My interview with P.E. Moskowitz

Originally posted on their substack, Mental Hellth

The last session I had with Kento Spanos, my friend and also someone I do bodywork with, made me feel insane in a good way. As I lay on his table, I could feel different emotions in different parts of my body as Kento pushed his weight into them, or gently held them. One half of my body—the right side specifically—“felt blue”—something I thought repeatedly during the session and told Kento afterwards but still have no clue what it means. But it still feels true; as if my mental traumas and grief had coalesced in my right arm and shoulder and Kento had found them there hiding, cowering as if they’d just robbed a bank and hoping no one would shine a flashlight on them.

I used to think most body-based stuff—meditation, acupuncture, massage—was kind of useless for mental health. But then it started working. Almost a decade ago I was struggling with persistent PTSD symptoms. I did therapy. I took medications. But it was really acupuncture and massage that finally made my nervous system calm down. Fast forward to about a year ago, I thought I was mostly “cured.” I’d stopped going to yoga, I’d mostly stopped meditating. Probably not coincidentally, I had started having more panic attacks.

And then I met Kento at a party and he told me to come in for a session at his massage studio. Boy was I wrong about being healed!

Kento is a somatic bodywork specialist, which means he does massages that aren’t just about working on pain or issues within your body, but also your mind (but really these two things are not separate at all, as Kento and I discuss below).

After most sessions with Kento, I’d feel grief, like things long-buried had been surfaced. Sometimes I’d even have a panic attack on the table. It felt as if Kento was literally touching my traumas through my skin, or at least showing me where they were.

It’s always a struggle for me to balance my interest in “woo woo” things with wanting to remain critical of any modality of healing. But I’ve come to believe, at least for me, that these things are deeply effective. And, really, why wouldn’t they be? The mind and body are not two separate entities. It is a relatively recent phenomenon that we think of them as such.

I wanted to talk to Kento about his practice, about the politics of bodies, and how we all can stop shoving our traumas and discomforts into vaults or caves inside our body—and how that might lead to our personal and/or societal liberation.

[This interview has been edited and condensed]

Last time I came to a session with you, what exactly was happening on your end? Because on my end, I felt so many weird sensations in my body. I felt almost like a darkness on the right side of my body. It was such a strange sensation. Were you feeling any of that?

Yeah, I mean that session was informed by a few different things, including the fact that we were resuming this work together that we’d done in some depth last year. I think what I picked up on was what I was able to sense in your muscles—how you were holding them, where they were tense or had more resistance. And that’s tied to the nervous system. Your muscles can be sore from working out, or stiff from certain movements or from injuries, but I think the majority of the tension in our body is connected to our thoughts and mind. And so when I linger in certain places, like during last session, it’s an invitation partly for you to join me in holding that muscle, focusing on it, and observe what’s happening with it, and then connect it to something that might be coming up for you mentally.

I feel like the the connection between the story in our conscious mind that we always carry with us, versus what the body is telling us, the body’s story, those two things are often separate—and this is an opportunity to have them converge in this really novel way that we don’t often get the space to do.

I guess what I’m asking is: are you feeling the same things I’m feeling when you’re touching me?

Well, I’m definitely not a mind reader. I can’t intuit your thoughts. But I can intuit shifts. Like really subtle shifts in the body. And so if I see a shift in breathing for example, or if I see a shift where your shoulders might be from one moment to the next, those are the kinds of cues for me to ask questions or check in with you, because that shift is happening often because something is coming up for you.

It’s not the case in every session but in some sessions I notice that I might be really focused on a muscle or working on a stagnation of release somewhere specific, and then I start to have certain emotions come up for me that relate to my own life. When that comes up out of nowhere, especially while I’m working, I know that’s a cue that maybe that feeling isn’t exactly mine, or that there might be this unfolding or sharing of a feeling that’s coming up for the person I’m working with. It’s always a cue for me to be incisive and allow people to notice what might be happening in the moment.

When you do notice these things—a shift in muscle or a sign of tension in the body—what, exactly, does that signal for you?

Sometimes I like to use this metaphor that this type of body work feels kind of like excavating, or climbing, or exploring, an internal cave. And my hands aren’t doing that for you, but my hands or the pressure I’m applying is kind of a headlamp that points out something that might have been previously in the dark to your conscious mind.

So you might suddenly feel a tension in your calf that you’ve never noticed before, or you haven’t noticed in a long time, and once you notice that, maybe your feet kind of stop digging into the table, or your hips might adjust to notice that new sensation. It becomes this domino effect—my presence or my witnessing something can lead to a chain reaction that might change the nature of that muscle just by witnessing it. Some people tell me, “I had no idea that was going on in my body until you pointed it out.” The awareness can help your body stop running these processes in the background, like it was on autopilot.

