my surprise (disappointment maybe?) It turns out he was planning to apply pressure with his elbow… I’m not sure what pressure point or whatever he was hitting but as he jammed his elbow into my butt the pain magically disappeared!

As I was laying there however I was doing everything in my power to hide the fact that I had the giggles because my mind was strategically creating the facebook status which would eventually state “I paid a stranger to repeatedly jam his elbow in my butt and I loved it!”

Sometimes it is fun to play with words!

~ Elena <3