My first session with Ann E. began as they all would: I stood against a wall wearing only a sports bra and underwear while she stood against the opposite wall, looking me over. She had me face north, south, east and west, and each time her eyes seemed to be tracing invisible lines down my body.
第一次接受安·E(Ann E.)按摩时，和所有治疗一样：我先是只穿着运动胸衣和短裤，靠墙站着，她则靠着对面的一堵墙站着，看着我。她让我分别面朝东西南北四个方向，每一次，她的眼睛都像是循着一些看不见的线条，审视我的身体。

Being with Ann E. feels a little like being in psychotherapy, except you’re usually lying on a massage table in your underwear. It costs about the same for a session, although it lasts a lot longer and she doesn’t care if you doze through most of it.
和她在一起，感觉有点像是在接受心理治疗，不过你通常都是穿着内衣，躺在按摩台上。每次按摩的收费也和心理治疗相近，不过她的时间要长得多，而且她也不介意你大部分时间都在打瞌睡。
Settled on her table that first day, I explained to her that I’d had many intractable physical problems in the last several years, the most recent being a pain in my knee that no medical professional could make heads or tails of. I couldn’t sit cross-legged on the floor or rise up out of a full squat, and I’d feel a sharp stab whenever I slipped that leg into my jeans. Some yoga practitioners that my husband knew had recommended I see her about this.
第一天，在按摩台上躺好后，我向她描述了过去几年身体上出现的许多难治的毛病。就在前不久，我一条腿的膝盖疼，却没有哪位医学专业人士知道是怎么回事。我没法盘腿坐在地上，也不能从全蹲的姿势站起来。每当要穿牛仔裤的时候，那条腿都会感到一阵钻心的痛。我丈夫认识的一些练瑜伽的人，建议我来找她。
After I’d spent 30 minutes on the table, Ann E. still hadn’t attended to my knee.
我在按摩台上躺了30分钟后，安·E依然没有管那只膝盖。
She hadn’t so much as looked at it. In fact, she didn’t even touch me. She just held her open palm a few inches from my body — first at my hip, then my feet, then my other hip, then at the top of my head — and I became so relaxed I fell fast asleep in the middle of her talking to me.
她甚至连看都没看它一眼，也根本没接触我的身体。她只是把打开的手掌放在离我身体几英寸的地方——先是髋关节，然后是脚，再然后是另一边髋关节，最后是头顶——我变得非常放松，以致于在她和我说话期间睡着了。
I barely woke up as she started pressing her finger into my C-section scar. “What are you doing?” I asked her.
在她开始把手指伸向我剖腹产留下的伤疤时，我勉强醒来。“你在干嘛？”我问她。
“Releasing fascia,” she said. Fascia is a connective tissue throughout our bodies that acts like webbing, keeping our innards where they’re supposed to be.
“放松筋膜，”她回答。筋膜是一种结缔组织，遍布我们的全身，像网兜一样把内脏固定在它们应该在的地方。
As she pressed on my scar, Ann E. talked to me about my body in a way I wouldn’t really come to understand for many months, but which I could experience the effects of right then and there. She used one or two fingers, touching my torso gently until she felt something release, then she’d move her fingers an inch or two to a new spot and press gently there.
在按压那处伤疤时，她和我谈论起了我的身体。她那种说话方式，我在后来很长一段时间都无法真正理解，但它的效果，我却是当场就感受到了。她用一根或两根手指轻轻按压我身体的躯干部分，直到觉得什么东西放松了。然后，她会把手指移开一两英寸，换到另一个地方，继续轻轻按压。
I didn’t know what I should expect from this subtle prodding, but it wasn’t for my lungs to inflate like balloons. As Ann E. worked, my breath deepened, my lungs filling as they never had. “My breath just completely changed,” I said.
当时，我不知道应该期待这种微妙的按压会有什么效果，但肯定没想到它会让我的肺像气球那样膨胀起来。在她按压时，我呼吸加深，肺变得从未有过的充盈。“我的呼吸完全变了，”我说。
“Yeah, I just created some real estate in your torso so your lungs are less constricted,” she said.
“是的，我刚在你的体内开辟出了一些空间，这样你的肺就舒展了，”她说。
Now she had my attention.