Is that why I start thinking about things I haven’t thought about in a long time when I’m on the table? Like, as you know, I was dealing with the death of a person close to me last year, and that would constantly come up in my mind on the table, and I’d often feel a lot of grief, either on the table or afterwards. Is that because in some way you’re saying you’re finding these things in my body?

Yeah, I think that’s true. I am kind of highlighting something that’s always been there. I think often with certain past experiences and feelings, it’s sometimes easiest to not deal with it at all; to just let it sit there, because that might be less scary. And so I think having another person in the room that can give you permission to deal with it, to look at it, to remember that experience, to feel that feeling—that can allow it to be a lot more within reach. It’s similar to psychotherapy, but we’re just not analyzing things. We’re just letting them surface. And people have often told me that they’ll bring certain ideas or thoughts that come up in their sessions to their therapist.

How did you even get into this work?

My first job in New York was mostly working in the photography industry. And after 10 years, I was having a tough time in that industry, and I wanted to do something else. My family, when I was younger, in Japan, used to kind of employ me as the family masseuse. I would go around as a young kid giving massages to my family members, especially my mom, who really worked hard with her body at a bakery. Her hands would be really stiff and her body would be really achy. So I took that experience, and I was fortunate to find an opportunity to take classes in New York, and begun an exploration into how body work can be connected to the mind, and how I could bring more presence into this type of work than a traditional massage therapist. And I also spent some years practicing meditation and yoga and a few other kinds of practices that have all funneled into what I do.

Was there something within your own body that you’d experienced that made you want to do this—like why this over, say, psychotherapy? What specifically about the body and processing things through it really interested you?

Well, I did have this really profound experience during Covid. There was one practitioner in Brooklyn, named Linda, who did a certain type of body work called Tuina. It looks similar to what I do sometimes. It’s like acupressure, deep tissue work, and a lot of uncomfortable high-pressure holding. And I kind of randomly walked in there for a session. There was quite a large language barrier. She didn’t speak any English. But I knew a little bit of Mandarin, so we were able to converse a tiny bit. But after the first session, she walked over to me and pointed at her paper calendar, and just pointed to the following Wednesday and said, “you.” So I took that as a directive to return. And I had about 10 successive sessions over the course of a few months, and I found that it really helped me release these long-held beliefs about my body and my mind and my mental health—things related to addiction, to all these behavioral patterns that I was looking to break. It really felt like something had changed in me after those sessions. After the ninth or tenth session, she walked me over to the calendar and flipped the page, flipped a couple of months, and said, “maybe here.” So it felt like we had finished some of the work. I felt like I’d learned so much in those sessions. That was a big inspiration.

One of the things we’ve talked about is having to be ready to embark on this journey through the body. You talked about there being a kind of bank vault where people want to store their emotions and traumas, and you have to be ready to open it. The first time we worked together, I’m not sure I was ready to open the vault, but the session definitely opened the vault for me. It was a kind of terrifying experience to be honest. Because I’d gone about life without addressing a lot of my traumas, even in therapy. Therapy didn’t force me to open the vault in the same way. Maybe I’d gotten good at tiptoeing around it through language.

With people in my private practice, it’s really community-forward and referral-based. People come to me hearing of experiences through their loved ones or through communities of care of any kind. But when I first started my work, I had worked at a spa in Brooklyn. Being plopped into a spa where no one knew the type of work I was building my expertise in, I noticed that I was often faced with clients who did not want me to, like, stay in certain places. There was generally this discomfort in shining that flashlight.

I think generally, massage therapy has been kind of ensnared in capitalism to this extent that it’s just a pair of hands. Now they’re trying to say a robot can do it—there’s AI massage robots that are supposedly as good as humans because, to a lot of people, massage is just about the labor. But I do think at its core this is a very intimate and vulnerable act—to trust another human being with all that we hold in the body.

And so I think when we started our work, it was definitely a new proposition for you to go into this with someone. We knew each other, but we had to build this trust working together over time, and over sessions.

I’ve learned that people come to me in my private practice at all different stages of willingness to address things in their body, and I have to wait for the invitation to kind of pry things open—pry open the vault door a little bit. But the initiative to be curious about what’s coming up, to maybe even voice it—I wait for the receiver to initiative that. There’s no forcing open the vault, because your body and mind have very advanced ways of keeping that all in balance. I don’t wanna disturb this balance that’s kept you safe and surviving through difficult times in your lives.

