Health
Healing Massage and Emotional Release
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010 | Health, Massage, Seattle | 1 Comment
A good, deep tissue massage isn’t just about healing the body, it’s also about releasing deeply stored emotions.
Intense emotions can be held deep inside our muscle tissue the same way they are stored in the brain, just waiting for a familiar scent or a stranger’s face to release them.
Receiving a therapeutic massage may dislodge some emotional layers you haven’t dealt with in a while and you might come away from a massage feeling either light as a summer’s breeze, or as heavy as a boulder, all depending upon which emotions were tapped into.
These emotional releases are connected with good, deep bodywork, and as a massage practitioner I’ve witnessed many emotionally-charged sessions when working with clients. Make no mistake, massage therapy can be intense.
We all carry around pockets of memories within our bodies and dislodging them, shifting them around, and making them a part of your day isn’t always easy. But, stirring things up can be a great thing! Getting these intense feelings outside oneself and into the light can be a fantastic improvement to one’s day.
So, consider turning a bright blue sky Northwest day into a day where you’ll receive important bodywork. If you’re in Seattle, browsing the web, and thinking of getting a deep tissue massage, also think about the healing benefits of therapeutic massage and bodywork. Maybe even the benefits you don’t usually consider. Like getting in touch with deeply held emotions and opening up more.
Turn your day into a healing day and your body and your emotions will thank you for it.
Listening to Your Body: Don’t Wait until It’s Too Late
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 | Health, Massage, Seattle, exercise, health tips, nutrition, stretching | 1 Comment
Make smart choices when it comes to listening to your body and its pain signals.
Maybe it’s not deep pain just yet, maybe it is a recurring stiffness in one knee joint or a dull ache that you feel like you can ignore in your lower back.
If it doesn’t get some bodywork and professional attention, it could turn into a bigger problem down the road.
You receive and feel these messages, because yes, your body sends signals and messages to your brain. Sometimes these messages come through louder or softer, but the messages are coming through.
It’s you who needs to pay attention.
By ignoring these messages, you do your body and health a huge disservice—you put off a healing massage treatment for one more day.
Attend to your body, get back on the path to proper care, and a healthy body awareness.
Make an appointment and visit a massage practitioner before more damage is done.
Don’t store up your pain and put off receiving a massage. Especially right now, here in the middle of traditional summertime in Seattle, when people are more physically active, and the thought of a day hike seems like a great idea, until your aching muscles the next day let you know you’ve neglected proper stretching and forgot about a stiff area full of lower back pain.
We live in a fantastic city. Seattle is amazing in the summer, and it wants us to open up and explore what it has to offer. To open your eyes to nature and urban exploring, you also need to move past the blind spots in your life.
See how even small steps made toward more healthy physical choices can have a large impact. When you think about it, caring for ourselves physically appears to be a blindside in our whole culture, if the obesity epidemic tells us anything.
I want you to pay attention and get involved in healthy movement and massage treatment before it is too late.
Begin by stretching, walking a short distance, try a beginner yoga class, and come to see someone like me—a healing massage practitioner who can do some deep work on chronic muscle and joint pain and free up areas that may have been locked up for months or years.
Listen to your body and begin taking care of it today.
Why Clients Are Requesting More Groin Work
Thursday, August 5th, 2010 | Featured, Groin Injury, Health, Massage, Seattle | No Comments
There are a great many reasons why new clients come to me to have pelvic and
groin massage therapy done.
But the two main reasons are to gain greater freedom of movement and to live healthier longer.
Wow. Good stuff. Right?
Think about those two health benefits and consider the less healthy options—an early hip
replacement, chronic lower back pain, and stress that can eventually lead to things like
prostrate cancer and incontinence issues.
Not so good.
Maybe you have a groin or pelvic injury, or a constant tightness in your pelvic region,
and you keep putting off having professional massage work done.
Often the clients who find me through referral or word of mouth are ready for the type
of healing pelvic and groin work I do, and are eager to feel a significant improvement
in their bodies. They may have hit a wall in treatment with other therapists and know
something was missing, and are ready to try again.
