14/02/2026
❤️
A little love and thought for your body this Valentine’s Day.
In the healing arts, we have a choice in how we approach change, and it is the same choice your therapist makes when they place their hands on you. We can work like we’re holding a hammer and chisel, trying to break tension apart and carve the body into a better shape, or we can work like artists with clay, shaping through warmth, patience, and relationship. One approach assumes resistance and tries to conquer it. The other assumes potential and tries to meet it.
A sculptor working with marble must strike and remove what does not belong, but an artist at the wheel keeps the material alive, adjusting pressure, adding moisture, circling again and again, letting form emerge through steady contact rather than control. Your living body is far closer to clay than it is to stone. It changes with temperature, hydration, rhythm, and trust. Tissue listens. Your fascia adapts. The nervous system leans toward or away from touch the way a plant turns toward light or curls inward from the cold.
If you have ever watched clay take shape, you know it responds best to presence, not force. Too much pressure and the walls collapse. Too little and nothing forms. Skilled hands create just enough guidance and space, returning again and again to glide, pace, and responsiveness. Bodywork follows that same conversation. It is not about overpowering your body, but partnering with it.
Clay is often described as “the only poetry that can be touched,” a visceral bridge between the earth and the human experience, shaped by patient hands and living pressure. And when I think about that, I can’t help but smile a little, because bodyworkers are doing something just as beautiful and artistic. We are not only shaping clay, but tending to bodies made of stardust, water, and memory. Dust Shapers of a different kind, listening for the hidden constellations within the body.