How do you balance that? I feel like obviously the world is not in a great place right now, and people are just trying to survive. But I also feel like that’s a self-feeding system, where the repression people use for survival cuts them off from humanity and makes them do bad things or believe bad things. Do you see America, or the West, or the world, or whatever, as particularly cut off from their bodies—as particularly “vaulted?”

I do find that focusing my work on queer communities and people who participate in organizing, and people who identify as non-binary or trans—that they tend to be closer to their traumas or closer to their vault. Maybe, in some way, people find me and the work when they feel ready to. Sometimes people will come for one session and then I won’t see them again for a year. And then they’ll come back and be like, “I’m not really sure, but I felt ready to do this work more regularly.” Especially having clients who identify as trans, I have found they have more willingness to explore these things, or it feels more urgent for them.

I think that makes a lot of sense, that queer and trans people would feel closer to their vaults, and that other people would feel less close. In that sense, do you see this work politically? Not to put words in your mouth, but I’m wondering if you have some version of what I’m about to say which is: the fact that people are so repressed means they’re not ready for any kind of personal but also societal liberation. We expect the world to become a better place, but we can’t be liberated if we are stuffing everything into our vaults. I wonder if you have a version of that.

I’ve definitely had experiences where I’ve worked with someone who felt really unprepared for the invitation I was offering. Without making blanket statements, they tend to be cis and straight, and of a certain class and race where, let’s just say, the extreme comfort and privilege of their position has allowed them to keep everything in their vault without fear of losing anything. It’s almost as if they don’t have to access that vault. They can keep things locked in their basement and still be comfortable.

That makes a lot of sense. I’ve never really thought about it in that way. I’ve thought that of course queer and trans people have more trauma than other people, but I think you’re right that it’s also that they’ve had reason to actually access their vaults because they need to because the world isn’t set up for them. They’re literally going through this process of transformation that requires plumbing the depths of their own psyche and body, and other people don’t necessarily need to do that.

Totally, and especially with trans people in America, where the insurance system and healthcare system force you to go through all these hoops to be the identity that you want to be, you have to confront your body, and you’re in your body so much more than someone who’s never had that experience—recovering in a hospital bed, needing your partner to help with your scar tissue or drainage or all these things that are so physical. You’re coming face to face with the elements of what makes a body a body.

On the flip side, maybe someone who doesn’t endure that, they might not see their traumas a needing to be plumbed or excavated or viewed differently, because it might not be the difference between survival and death. The same is true with sex workers or anyone who has had to put their body on the front lines for survival. They’re so much more aware of their own bodies. They’re aware when they’re in danger, they know what it means for a body to have signals that it’s under threat. It makes you so much more attuned to what’s being held.

At the same time that we’re thinking of the body and mind politically, MAHA and people on the right are being very critical of mainstream modalities of dealing with mental health and the body and what we eat and such. How do you reckon with that? Or like square that these are questions so many across the political spectrum are having?

I choose to be careful about how I describe my work because I think the MAHA-TikTokification of alternative wellness and somatic therapy is really scary. But I think that their suspicions and concerns about the pharmaceutical industry and American healthcare and the profit motive behind all of it are worthy of investigation. I just don’t think the dots are being connected in the right way.

I know people who’ve been on antidepressants their whole lives and I’m not criticizing that, but I think from an industry standpoint, in order for these medicines to justify themselves we have to believe that whatever’s happening in the brain is only neurochemical, or that it’s genetic, or that it somehow has nothing to do with the entire system of the body—that the brain and its functions are somehow completely divested from what’s happening in the rest of the body.

I think that understanding is where some of the MAHA questions come from, but I think there is questioning coming from all sides of the political spectrum about this right now, and curiosity about why we’ve decided that the mind and body are separate.

I feel like that disconnection has been purposeful. Like, if I were a fascist and could wave a magic wand to make people more prone to fascism, I’d make them feel completely disconnected from their bodies and discombobulated.

Right, and you would make them believe that the food you put into your body, or the amount of movement your body receives, is insignificant to your health. And that the solution to the problem is only medical or pharmaceutical.

Beyond the big political questions, do you think here’s anything we can do on a very micro level to start re-connecting with our bodies and less prone to locking things in the vault?

I will literally just sometimes lay down on the floor and try to engage my mind and my conscious thought with the muscles and tissue in my body. Obviously, my muscles don’t have the language to have a conversation with me, but, you know, the body can send us signals. We’re used to the body sending us pain signals, for example, when we have an injury, but there are less audible signals that we’re not as in touch with. Meditation tends to really help me come back into my body. Just observing and watching.