Mobile Sanctuary
Carrying the Sanctuary Within You
For years, I have suspected that what people value about my massage practice extends beyond the bodywork itself.
My treatment room is quiet and uncluttered. The table is soft and comfortable. The lighting is gentle. I don't talk much during a session unless there is a reason to. There is room to settle.
Over time, I began to understand that the environment was not incidental to the bodywork. It was part of the experience.
That realization eventually became an idea I called Mobile Sanctuary.
The original concept was fairly literal.
What if I could bring some of the qualities that made my treatment room feel restorative into other spaces?
I imagined helping people create dedicated sanctuary spaces in their homes. I could help them think about light, sound, texture, objects and atmosphere. Because touch was such an important part of my own work, I also imagined teaching partners and friends simple massage and bodywork techniques they could use with one another.
Then I began thinking bigger.
Years ago, I created a Mobile Sanctuary logo featuring a car with the tagline:
We bring the Zen to you.
The idea expanded into workplaces. Instead of asking people to leave their day behind and travel somewhere to decompress, perhaps the sanctuary could come to them.
I had an opportunity to try it at UNC–Chapel Hill. For one day, an existing room became a temporary sanctuary. I brought a massage table and offered brief, light bodywork sessions. The response was enthusiastic, and there was interest in having me return periodically.
But I was already imagining something beyond occasional massage.
What if there were dedicated spaces throughout the campus where students and faculty could simply stop in and unwind briefly before continuing on with their day?
Not a break room. Not another place to eat lunch, check a phone or have a meeting. A space intentionally set aside for unwinding. Bodywork might be available too, but it wouldn't necessarily be the point.
The larger idea never came to fruition. Funding changed. Other possibilities stagnated. For a while I even entertained the idea of an actual vehicle—a kind of Sanctuary-On-Wheels that could travel to festivals and events.
That didn't happen either.
Mobile Sanctuary went quiet.
Or at least I thought it did.
The Sanctuary That Never Was
Even as I imagined sanctuary spaces for other people, creating one in my own home remained elusive.
We had a massage table set up in the back room, and at one point I began making plans to turn the room into a The Sanctuary. I had ideas for creating a dedicated space for self-care, sensory awareness, quiet, and intentional rest.
Then a 180-pound Stop sign appeared.
My partner was perfectly happy for the massage table to stay. The cats could lounge on it in front of the window, and occasionally we could work on each other. But turning the entire room into a dedicated sanctuary?
That wasn't going to happen. It is a shared space after all.
So, I got smaller.
I created a little area on top of my bedroom dresser. A small Tiffany lamp. A few sensory objects. Things that helped establish a mood and gave my attention somewhere to land.
But a dresser is still a dresser. Things accumulated. Life encroached.
Eventually, I went outside.
Into the Woods
I began walking in the woods and pastures behind our house with my trusty sidekick, Mr. Gray, one of our six cats.
I already knew about the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing—the simple act of spending time in the forest and taking it in through the senses. What Mr. Gray and I were doing wasn't quite so intentional. Not yet. It was more of a ramble.
At first we stayed in familiar territory. Then we began following deer paths and venturing farther into the woods. We wandered beyond our property and into places I would eventually give names.
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Somewhere along the way, I began paying closer attention.
My brother Michael is a botanist, and years of seeing the natural world through his eyes had quietly influenced the way I looked at it. At first, I would notice something because I thought he would appreciate it: tiny white wildflowers carpeting the forest floor in spring, an unusual plant, a fungus high in a tree.
Then I began noticing for myself.
And the more I noticed, the more there was to notice.
Places acquired names. Moonshadow Meadow. Fern Gully. Pecan Alley. Gastroc Rock. Tree Cage. Sad-Faced Tree.
Some became landmarks for my body. I stretched my calves at Gastroc Rock. At Tree Cage, I stretched my arms. I pressed pecans into the KI1 acupressure point on the sole of my foot.
Mr. Gray climbed trees, raced across fallen trunks and hung back in the pasture until, without warning, he would tear past me at full speed.
After a while, it felt as though we were going out there to see our friends.
Attention accumulated.
When the Landscape Began to Answer Back
Around that time, one of our cats, Little Guy, crossed the rainbow bridge.
He had always been much more closely bonded with my partner than with me. After he died, I found myself wondering whether I should have tried harder with him. Did he know I loved him?
One day in the woods, I noticed a plant with green, heart-shaped leaves.
