Why I light the room before you arrive
The first sentence of the conversation is spoken without words.
Some of what I write here will be short. A single observation, kept because it seemed worth keeping. This is one of those.
I turn the heating up before you leave your house. Twenty-four degrees, which is warmer than a room is usually kept, and warm enough that your shoulders drop before you have decided to let them. Palo santo, burned earlier, not to cover anything. The linen is already folded. None of it is decoration. A body reads a room the way it reads a person, quickly and without asking permission, and it has usually finished deciding before you have taken your coat off.
Reverence is not solemnity. It is attention, paid without hurry.
That is the register the whole practice is tuned to. Not therapy, not performance, not technique for its own sake. Attention, paid without hurry, to a body that has gone too long without it.