这时，我开始重视她了。
Although I have spent about three decades — nearly my entire adult life — in talk therapy, I have always felt fundamentally unfixable.
尽管在几乎整个成年生活的30年时间里，我一直在接受谈话治疗，但我总觉得自己的问题无法从根本上治愈。
My longest therapy stint started in my late 20s. I was always sort of unhappy, but went to a therapist specifically to stop smoking cigarettes and to leave my job. At the end of six years, I was still at the same job and still smoking. Then, my company closed and I got pregnant, so my job ended and I quit cigarettes. But I don’t think I really changed at all.
快到30岁时，我开始了最漫长的一段治疗。那时，我总是有些不开心，去看这名治疗师却只是为了戒烟并辞职。我接受了六年的治疗，却依然干着同一份工作，也依然在抽烟。后来，我所在的公司倒闭，我也怀孕了。于是，我不再干这份工作，也戒了烟。但我觉得自己并没有真正改变。
I had always been skeptical of anything too “alternative,” until about eight years ago, when I first started to see the connections between mind and body. I’d been referred to a psychologist to deal with back pain. But even that experience, despite eliminating the distress in my back, felt like more of the same — we sat across from each other, I told my story, I talked about my “feelings,” I cried.
我总是对特别“偏门”的替代疗法持怀疑态度，直到八年前开始看到身体与心灵之间的关联。当时，有人介绍我去找一名心理医生治疗背痛。那段治疗经历尽管消除了我背部的疼痛，但感觉也大同小异——我们面对面坐着，我讲述自己的经历，谈论自己的“感受”，我还哭了。
I could have gone on like that for years, just as I had with other therapists, because no matter what I said, or how I looked at my story, the emotional pain always felt fresh and new. I felt stuck.
那样的治疗我本来可能会持续多年，就像我接受的其他治疗一样，因为不管我说什么，不管我如何看待自己的经历，精神上的痛苦永远历久弥新。我觉得自己被困住了。
After pressing on my C-section scar, Ann E. moved around the table to my right shoulder. I had injured this shoulder twice. It took almost a year for the first injury to heal and then eight months later I reinjured it, leaving me in such discomfort I had to prop my arm with pillows when I drove. After doctor visits and months of physical therapy, the pain was gone, but I no longer had full range of motion.
在按压了我的剖腹产疤痕后，安·E绕过桌子来到我的右肩。这只肩膀伤过两次。第一次受伤用了将近一年才恢复，八个月后我又把它弄伤了，留下了很严重的不适感，导致我开车的时候都要用枕头撑着手臂。经过医生的诊治和好多个月的理疗，疼痛消失了，但我的这只手臂再也不能全幅度运动了。
I hadn’t told Ann E. any of this. I’d told her only about my knee, which she continued to ignore.
这些我一点也没跟安·E提起过。我只对她说了膝盖，而她一直无视膝盖的问题。
“Don’t touch me there,” I said as she approached my shoulder. “It makes me uncomfortable even having you near it.”
“别碰那里，”我对正在靠近肩膀的她说。“光是接近它都会让我感觉不舒服。”
Yet ever so gently, she slid one hand under my shoulder and then even more gently, laid her other hand on top of it, holding it as lightly as you would a baby bird, and in an instant I was sobbing uncontrollably.
然而她的一只手还是滑到了我的肩膀下，前所未有地轻柔，随后放在肩膀上面的另一只手还要更轻柔。她的双手就像捧一只小鸟一样，轻轻捧着肩膀，刹那间，我难以自制地啜泣了起来。
What she was doing did not hurt and there was no sadness — or any specific feeling — attached to the crying. Tears streamed from my eyes, and my chest heaved. It went on like that for maybe five minutes, and then the crying stopped suddenly and completely, as if it had never happened at all.
她的动作并没有导致疼痛，而哭泣也无关伤感——或任何其他具体的感受。泪水从眼中流淌出来，我的胸口起伏有致。这样的情况保持了大概五分钟，而后哭泣突然而彻底地停止了，仿佛什么都没发生过。
And without moving a muscle, I could tell that my shoulder had changed.
虽然一动未动，我已经能感觉到肩膀不一样了。
Ann E. refers to her work as “unwinding” and likens the process to taking apart a big ball of tangled necklaces. Each tangle has come about through some emotional or physical injury from which our body has attempted to heal. But the body compensates in areas where it is weak, and those compensations turn into habits. The pain we feel is largely due to a once efficient system no longer working the way it should.