A big part of feeling better is getting massage therapy for the problem areas you know
about, and having bodywork done so you’ll prevent future problems.
Groin and pelvic massage helps to open up and create space in hip joints, and relieve the stress that’s been building up.
In Seattle and our surrounding communities, people have the same stresses and problems that everyone else does in other parts of our country.
We just happen to live in a city surrounded by nature and are constantly reminded that we’re a part of nature.
I believe it’s in our nature to be smart creatures that solve problems.
Now is the best time to discover how much better your body will feel when you’re good to it and get the massage therapy you need.
Springtime in Seattle: Connecting Massage to Daily Life and Healthy Movement
Saturday, April 24th, 2010 | Business, Groin Injury, Health, Massage, Seattle, health tips, stretching | No Comments
What do so many of my friends and massage clients in Seattle have in common?
What one activity do they spend so many hours doing during the course of a day?
Sitting in the same position, and most likely in an uncomfortable office chair. Not just one day a week or sometimes, but day after day. And to be blunt, that shit accumulates in the mid-section of the body, as well as other areas such as shoulders, hands, upper arms.
You can feel it without even thinking about it all that much. Can’t you?
Over time, the body just holds onto this stress and strain, and one day an area in your back or hip gets pushed too far.
You go from uncomfortable to truly hurting, and you wonder how it happened.
Even if you just get up and do a few easy simple stretches, you can feel a difference in your energy level.
But having some deep tissue massage work done is more likely what is needed, especially when you’ve been ignoring those neck pains, shoulder twinges, and chronic lower back pain that just doesn’t seem to go away.
Daily tension gets ignored, and pushed down and held in places like the butt and pelvis area.
And since this is such a core area that affects your whole body’s movement, sooner or later, muscle and joint tension builds up and creates problems.
Sometimes when people say things like “That really gives me a pain in the ass.” they are being more literal than they think.
Please pay attention to your body throughout the day.
Listen to what it’s telling you.
Maybe it wants to stretch, and if you take five minutes to unplug from the wired world we live in and listen to the inner world of your own body’s rhythms, you’ll get rewarded with a deeper connection to your own life energy.
And won’t that feel great?
Finding (And Healing) the Deep Center of Gravity (Part 2.)
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 | Groin Injury, Health, Massage, Seattle | No Comments
Healing massage is about many things, but there’s a basic truth: good massage requires forming a partnership. This means creating a safe space to do the deep healing massage work that you need and I can provide.
When you locate the specific areas you store your pain, you can begin healing them.
One place we store deep stress is in the pelvic region. People can gain greater movement in this amazingly important part of the body. Deep tissue massage therapy can bring some major release in the pelvis and groin area.
Take a deep breath,
and feel where it is, you store the stress and tension in your body.
If your pain is stored in the center of your body, you probably have pelvic issues that could use some work.
Working with many types of bodies and personality types at my office on Capitol Hill in Seattle 
, I understand how pain can block a person’s focus and prevent the free flow of energy that we want to always have moving through us at optimum levels.
We’ve all experienced our selves flowing and feeling so in synch with the world, just feeling great.
So we want to get to a place of feeling connected with this great sense of movement we carry within us.
I want to bring clients to that place within, and help them to be creators of their own healing. Sounds good? Right?
Anyplace a massage therapist works on, that holds deep trauma and stored pain can uncomfortable at first.
And since the tightness in an area of the body is so near the genitals, working near it can bring up all sorts of emotional and physical issues.
As I said in the first part of this article, this is a highly charged area for many reasons.
Our culture simply doesn’t support or even talk very much about the idea of healing and release work done in this area.
I want to see our blocks around this body area change, and I’m doing something about transforming this outdated mindset.
A good massage treatment for yourself is just as much a willingness to become involved in your own healing as it is a way to let go and feel healing touch that will stay with you. I partner with and join into the healing massage treatments with my clients.
We take a journey together, and the trip is about restoring energy and health to the places you’ve been storing all the lifelong pain, pressure, and problems.
Bodies are often smarter than we are. They want to be healed.
