Last Autumn, I found a woman in the park outside my apartment with a massage table, a sign, a bowl of caramels and a man. The sign said “Run your bars, $20” and the man’s face said “simp.” It was a unique opportunity to engage with the first person I’ve seen in four years who was inconsiderate enough to haul a DIY massage table into the park and hustle on public property.
A twenty-dollar bill still sticks to my fingers these days, remarkably more so than a hundred does, and I hesitate before dropping twenty bucks on anything. My session on that dubiously legal massage table was worth twenty bucks. Every once in a while those striking memories strike again: the nonsensical, hand-drawn sign hiding behind the caramels; the way her previous patient hovered and hugged like the man I pray I’m not; staring up at the trees in the perfect sunlight as this fading woman crowned me with her fingertips; her bewilderment when I gave my address as her name at my domain dot org. And my growing fascination with this thing called Access Bars.
Which is of course a big scam®. Aside from my fascination with the practice itself, Access Bars® is a huge alternative medicine multi-level-marketing pyramid scheme. It’s ® for Repugnant Trickery!
What I learned from her during my twenty-dollar session was this: there are energy channels running through your body. Stress, anxiety, and other bad feelings coincide with backed-up pipes. A trained practitioner can “run your bars” by gently pressing points on your scalp while focusing on energy flow for an extended period of time, usually 60–90 minutes. This creates an energy circuit across your body that burns off the muck and detoxes your mind. The founder of Access Bars learned this from some aliens2.
Other sites I’ve found online compare having your bars run to “defragmenting your brain” and explain the science a bit differently and for two hundred dollars. The practice is the same, minus the feet which my spinster may have invented herself. When you have your bars run, someone presses their fingers on your head for an hour and then you feel better once a week.
My time on the table began because I thought it would be a cheap scalp massage. There’s no massage involved. My bare feet hung off the table while I grilled her and she sought the critical terminals1. Running the bars is usually a long, quiet moment stretched between two people, and she even told me about incestuous rituals where partners trade off and run the bars for each other.
I am fascinated by Access Bars, because the founder of Access Bars discovered a memetic mutation of meditation and then bottled it for sale. This mental virus has distilled the giver-receiver power dynamic of alternative medicines just like TikTok boiled the padding out of viral video content and Twitter decapitated literature.
When I practice meditation as a novice, I sit for 15 minutes while I try to focus on the sensation of breath and on “the present moment.” I understand that real meditation is much like this, but lasts for 45–90 minutes and is done by people who are not me. In my sessions, I sit or lie alone against a ceaseless flow of thoughts. It is really hard to keep my focus and relax.
When you concede to having your bars run, you slip into a critical power dynamic where you are totally giving yourself up to the practitioner and the power they have over the bars. And the practitioner does have power, because unlike massage or acupuncture, there is no expertise. Anyone can run your bars if they bought the training DVD. You won’t be worrying if your practitioner is skilled enough to make it work because their quality of service is measured by how long they touch you for, which you already know is a benjamin an hour. If you believe in Access Bars, your practitioner must then be present, focused, constantly fingering the contacts, constantly caring for you. Otherwise it wouldn’t be working. “Access Bars works” and “My practitioner is all-powerful (in this context)” and “My practitioner is using their power to heal me” are entwined truths: if you believe the first then you believe the others too.
When your bars get run, a window of mindful, present awareness easily focused on a physical sensation has been opened by the presence of an intimate, powerful parent who you know for certain is currently cleaning your mind of all its evils. Access Bars treatments involve lying quietly for 60–90 minute sessions while your focus is drawn to the sensation of your practitioner’s touch. You can’t avoid it. It’s so, so easy to focus attention on that touch; it’s practically automatic. It is implicit intimacy. It is a cradle. It is safety. It is Access Bars®.