Pain, Paper Pants & the Profound

Roadside, near Monkey Forest, Ubud. A bend where bikes lean low, horns beep, engines rev, overtakes blur, knuckles grip handlebars, warmth fans across skin with each uphill acceleration and dust swirls in the hot, fume-laced air.

We wait for Sudiana.

He appears, gliding out from behind a pickup, curving smoothly into the bike area of the studio.

He removes his helmet: chiseled Balinese features, wide alert eyes, a warm smile. He beckons us over. We go.

“Hi, long time no see,” he says, smiling.

(I’ve never seen him before.)

We shake hands. I wave to John and Reid, then follow Sudiana up a set of open steps, where he gestures to a door at the end. I follow his hand… straight into a bathroom.

“You want me in here?” I ask.

He looks up from another doorway. “Nooo… but you want toilet, right?”

I hadn’t asked for a loo.

Then I realise I need to go.

I shrug, thank him and shut the door. As I wash my hands, I wonder what exactly I’ve signed up for.

Sudiana is known, not casually, but really known , as one of the best masseurs in the world. From a five-star Bali resort to being flown around the globe by billionaires, celebrities, A-listers, royalty. This is a man whose hands, apparently, transform bodies. People I trust swear by him.

Whatever he’s going to do… I’m in.

He waits in the therapy room. He peels back a batik cotton sheet and gestures to where I should lie. Then hands me a stylish pair of paper pants.

“Put them on if you’re not comfortable being naked.”

Naked?

Erm. Okay.

I’m still in.

By the time he returns and I’m tucked neatly beneath the sheet, I feel like I’ve strapped into a funfair ride… the kind you can’t get off. And then begins the most painful massage of my life.

I have a high pain threshold. The hour and twenty minutes that follows requires a level of focus and breath-management I didn’t know I had. Every muscle he works feels like a thumb-war ... my body versus twenty years of jiu-jitsu / Muay Thai / thumb-war brutality.

And in between breaths, my mind wanders.

At some point it feels like he isn’t even there anymore ... just sensation and mastery, a strange choreography unfolding.

I wonder about his philosophy on bodies and consciousness, how many human landscapes his hands have travelled. What he must think of Western bodies… how we bend, stiffen, calcify around our lifestyles; how our thoughts and mindsets contour themselves inside frameworks that become almost impossible to question within the pummelling rhythm of daily life.

I thought about how our bodies adapt.

They learn how we sit. How we drive, How we rush. How often we brace instead of soften. How frequently we override discomfort in favour of productivity, politeness or pushing through.

The body is obedient like that, have you noticed? It shapes itself around the life it’s given.

Shoulders tighten around responsibility. Hips lock around urgency. Necks freeze in forward-leaning anticipation. We store unfinished conversations between the shoulder blades and carry years of silent coping in the lower back.

Perhaps, I winced to myself (as Sudiana massaged a lower right arm muscle that I didn't even know I owned), Western bodies aren’t injured so much as over-managed. We live lives of straight lines and right angles ... desks, chairs, screens, cars ... and our bodies fold themselves into compliance. Until something calcifies and compensation becomes pain.

And then it hits me ... what’s been happening to me over these past few days in Bali. Why I’ve felt weird, discombobulated, fuzzy-headed and dull. It’s as though Bali itself has been massaging my psyche, pressing its thumbs into the hardened parts of my mind, reshaping the geometry of how I think. All the subjects I usually churn over have become impossible to grasp, suddenly invalid ... their old importance dissolving like puddles in forty-degree heat.

My routines are lifted. My patterns don’t fit. And now Sudiana is completing that same process with my body as well.

“Is this pressure okay?” he asks as he presses his thumbs (or knuckle, or elbow) into the point in my shoulder that’s been jippy since the accident two years ago.

“It’s fine,” I manage, face scrunched like a baby. “I trust… (wince)… whatever… (wince)… you need to do.”

And so the torture continues. And so does my childbirth-style breathing.

Eventually, one twisted spine, a deep stomach-organ massage, an inner-hip release that clicks out a fifteen-year misalignment, a head pulled practically out of its socket, and feet bones strummed like a guitar ... the massage is complete.

“I will leave you to get dressed,” he says, graceful as a Buddha.

I get up. Dress slowly. And decide to take my paper pants with me, rather than leave them on the bed like some peculiar offering for Sudiana to bin.

I step out of the room feeling like a marionette whose strings have been (tough) lovingly untangled. My hip no longer clicks. My lower back no longer hurts. My organs are rearranged into what I can only assume was their manufacturer’s original layout.

My thoughts feel shifted. Centred. Calm.

Sudiana reappears, smiling with the serenity of a monk who occasionally moonlights as a professional body-breaker.

“You feel different now?” he asks.

“I do,” I reply, unable to articulate exactly how. Instead, I pay him and book another massage for when we’re back in Ubud before Christmas.

Outside, the roadside chaos hasn’t changed. Scooters still weave. Horns still beep. A thousand insect-like engines hum. But I feel more grounded inside it.

As we drive away, I keep my spine straight. John comments on how level my shoulders look (for the first time since he met me) and I’m acutely aware that alignment isn’t something you achieve once.

It’s something you practise, not just in the body, but in thought.

See, if the body takes on the shape of our lifestyle, then tension is information. Pain is feedback. Misalignment is actually a question that is asking: "What am I repeatedly doing that requires this much compensation?"

I don’t yet know how to maintain the physical alignment Sudiana has coaxed back into place (I'm guessing a more dedicated Yoga practice and less gym would help) ... or the mental softening since the water purification ceremony.

But I’m keen to learn.

I'm want to keep decalcifying my perspectives, loosening my grip on old frameworks, nudging belief systems out of positions they’ve occupied for years and shedding light on my cultural blind-spots.

Most importantly, I want to know whether new alignments, once made, can be sustained when we return home.

Right now, I don’t have the answers.

What I do have is:

A) Some paper pants stuffed into my bag.

B) Another appointment with a world-class masseur, during which there may be further revelations and/or suffering.

C) ) A few more weeks of Bali-balm to deliver its unexpected medicine.

JOURNALLING PROMPTS I'M GOING TO USE (and you can too if you want to):

1. Where does my body consistently hold tension ... and what patterns in my life might it be adapting to or compensating for? (Consider posture, pace, emotional habits, or responsibilities.)

   
   

2. If my current physical discomforts were offering me information rather than a problem to fix, what might it be asking you to change or soften?

   
   

3. What beliefs, routines or ways of thinking feel rigid or calcified ... and what would it look like to gently realign them rather than force them to break?