As for my innermost, deeper truth: I must admit that it has no language. In Hebrew, Truth is 'Emet', and since all nouns in Hebrew have sex, Emet is feminine. It just occurred to me how suitable it is for the truth to be feminine, since truth is ever changing, dynamic, creative: she is the mother principle in our being. Therefore, my truth is. Within the session we, the patient and I are, together. And the journey taken is a joint one, the quests are shared and the question marks belong to both of us. And there we are, together, aspire to the same basic thing: which is, order (cosmos) and balance, dynamic flow.

Integrative Massage Therapy (IMT) is a shared space and shared experience. However, I know that in its best, IMT is a therapy, it is a process. I know that one ought to receive IMT sessions as a therapeutic process rather that occasional 'energy boosters' or 'one shot' trial. I could see the immense differences between patients who received IMT in its most effective form, as a therapeutic process, and those who enjoyed it fragmentally. This is why I am trying to transcend my primal understanding here, which has no language but the obvious language of being. This is why I am trying to communicate what is in IMT for me, the things I have to share, the things I invite my patients to receive.

I joined the two-year course in Swedish-Medical-Holistic Massage almost by accident, and under the unique and loving hands and soul of Flora Shemesh, I found one angle to cherish and to keep, my first important anchor in the therapeutic space.

It was intriguing to discover that even in my supervised practice I found such a tremendous therapeutic satisfaction. The people who came to see me were drawn to me for very specific causes: they sought therapy. It was amazing for me that so few of my patients were 'clients', the big proportion of sexual and physical abused victims; of people with eating disorders; of deep processes taking place in the session. When asking Flora about it she said, you ask for people in need and you get what you are asking for, they are drawn to your thirst. My own pains contributed to sharpen the specificity of that thirst. Although not a common theme in our group, Flora encouraged me to adopt my own way, acknowledging my need to do therapy. She is one of the few teachers I know that were delighted to let their kids grow and leave the warm parental nest and I am grateful for her.

Next, the psychotherapeutic and hypnotherapeutic training I acquired answered another inner burning need. It was clear to me how I must, how I am obliged to create my own space of the integration of touch and psychotherapy; addressing the conscious, the body-unconscious and the soul-unconscious; to set forth a safe environment for enveloping change. There is a lot more that I need to learn, and I am learning all time. In my advanced courses I try to internalise these new learnings into my own systematic structure of therapy. My clients are not meeting a 'know-all' therapist, they meet me, a student, a friend, a guide.

After the initial psychotherapy and hypnotherapy training, the role of the soul (or spirit) emerged. My faith and my god joined in me to strengthen the way I chose and to blow life into it. Faith is the therapeutic soul in IMT, the core depth of change, the light and the day, the love and the life.

This is my place, my home base. It is not better than other effective therapies or doctrines. I am not a better therapist than any other effective and loving therapist. However, this is who I am. I need to have all these components arranged in this individually tailored structure, since those are my favourite languages and adopting others' is impossible for me. I love to play with these languages on the tongue of my being, because this is who I am. In order to be a good therapist, I need all these components and yet another, even more important one: advancement and dynamics.

What is the pure intention, anyhow? It is simplicity. In the deepest places of existence, and therapy; at our innermost intimate places, we are identical and simple. It is intention for happiness (the English language lacks the word for true and total happiness, being in the highest form of being). It is intention directed at relief from pain, at a smile. It is love, and embrace and acceptance. I am grateful to my vocation, to my faith and to my gods for every time I am privileged to hand such an intention, since I receive twice as much from it. And I live in it, and become a better person in it.

When I walk in the streets of London (or Potters Bar), the world is opaque. In the underground - people are opaque, impervious-bubbles. In the same sense, I am opaque to them. What does it mean to be opaque? It means to hide my humanity from the 'thou', to be something outside the fellowman. My boundaries are then clearly defined and bluntly asserted. Love is the active choice and movement towards extending these boundaries, towards reaching out.

My love to Tom, my wife, is a shared existence in a shared, exposed and intimate space, and this is the happiest external (and internal) reference point in my life and an abundant resource of energy for each and every step I take in my life. The love in therapy, albeit different, is too a shared existence in a shared, exposed and intimate space. I draw the right to guide our joint journey from places bigger than me, bigger than my ego, who grant me the gift of a candle light. I use those energies to help bring about change.

What do I give in return to those places, from whence I draw my faith? I give my presence, my being in it. How come I receive that privilege of love? Because I am a man, since I am. And since I need it in order to be whole. This is my vocation, the same voice which makes me write to be the I who is me, which guides me in the labyrinth of paths: saying which way is mine, which way is not.

I learned to use the collective unconscious in therapy, and not only in therapy. The world is so much smoother and softer once I am guided by something bigger than my own ego. So clear and light is this ray of healing, the genius curative consciousness, so bright she is, that I fear no more to be as young and inexperienced (only few years of therapeutic experience) as I am in this world. Because the road is crystal-clear and the love so pleasant. How is it that only through humbleness in the face of the collective unconscious, I am given that power? Since whenever Ego threatens to surface and reappears, when I am proud or scared or shy - the ennoblement retreats and the treatment is so small and ineffective.

Thereafter I started to apply the same love triangle, the same faith triangle in my personal life, communicating with hidden parts of me - unconscious parts; developing deep friendship with the unconscious who is my body and with everything that was me without knowing. Everything was done through love.

Gradually, the fear of recognising love as a religious faith faded and disappeared. The more I worked, the more I work my faith is getting stronger. Together with the strengthening of faith, the need to name its subject weakened and she is just there, and she is creative and loving, embracing and reassuring.

I am human - I am weak. It is impossible for me to be with that faith all the way throughout the treatment. This triangle too is flashy in its essence, and I know that a tiny flash is enough to make the relationship between the patient and I, through faith, a perfect one. It carries the touch to the most needed places in the patient's being and delivers energy to it; energy of change.

Whatever creates that energy, be it words (hypnotherapy or psychotherapy), breathe of touch - it is still the same energy. I add all these approaches to increase the probability of this exciting movement. And when it is, all the theories - mine as well as others', all the explanations and words become unnecessary and preposterous - there is movement, there is dynamic being, there is life, and I have a chance to experience labour. Maybe the creative side in me is just jealous of the pure femininity. Because if there is only one character to the big consciousness it is her femininity. It is a she.

Our era is a time of changes. You can feel it in the air, in the people, in the energy all around us. How natural and easy it is to connect people to that energy. Lately I feel, inside me, flooded with energy (sometimes to the extent of becoming short breathed). It is so pleasant to swim, just like that, in the foaming river of change-energy. How lucky I am to bath in it.

When a patient is coming to see me, a change is happening in our relationship (shared space) out of which the change in her or him sprouts. The distribution of roles is no longer clear or at all needed. However, awareness to this process is not a necessary condition for the actual occurrence. Still, I want more and more patients, more and more changes. And I am thirsty to her, to the therapeutic energy. The same happiness is evident in my writing too, but with whom I share it I know not. Only this I know: every patient is enlarging my heart and my loving capacity.

When I began receiving payment for treatment I felt like a fraud: I am receiving money to grow. It felt like I should be the one who is paying, I received and now it is my turn to give. However, a violinist who gives Tchaikovsky's violin concerto to others receives payment although he wasn’t the one to compose the piece. The creativeness is manifested in the calibration and facilitation, in translating the therapeutic energy and in the willingness to carry it further, to others. Indeed, I feel called to treat, and from there I teach my patients a new language. They pay for the lessons, not for the language.