I immediately thought of Little Guy.
It felt like an answer.
I don't need to decide whether it was an answer. What mattered was what happened in the encounter. Something outside me met something inside me, and meaning arose between them.
The heart comforted me.
After that I began seeing hearts everywhere.
The forest became a place where the external world and my internal world co-created meaning.
I collected some of what I found—carefully, and usually sparingly. Twisty sticks. Pods. Stones. Walnuts.
My pockets were frequently full of nuts.
A Nut in My Pocket
One day, I discovered a walnut I had forgotten in my pocket.
I held it there as I went about my day, turning it over in my hand. Eventually I took it out and looked at it.
There was the heart.
The heart made me think of my deceased mother. I knew she would have appreciated my discovery, and somehow that gave me solace.
Then my massage-therapist brain took over.
I pressed the walnut into the muscular tension in my forearm near the elbow. I used it at the LI4 acupoint in my hand and along the tibialis anterior muscle in my lower leg.
It felt good.
I wasn't healing myself with a walnut. I was using something I had found in the woods to bring attention to my body, apply pressure, and relieve some tension.
But something else interested me even more.
Simply holding it in my pocket was reassuring.
And nobody knew.
That mattered.
I didn't have to explain what I was doing. I didn't have to tell anyone what the walnut meant. I didn't have to turn it into a ritual or announce that I was practicing self-care.
It was just a nut in my pocket.
And it was mine.
Something Already Available
Eventually I began to understand that the walnut wasn't doing anything magical.
It was a cue.
Its texture and weight brought me into my hand. Its shape connected me with the woods. The heart carried associations with my mother. The object had accumulated relationship.
It gave me cued access to something that was already becoming available within me.
And walnuts weren't the only cues.
Sometimes I hum. Sometimes I chant. Sometimes I sing along with the radio.
Even something as simple as the color purple glimpsed in an otherwise ordinary setting can put a smile on my face from time to time. A purple granny sweater. A violet bicycle seat. It’s like a little bit of magic in the mundane.
Sometimes the cue is another human being.
There’s a cashier I encounter occasionally who always catches my attention. Her hair is immaculate, her fingernails are extraordinarily long, and I can hear them tapping against the register as she works. She is consistently warm and upbeat, greeting everyone who comes through her line. She calls me Honey—a term I don’t usually care for, but somehow from her, it feels different.
For five minutes in a grocery-store checkout line, her way of being changes the quality of the space around her.
The sanctuary may be internalized, but it remains relational.
The world continues to participate.
The Vehicle Was Me
It took me a long time to understand what had happened to my original idea.
Mobile Sanctuary began with a little car.
We bring the Zen to you.
I thought the vehicle would carry the sanctuary.
I thought I would arrive somewhere with the massage table, the sensory objects, the quiet atmosphere and the skills I had developed over years of bodywork. I would temporarily create the conditions, and people would enter them.
But somewhere along the way, the meaning of mobile changed.
I couldn't create the room I wanted at home, so I went outside.
The forest co-created the conditions through which I learned to find sanctuary within myself.
I brought pieces of it home.
I carried one in my pocket.
And eventually I understood:
The vehicle was me.
We are, after all, mobile by nature.
You are literally an ambulatory human body carrying an internalized capacity for sanctuary through the world.
Not the sanctuary itself, permanently furnished and waiting inside you.
The capacity for it.
Becoming the Sanctuary
That capacity requires tending.
I lose contact with mine all the time.
Too much screen time can pull me away from myself. Other people's expectations can do it. So can allowing myself to become a container for everyone else's needs while forgetting to be a container for my own.
Sometimes tending the sanctuary means humming.
Sometimes it means walking outside.
Sometimes it means noticing purple.
Sometimes it means saying no.
Sometimes it means allowing an experience to remain private—not everything meaningful needs to be shared, explained, or understood by someone else.
And sometimes it means putting my hand in my pocket and finding a walnut.
Perhaps that’s what becoming the sanctuary means to me now.
Not withdrawing from relationship. Not needing nothing from the external world. The external world helped me discover this capacity in the first place, and it continues to offer reminders.
But there is an interior place that belongs to me.
I can pay attention to it.
I can protect it.
I can cultivate it.
I can tend it like a private garden.
The walnut isn't the sanctuary.
I am.
The walnut reminds me.
Wherever I go, I am still here.

And this interior place is mine to tend.