Resurrection Stories: Bodywork Therapy in Cuba

Last November, a colleague and I traveled for a week to Matanzas and Oliva, Cuba, to share the bodywork therapy we practice, Ortho-Bionomy, with our friends there.

Ortho-Bionomy is a gentle form of bodywork that supports the body’s innate wisdom to self-correct and heal from within. It allows the brain to recognize what’s happening in the body and to respond, creating more ease and communication throughout the whole system. There is a structural component as well as an energetic, fluid one.

Ortho-Bionomy practitioners don’t fix. We facilitate the body remembering its wholeness.

Our days in Cuba began with a morning group class on self-care and body awareness, followed by a few hours of hands-on work for anyone who wanted it. After lunch, we either did more hands-on work or spent time visiting with each other in other ways. Over the course of the week, I had sessions with more than 50 people.

One day, at Primera Iglesia Bautista in Matanzas, after working with a senior adult group, I began working with a few women. My table was set up in the center aisle of the church.

After working with a handful of women, I noticed my own body beginning to feel irritated and frustrated. Gratefully, I’ve learned to pay attention to those sensations. They are usually clues about how I’m working or what I’m working with.

I quickly surmised that the tissues of the body I was working with were unresponsive. It was like no one was home. I tried almost everything I could find in my bag of techniques to help stimulate a response—some kind of movement, a sense of presence, connection—but nothing.

‘No es fácil’

I realized I had felt a very similar sensation in the bodies I had worked with before hers. There was a theme, a pattern.

I kept working and listening. And then I wondered, Is this what systemic trauma feels like?

Something in me recognized that as true.

My eyes suddenly grew hot and watery, and tears began rolling down my face. I had touched into something—quite literally: into grief, hypervigilant bracing for impact, and into living in a culture of not enough, of struggles upon struggles.

“No es fácil.”

“It’s not easy.”

I first heard this phrase when I began traveling to Cuba decades ago, and it hasn’t changed.

Suddenly, I felt helpless. I had no sense of how to support what I was feeling. I had never before felt this depth of loss, uncertainty, and hopelessness in the tissues of the body—all at once.

‘Ask for guidance’

I did the only thing I knew to do. I prayed. I asked for guidance. Of all places for this to be my “office,” how fitting it was to be in a church.

I lifted my gaze to the front of the sanctuary. To the cross. And I opened to something beyond my understanding.

I stayed as present as I could. With my own overwhelm. With my connection to the body under my hands. I began working with a familiar technique, one that holds past energy and invites it into the present time.

But something felt incomplete. One-dimensional. I asked the moment: What is missing?

And then, something shifted. Not as an answer exactly—but as a wondering.

What if this body, this community, and this country were not only holding the struggles and injustices of the past, but also struggling to visualize the possibility of a future? Where did hope live in the tissues?

I continued to wonder. What if I held the past with my left hand, the present through my torso and legs, and the future with my right hand? What if they could all three come into relationship?

I had nothing to lose. So I reorganized my hands and my energy. And then I felt a movement emerge—like a figure eight moving between my hands. It took a moment to recognize what was happening, but it soon became clear.

The energy was repeatedly circling the past, crossing through the present, and connecting into the future. It was clear and connected. There were moments of doubt—because what I was feeling was so unfamiliar. But I stayed and listened.

And then, the tissues began to respond. They softened and moved. They breathed and woke up. There was a connection.

I was participating in something I didn’t fully understand, but could not deny. And I wondered: Had hope been reawakened?

Ever the skeptic, I thought maybe this was a one-time thing. So I tried again with each of the other friends who came to my table.

Each time I met that same quality—stuckness, contraction, absence. And each time, I held that relationship—past, present, future.

And each time, something shifted. Something expanded. Something came back to life.

‘Embroider a new world’

In reflecting on what happened that day, I remembered a quote by Björk, an Icelandic singer and songwriter. She said:

“After tragedies, one has to invent a new world, knit it or embroider, make it up. It’s not gonna be given to you because you deserve it; it doesn’t work that way. You have to imagine something that doesn’t exist and dig a cave into the future and demand space. It’s a territorial hope affair. At the time, that digging is utopian, but in the future, it will become your reality.”

I realized that’s what happened that morning. I held a pathway to knit together the hope, to hold the sensory feel of hope, and to imagine it so fiercely that it demanded space, connection, and realness until the body could sense it and bring it into fruition.

On Sunday, during the church service at the end of the week, Primera Iglesia’s pastor, Orestes, offered words of gratitude.

With tears in his eyes, he said:

“You brought us hope. We have been living without hope—and you brought us hope through your work, your presence, your gifts.”

‘We carry hope for each other’

While I received his kind words, there was something in me that wished I were able to put a response into words. If I could do it over, I would grab the microphone and say something like this:

“Oh, dear friends … that may be true. But something else is also true. By being in your presence this week, by laughing and crying and moving and singing and eating with you, you have embodied for me a depth of hope I did not know existed. We have ignited a hope within each other. You have shown me that hope does not always manifest as certainty, or ease, or even relief.

Sometimes hope looks like staying, like being here, in this moment with each other. Like continuing to show up inside of conditions that are impossible. You have helped me realize that hope is not something we carry alone. We must carry it for each other.”

Maybe this is what resurrection looks like. It’s not only something that happens once, long ago, but something that happens again and again in the living body.

I think resurrection hope is this—the quiet return of hope when we think none is possible, made real through our willingness to stay, to listen, to imagine a new reality, where we carry hope for one another and are held fully by the Divine.