A Prospective Guide for Muscle Monks

(What follows is my comment on a wonderful post on becoming a Tea Monk on Substack by the Peaceful Revolutionary.)

I have decided to become a Muscle Monk. I use capital letters sometimes because it is very important. I loved your piece/peace on becoming a tea monk and will have to read this new author, new to me, Becky Chamber.
I am transitioning right now to engaging in my vocation full-time. I have been a Muscle Monk for a long time already but I have decided that it is time for me to commit to my vocation. A muscle monk is someone who wishes to save the world with muscle. Muscles are a part of the body and include everything that is important to us from our hearts to our fingers and toes and our voice and even our sexual organs.
We all have muscles and sometimes they are brilliant and do things for us without our even trying. Our muscles are very closely related to our sexuality and our spirituality and our hopes and hurts and feelings. Behavior patterns are held in our muscles. Muscles are our most sensitive and volitional organ. As a muscle monk I believe the change that begins from within begins not just from our cherished beliefs and ideas but from within our body. There is no better source of agency than our muscles.
There are superficial muscles that you might train in a gym and flex in a mirror but there are also deeper muscles that work tirelessly deep inside of us, holding us together when everything else seems to be falling apart. Finally, when we are the ones who are falling apart, it is our muscles that can save us, and even the simplest and gentlest of movements can begin a sea change from within.
These deeper postural muscles are the particular focus of my vocation, but I like the big and showy sorts of muscles too. Being a muscle monk for me means that I find all of these different aspects of our body to be sacred and healing and wonderful and joyful and strong and reassuring and many other good things too.
More often than not in our broken world it seems muscles hurt and don’t work the way we want. We don’t know why they refuse to cooperate and begin to complain. We understand that we don’t move enough or don’t move well enough and that it takes its toll over the years and decades.
We know we don’t have the ability to understand the history and the habits and the experience of our muscles when they complain because we know we don’t pay attention and we even believe that we aren’t able to pay that sort of attention. I think that it is a strange conclusion if a very understandable one, because we are our bodies and nothing else.
It doesn’t seem to happen quite the same to animals in the wild but we know that this deterioration definitely does happen to animals in cages. We don’t want to see our own cages that we create for ourselves and for each other. Perhaps the old belief that we live in our minds while our bodies are sinful is the problem.
“I think therefore I am” was the belief that gave us power over nature. “I am therefore I think” is the belief that will give us power with nature.
A Muscke Monk has the job of doing the Deep Work and helping others to find balance and relief and hopefully a little bit of a new relationship with themselves and their own bodies. A muscle monk is a healer and a teacher and does this by simply touching and moving and listening to people and their muscles. It is my vocation and I take it very very seriously. I live a simple life devoted to the truth. I study deeply and train and practice and have worked for many years to build the manual therapy skills required for my vocation. I have worked for many years to study the body and the deep postural system that holds us together. I know things that others don’t and I know these great truths both as complex academic theories and the simplest of ideas that any child can grasp. This is what it means to be truthful. At least I very sincerely hope that this is so. It is my faith. I will let you be judge of it.
If you ever need some time with a muscle monk then I am here. You never need to do anything that you don’t want to do and I too never have to do anything that I don’t want to do. But I want to help you to heal, something your body already knows how to do but may need some help with. And I want to also simply soothe and relieve the stress stored in your muscles. It takes a lot more to come to a muscle monk than to a tea monk. This is why it is good that we have tea monks too.
What I share can be as simple as a hug. It is simple touch. It is perhaps not as simple as sharing a cup of tea but it can be as simple and direct as healing, loving, and careful touch.

Here is the original story on Substack about becoming a tea monk. It is really wonderful I thought. https://substack.com/@peacefulrevolutionary/note/p-140415619?r=2cl819&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action