The Awesomeness of Bob

mtwadmin - Fri, October 30, 2009

When I told Jared and Andrea I was going to be writing an article about Bob Nemeth, their faces lit up.  “Bob is awesome,” said Andrea.  “Yeah he is,” concurred Jared.  “You should call your article, ‘The Awesomeness of Bob.’

I had never really spoken to Bob.  He’s an afternoon guy and I usually come into MTW in the mornings.  But I had seen him all over the MTW website and heard Bob’s name mentioned so many times that he had become a character in my mind well before we sat down face to face, like the title character in a Moliere play who doesn’t enter until the end of the first act. 

When Bob and I met for our interview, it was the end of lunchtime and he was finishing his soup.  While I waited for him to be done with his meal, I tried to attach my preconceived Bob notions to the man sitting in front of me.  I knew he specialized in injury recovery and did lots of things with sciencey sounding names like Spinal Reflex Analysis, Rehab Myotherapy, and Myofascial Release.  Bob’s skills are legendary at MTW.  Stories of him helping a woman who’s right leg was one and a half inches shorter than her left (when he was through there was only a normal half-inch difference) and helping a little girl who’s brain was not developing properly were common around the office.  I was half expecting a no-nonsense practitioner with a medical approach and half expecting a contemplative energetic-healing guru.  Turns out Bob is a little bit of both.

We sat down and I immediately found Bob to be an incredibly calming presence.  Before we could get to all the boring stuff (How long have you been a massage therapist?  Why did you get started?) he wanted to tell me about a workshop he had just been to.  Matrix Energetics is a relatively new form of energy work that taps into the field of possibilities, and the reality that on the smallest level, anything is possible.  He was so excited to talk about the new skills he had learned and how he planned to implement them into his practice, I could barely get a word in.  From the moment we started speaking, I was struck by Bob’s passion for healing.  Here was a man who had been practicing holistic bodywork for thirty-one years, and he came at it with the enthusiasm of a young person who has just discovered his life’s work. 

Eventually we started talking about his personal journey.  “Massage and bodywork have always been about healing for me,” he told me.  “Before I became a massage therapist, I had gone through a process of healing myself.  When I was younger, I lived an extremely self-destructive lifestyle.  It got to the point where I could feel it hurting my body.  I knew I needed to make some big adjustments. 

“In 1972, I made the decision to heal myself.  I quit all the bad stuff and changed my diet.  I started studying with herbalists in Worcester and up in Canada.  My interest in herbs eventually led me to to the Cristos School of Natural Healing in Mexico.  That’s where I studied with the incredible herbalist and healer Dr. William LeSassier. 

“There was so much to study at Cristos.  I studied herbalism and some acupuncture, and I found the bodywork I experienced incredibly inspiring.  This was my introduction to hands-on healing.

“When I moved to Portland, Oregon after Cristos, I needed a job.  My experiences with bodywork and my own journey of healing had been so moving, I knew I wanted to pay it forward and help heal others.  This was 1978, and chiropractors were all the rage, but I decided to go into massage therapy instead.  At the time the industry wasn’t anywhere near what it is today.  It was actually pretty difficult to find work.  I got very lucky.  A posh athletic club that had had massage facilities since the early 1900’s had a massage therapist position open up right as I was getting my certification.  Everything just aligned.

“After Portland I lived in Seattle for eight years and then in Marin County in California.  I loved the West Coast, but a myriad of circumstances eventually brought me back home to Massachusetts.  I do miss the West, but it’s nice to live around my family again.”

I asked Bob about some of his specializations.  Again, he became animated.  “Rehab Myotherapy isn’t just about muscles, but also about joints and bones, and also about the synthesis of alignment.  Your body isn’t a frame of bones with tissues draped over it.  Everything is connected like a spiderweb.  If you tug one thread of the spiderweb, the whole thing changes shape.  Your body is like this, and it carries with it numerous impressions from traumas throughout your lifetime.”

