Sometimes you want to be treated like a piece of meat.
By this, I do not mean being objectified sexually. Rather, I mean the weird experience of getting a massage — something I don’t do regularly. But after receiving a massage treatment as a Christmas present recently, I have started thinking more deeply about the odd but revitalizing experience of receiving a massage.
In a massage, you find yourself on a massage bed — or, as they sometimes call it, a table — as some stranger throws oil over you and tries to make your muscles more tender, as though your bodily flesh were simply a piece of meat that television chefs teach you to massage on your kitchen table. It is odd to feel and think of oneself as being a piece of flesh or meat “treated” on a table. Sometimes they even rub a salt-like substance onto your body as though to season you.
Yet, at the same time, the massage can also be deeply comforting. I often somehow feel “more myself” when I emerge out of the dimly lit room and experience the world anew with a somewhat revitalized — or even re-humanized — body, as though I’m more conscious of the world, feeling and experiencing it more clearly.
Perhaps one reason why I feel like I experience the world anew after a massage is because my experiences of the world in everyday life differ so much from my state of consciousness during the massage treatment.
In my everyday life, when I drink my morning coffee, open the door, and wave to my neighbor, I conduct and experience myself for the most part as an active subject; unlike the cup of coffee, the door, or even my neighbor, which are objects of my conscious experiences and actions. The I — the grammatical subject within the sentence “I drink my coffee” — is the active conscious subject, whereas the things or even people I encounter are objects of which I am conscious.
However, such dynamics are reversed in the massage. In the dimly lit treatment room, one’s instructed to suspend the use of one’s sight — whether by facing down or having a towel placed over one’s eyes — so that one is focused on passively receiving the massage in one’s body. In the massage, on the massage table, one no longer experiences the world as an active subject. Instead, the conscious I becomes a passive object — like the piece of meat on the table massaged by the chef. Perhaps even the momentary experiences of pain on the massage table epitomize the character of passivity central to the massage experience: after all, in Latin, the notions of pain and passivity are etymologically linked in the single word of “passion” (passio).
In the massage, one is no longer in control but becomes the passive recipient to the other. Besides seeing the doctor, the massage is one of the few moments in which one directly surrenders one’s body, one’s flesh, to a stranger whom one does not know beyond the confines of the encounter and process of the treatment. To undergo a massage is, in this sense, an act of faith: even an act of “blind faith” whereby one suspends one’s sight — the sense faculty the Western philosophical tradition has historically associated with the intellect — to put one’s body or even one’s intellect in trust of the hands of a therapist.
While the massage is obviously not some kind of organized religion with a clear confession of faith, its practice and its aesthetics share certain elements which resemble a kind of spirituality or a “remix” of religious themes often associated with the so-called “spiritual but not religious.” In massage salons or spas, one often finds statues of little buddhas or buddha-looking figures, some bamboo “Zen” forest installation, and even at times incense, items, and decorations one would normally expect to find in some shrine or temple in the Far East (or at least in some Hollywood imagination of these things).
Perhaps more intriguingly, there is the “spa music” one hears in the massage room: the type of atmospheric soft synth music which has become its own genre. After bingeing several documentaries on the Hillsong movement last year, I found it striking that “spa music” sounds remarkably similar to the synth music frequently used in charismatic and Pentecostal Christian churches. In these churches, almost always dimly lit like the massage room, the soft synth is often played in the background when the believer is called to “wait” for the Holy Spirit, to prepare oneself to receive God’s grace through the Holy Spirit. The soft soothing sound of the synth is supposed to enable one to be more open and more receptive to that which is beyond us: namely, to the divine and the transcendent.
Indeed, with its “rituals” of cleansing or even purifying the body, the spa is seen by many who are “spiritual but not religious” as a place of spiritual inspiration or even transformation—not dissimilar to practices of traditional religion. As the Harvard scholar of religion Mayra Rivera notes: “For people who are no longer part of religious communities, it is not surprising that there is a need for places where they can find those spaces, those times for a different type of attentiveness.”
The “different type of attentiveness” that the massage teaches us is how to receive.
Philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty argued that the human is a conscious being who receives sense data and perception from her surroundings, from the things and phenomena she encounters (whether such data is then processed or interpreted into concepts or not). This receptive character of human experience and existence is amplified and exemplified in the massage, in which one opens or even surrenders oneself to a giver — to the one who “gives” the massage. Unlike medical surgery or the operation table, on the massage table one is usually awake; the massage recipient does not simply receive the gift of healing or treatment but more consciously or even actively attunes one’s attention to experience the massage, to receive the massage in one’s conscious experience. The massage is a paradoxical phenomenon in which one actively becomes a passive recipient, experiencing what it means to experience — to receive what it means to receive.
But what does it mean to receive or, indeed, actively receive? It is, one might say, to actively recognize what we have received as something given to us. Such active recognition is like a response, for it is only possible because we have received something already. We may think of it in terms of gratitude: the act of giving thanks in response to the one who gave us something.
This may be a bit of a stretch (pun somewhat intended), but perhaps what the massage ultimately reveals to us is not just what it means to consciously experience the world but what it means to exist as a conscious human being. Rather than self-sufficient, thinking beings who can come up with and generate our own thoughts (as the modern age has had us believe), the massage shows us that we are embodied creatures whose bodies, whose flesh, are given to us. That to exist — to exist as a body, as somebody — is to receive. And to actively recognize that our body or even our existence is given to us like a gift is a kind of gratitude: a gratitude for existence or an existential gratitude.
Perhaps the desire to be treated like a piece of meat from time to time is something that helps me recognize that my life, or indeed my existence, is something given to me, something I have received, something like a gift.
King-Ho Leung is Assistant Professor in Theology, Philosophy and the Arts at King’s College London, UK. His most recent book is Spiritual Life and Secular Thought: A Phenomenology (Oxford University Press, 2026).
