Tatler

January 2010

Eyes Wide Shut

I decide on a course of Body Balancing at Pure Massage with Polish masseuse Beata Aleksandrowicz. I have known Beata for a few years. She passionately believes in the healing power of touch and in my experience she seems to operate on a completely different level from any other massage therapists I have known. She has a gift for unwinding the emotional knots as well as the physical ones. A few times a year she travels out to the African bush to work with displaced Kalahari bushmen – although they don’t speak the same language, they communicate purely through touch. In London Beata works fro ma womb-like treatment room at Fenwick. She realises the iron-fisted tension in my body by loosening up tight connective tissue (the stuff that encases our muscles), to create space in the body for energy to flow correctly. Again, this is not a quick fix. One massage is not a cure-all but after about six sessions Beata recons she can fine-tune my posture and reset my muscle memory enough so that I will feel more energetic during the day and will be able to relax properly at night. And so to bed. Tonight I don’t feel like a coiled spring. I have a weeks worth of perfect eights (eight hours’ sleep) behind me and I’ve noticed the vampiric blue tinge under my eyes is starting to fade. Who knows what the future holds? I’m not longer that worried. The most crucial thing I have learnt through this experience is the importance of living in the present.