A. Ben Cabal, Part 2: From Halibut to Healing

By Ben Cabal, edited by Jonathan Atleson

I’m ready to go home. I’m done.

I was just 23 years old. 23 and in really great shape. But they wanted to cut me open to fix me, and I wasn’t ready for that.

The doctors said I had Carpal Tunnel Syndrome or Tendinitis. They offered injections, or worse, surgery.

I shook my head and thought, I think there's another way.

Dressing the halibut meant cleaning out the 500 pound fish and then throwing it into the hole filled with slush to keep it fresh for the journey back to the cannery.

My hands and forearms were pumped up from the dressing. No time to recover. They felt arthritic.

I knew something was up when I couldn’t open the bathroom door. I was trying to get out, but my hands were so pumped up I couldn’t even turn the handle. I resorted to banging on the door, yelling, “Let me out, let me out!”

And then there were the times that we were able to rest and recover. But my hands were just spent; I would bang them on the table just to wake them up. I thought to myself, I want to go home…back to San Diego. Toes in the sand, warm sunny weather, surfing. I was ready to go home. I was done.

For three years, I had been an Alaskan commercial fisherman. I was the “keeper” who, every 10 seconds, hooked the fish and threw them on board. I was strong, sure, but also just about physically wrecked from the intensity of it.

It was at this point that God introduced me to Christine Stephens, a Massage Therapist and former Olympic gymnast. She was currently working on her powerlifting because she was training to become a firefighter. I was thinking that was what I wanted to do next: firefighter. So we became training partners, studied together, and then fell in love.

She shared with me the acupuncture academy in Oakland, where the Sufi had a long goatee all the way down to his belly button. He couldn’t speak English without an interpreter.

The Sufi asked me to stick my tongue out; he assessed it, took my pulse, and then sent me to the next room room. In the room were three male apprentices performing a massage technique called Tui Na.

Later on I learned Tui Na was a meridian massage. There were twelve organ meridians running like a freeway system all through out my body.

Until then, I’d never took the time to relax and receive healing. For me, it was heavenly to be touched therapeutically like that.

Then there was the acupuncture…based on his initial assessment, the Sufi acupuncturist treated me with needles. It was so good, I had to thank God how all this was coming together to help me heal.

The acupuncture academy gave me some Chinese herbs for tea. The instructed me how to boil and drink them. They were rather unpleasant, but I did what I was told.

The results were nothing short of amazing. I was only treated three times by the Sufi acupuncturist, but he had completely eliminated all my symptoms: tendinitis, carpal tunnel…gone! I thought, “There’s really something to this…they are enabling me to heal my own body!”

This was the beginning of my journey into Massage Therapy: the gift of touch, hands-on healing, where we would help the body to heal itself.

One day, Christine was finishing up a full day giving massages. She had worked on something like ten clients and was completely exhausted. I told her, “Get on the table, let me work on you.”

Photo by Marc Zeman on Unsplash

She said, “Wow…you’ve got great hands…all that strength! You need to get them trained. Then I can get you a job in massage.”