Twenty years ago, a thought came to me during a massage therapy session. It floated into my massage studio and would not leave. I wrote it down. Once published, the thought kept moving. It turned up here and there: in a couple of books, in an occasional massage school graduation speech, on a massage therapist’s […]
Notes from the Oncology Massage Healing Summit, 2016
Our teaching staff returned from the 4th Oncology Massage Healing Summit in high spirits last month. Nanci, Erika, Cindy, Joan, Megan, Julie, Michelle, and Kim raved about their 4 days in Minneapolis, where they felt a strong sense of community among oncology massage therapists and a renewed respect for OMT teaching and clinical work. Kim […]
One Massage Study Does Not “Prove” a Point…
…For a massage claim to be accurate, it needs to be backed by the strongest evidence. Yet some of the massage studies we’ve quoted for years are neither strong, nor conclusive. In a few weeks, the Massage Therapy Foundation will release my free e-book, “Five Myths and Truths about Massage Therapy.” When it’s up, I’ll […]
Teaching and the Worst Form of Love
I was worried. Really worried. How could I teach effectively online, where I couldn’t see my students’ faces? How would we connect as a group if we were scattered so widely? Would online sessions ever feel like a living classroom? The warm kind of classroom, with padded seats and honest conversations and a beating heart? […]
The Massage Meant for Someone Else
Each time I teach a new group of students, it takes me a day or two to learn their names, and to straighten them out in my mind. The first day of a course finds me squinting at name tags and mouthing their names as I move through the room. When there are two students […]