安·E称她的工作是“松解”，就像是解开一团缠绕在一起的项链。每一个结都是某些情感或身体的伤痛留下的，而我们的身体已经尝试过去治愈它。但身体会在一些弱的区域进行补偿，这些补偿又会变成习惯。很多时候，我们感觉疼痛，是因为一个曾经高效的系统，已经不能再像往常那样运转了。
When Ann E. presses into fascia that has become gummed up like glue, holding parts of our insides where they don’t rightly belong, her touch somehow “dissolves” the gooeyness and allows the fascia to revert to its original light, fluffy nature. With each of these releases, the “necklace tangle” loosens and our bodies can start to sort out the mess that has been accumulating for so many years.
筋膜像胶水一样，把我们体内一些本不在一起的部位粘在一起。当安·E按压筋膜时，她的触碰以某种方式“溶解”了粘滞感，让它恢复到原本轻盈而松软的状态。随着每一次的松弛，“项链结”解开了，在我们体内淤积多年的困扰得到梳理。
As I discovered on that first day, she rarely works where the pain is. She says that the body provides her a map of where it’s really hurting, pulling, stagnant, frozen, and she starts there, unfurling one little piece of the necklace ball, so that the body can begin its own organic process of unwinding itself back to health.
她很少去直接处理疼痛的地方，这是我从第一天就发现了的。她说身体给了她一张地图，上面注明了真正疼、扯、滞、僵的地方在哪里。她会从那些地方下手，解开一个个小项链结，好让身体自行开始松解的有机过程，恢复到健康状态。
My shoulder was not the only area that incited sobbing. This would happen many times, with other parts of my body, during my work with Ann E. Every episode came on the same way: I suddenly felt very vulnerable, almost unbearably so, and then the tears came, completely devoid of emotion, and then they stopped, leaving me feeling as if I were suddenly freed of something.
我的肩膀并非唯一一个促使我哭泣的区域。在接下来与安·E的合作中，还会出现很多次，事关身体的其他部位。每一次都是这样：我突然感到自己很脆弱，几乎难以承受，然后眼泪就下来了，完全不带感情，然后就止住了，给我留下突然摆脱了某种东西的感觉。
What happened on that table was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I cried harder than when I was 17 and lost my father to cancer, harder than when our family dog was run over by a truck a month later, and harder than when I was dumped by my first love.
在那张按摩桌上发生的一切，都是我未曾经历过的。我的哭泣比17岁时父亲因癌症去世，比一个月后我家的狗被卡车轧死，比我被初恋抛弃，都要来得更痛彻。
But this is a body crying, not the crying of a heart.
但这是身体在哭，不是心在哭。
I’m not quite sure how to explain how the emotions become unstuck, but as with my shoulder that first day, much of my lifelong pain now feels as if it had never been there in the first place. The main thing I feel is a kind of unfamiliar optimism, along with a lot more energy — energy that, Ann E. would say, has been freed up from letting go of longstanding trauma.
我不是很清楚该如何解释这种得到解脱的感觉，但就像第一天肩膀经历的那样，我的许多长年未愈的痛苦，变得好像从来就不曾存在过。我的主要感受是一种陌生的乐观情绪，还有更加充沛的精力——用安·E的话说，这种精力是因为放下了一些持续很久的创伤。
I continue to let Ann E. untangle me. I try to trust that she has my best interests at heart. I wrestle sometimes with how much I’m willing to let myself need her. But as I unwind, I sleep better. I breathe better. Parts of me that have hurt for years have stopped hurting. When I look in the mirror, I’m still middle-aged and my hair is still graying, but I feel able, possibly for the first time, to truly cope with life.
我继续让安·E帮我松解。我努力让自己信任她，相信她在为我的最大利益着想。有时我会自我搏斗，不想让自己太依赖她。但随着我的松解，我的睡眠改善了。我的呼吸改善了。全身上下一些疼痛多年的部位不再疼了。我看着镜中的自己，依然是那个中年人，依然渐生华发，但我感觉到，也许是迄今以来第一次，我觉得自己能面对生活了。