In massage and bodywork, there is an elephant on your tables and chairs, in your spa rooms, and, in fact, everywhere you take the profession. Not the trunk and peanuts kind. No, this animal is metaphorical in nature, yet an animal, nonetheless. Strangely paradoxical, this elephant is the backbone of many modalities and to many of our lives, yet is often avoided in the name of privacy, sacredness, and because we just don’t know how to talk about it. The subject of which I speak is none other than spirituality.

Someone may tell you it’s all in your head. Yet you know it’s not, because you’re feeling it, in excruciating detail, in your body. Movement education pioneers F. Matthias Alexander, Moshe Feldenkrais and Milton Trager agree that it may have started in your mind — way back when your body and your brain were learning together how to crawl, stand and walk — but it didn’t end there. Movement education theorizes that when the body establishes responses to its emotional or physical environment, those responses are carried forward long after the original stimulus is gone.

Millions of people have suffered from their own or someone else’s addiction. I’m not talking about craving a few brownies. I’m talking about gambling, cocaine, the Internet, heroin, alcohol, nicotine, crack cocaine, marijuana, caffeine, pornography, food, sugar and prescription drug addiction. Addiction takes a huge emotional toll on everyone, has profound financial and legal consequences, and dashes the hopes and dreams of families everywhere.

Massage & Bodywork: Tell me briefly about the incorporation of spirituality in your own bodywork.

Barry Kapke: My approach to bodywork is definitely influenced by Eastern views. My practice and teaching of forms such as shiatsu, nuad bo rarn (traditional Thai massage), Breema bodywork, and Swedish massage, and incorporating aspects of other approaches such as Ortho-Bionomy, Trager(R), Dzub-Nyin (Tibetan Ayurvedic massage), yoga and Theravada Buddhism, have led to my rather eclectic formulation of a way of working I call Insight Bodywork(R).