Bob is also an ordained interfaith minister.  Eventually, his goal is to combine all of his practices, the bodywork, the energy work, and spiritual healing, into an overarching, truly holistic healing practice.  “I want to alleviate suffering, be it physical, mental, spiritual, or some combination of the three.  In my experience, it’s usually a combination.”

It was time for me to experience the awesomeness of Bob for myself.  I told him about my chronic hip and and knee pain on my left side, which is my most pressing and persistent problem, and my jaw, which I have a bad habit of clenching.  Bob decided Rehab Myotherapy and CranioSacral would be the best modalities to treat these problems, but he wanted to start out with some energy work. 

The energy work was different from other subtle energy works I had received before.  We were both standing up, and most of the time his hands never touched me, but hovered about six inches away.  I tried to clear my mind and just “notice what I noticed,” as he instructed me to do.  It was a profoundly relaxing experience.  I felt warm vibrations flowing from my head to my feet.  Occasionally parts of my body would seem to move on their own.  At times I almost fell over.  When it was over I felt like I had just stepped out of a warm bath.

After that, it was time for more hands-on bodywork.  Myotherapy was different than any massage I had ever had.  I lay down on the table fully clothed, in jeans, a belt, and a sweater.  Bob moved my limbs around in circles, aligning this, gauging that.  The term “body mechanic” may have flickered into my consciousness a time or two. 

Bob told me things about my body I had never known, but that made perfect sense.  “The way your sacroiliac connects to your pelvis is tilted.  You have no range of motion on your left side below your hip.”

My left hip and leg.  My “bad leg.”  I asked him if the twisted pelvis was why my leg was bad.  “It’s not a ‘why’ situation,” he said.  “It’s just how it is.  Everything is connected in this specific way, and the pain is simply another part of the configuration.”

Bob brought my limbs through very precise rotations.  He held my shins and moved my legs through their full ranges of motion.  As he bent and twisted me, I could feel the relationships between the muscles, bones and joints changing positions, finding their proper places and settling into them. 

When I was lying face-up on the table, Bob illustrated the tilt in my pelvic bone.  The left half was higher, and the right was angled downward.  “That’s easy enough to fix,” he said.  What happened next was one of the strangest experiences I had ever had during bodywork.

Bob put one hand on each of my hips and steadily and deliberately moved my pelvis.  I don’t mean my legs and spine went with it like when you shake your hips on the dance floor.  I mean I could feel my pelvis shift, and all the connecting bones staying put.  The relationships between bones and pelvis changing in the joints and sockets.  It was like everything slid over. 
It’s something I’ve never thought about before.  My hips can actually be in a position other than where they have been.  We think of our bodies as these ultimate constructions that just sort of “are,” and we have to deal with them.  But our bodies are movable, are changeable, and sometimes we get into a pattern over a long period of time that twists our bones, our foundations, into painful ways of relating to one another.  It’s just like a group of long-term friends.  It’s the issues that are left unaddressed that lead to strains.

He finished with CranioSacral (a subtle manipulation of bones in the skull and upper spine) and facial massage.  He did some of the same bone adjustments with the bones of my face and jaw. 

When I stood up, I was amazed.  My whole body felt right.  The pain in my leg was dramatically decreased.  Walking home, I didn’t even favor it.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to mention this, but another unusual thing happened after this session.  A few months before I had gone into the dermatologist with an embarrassing red birthmark on my lip.  She assured me that it wasn’t harmful, just a dilated blood vessel, but she said it would never go away without an expensive laser treatment.  It was bright red in the middle of my face and had started to make me very self-conscious.

The morning after my bodywork with Bob I looked in the mirror and something looked different.  Upon closer inspection I realized that the birthmark was completely gone, as if it had never been there.  I remembered the energy work Bob had done with me the day before.  I had been thinking about the birthmark, but hadn’t mentioned it because I didn’t think it was something he could do anything about. 

I don’t know if the energy work was why the birthmark went away.  Maybe it’s not even a “why” situation.  Anything’s possible.