Women clients who want /need a massage practitioner that will:
Thursday, April 1st, 2010 | Featured, Groin Injury, Health, Massage, Seattle | No Comments
Help You to Reconnect With Your Sensuality
If you are a mature women, you’ve already gone through many life changes and challenges. And there are times when you may wonder where your body’s resiliency and your energy went. As an expert massage practitioner based in Seattle, I can help you to discover what you’re missing—by taking you emotionally and physically where others won’t go. After finding out which areas you’d like to improve on, we’ll move ahead and address long-buried issues and traumas.
Sexuality, body/mind connection, center of gravity, flowing sensuality.
With ongoing massage treatments you can add more flow and grounding in your pelvic area. In our massage session we’ll work to bring back core strength, to expand your ability to be stronger and more flexible. Our goal will be to free up the areas to help you to feel younger and more rejuvenated.
Areas than can be focused on include:
· Relieving pain
· Helping with overall movement
· Improving productivity
· Focusing scattered energy
· Healing old trauma
· Helping to feel more vibrant
· Freeing up movement for a more active lifestyle
You don’t have to live with lower back and hip pain. Vitality and focus can be increased. It is possible to bring back more creativity and passion to your life. When your body begins to feel more flexible, you can better express yourself in daily life, in relationships, and in all areas of your life.
A Real Cure for the Common Cold
Saturday, March 20th, 2010 | Health, Seattle, health tips, nutrition | 2 Comments
My grandmother once said to me “Sierra, when I get a cold I do nothing for it, and it lasts about a week. When I get a cold I do what everyone else does. I drink hot tea, get lots of rest, have chicken soup for every meal, and my cold will last about 5-to-7 days.”
I think that was her way of submitting to the “fact” that everybody will get a cold and there’s just not much we can do about it.
Thanks Grandma.
But I’m of a different opinion. More on target…I’m of a different experience. And so is my mother.
My mother is one of these gals that grows an herb garden and makes so many tinctures and teas with dried plants that it drives my father bonkers. “We’ve got dried leaves coming out of our ears!” he says.
My mother won’t lie down and simply accept that a cold should last for about a week. She battles colds tooth and nail with home-gown herbs and a few (what I like to call) “god-send” products such as GSE (aka: grapefruit seed extract) and oil of oregano, just to name a few healing gifts from nature.
I’ve taken Mom’s advice when dealing with a cold, and drink constant cups of white sage tea with GSE, Emergen-C (with GSE), good old chicken soup and lots of warm blankets, and do so little physical activity that I need to fight my ego’s urge to get up and do SOMETHING. Using this method, I’ve made a cold disappear in three days.
I hate getting colds.
I REALLY HATE getting colds. I think it has something to do with the discomfort of not being able to breathe through my nose. And of course, being a massage therapist, if I don’t work I don’t have an income…so I REALLY hate getting sick AT ALL.
It’s one thing to eat right and stay healthy. It’s another to have symptoms of an oncoming disaster (such as a cold that will put you out of commission for a week) and another to have a way to stop it dead in its tracks.
I use something that I consider better than the miraculous cures mentioned above.
It’s called WELLNESS FORMULA, and it is made by a company called Source Naturals. It does contain soy, unfortunately, but the effects of the Wellness Formula pills are worth the trouble of ingesting the controversial and wholly useless ingredient called “soy.”
One bottle of 90 big fat pills costs me $25 at Pike Place Market’s Tenzing Momo. (An herbal healing store inside the market. If you’ve never been there, go check it out.)
During the last six months, here in Seattle, I’ve heard of a new “bad virus” going around about every two weeks. It seems like someone is always getting sick from it.
As a massage therapist, I touch people all the time, all over their bodies. If they are sick, there’s a good chance my immune system is going to have some work to do.
Since I’ve been diligently taking Wellness Formula anytime I get an itchy ear, a sniffle, or a scratchy feeling around my eyes. After I take it the symptoms clear up within a few hours.
I haven’t gotten sick for over half a year and I’m going to keep my healthy streak going.
I also hate feeling run down. To counteract this feeling, I sleep longer, drink lots of water, say no thank you to the social pulls and invitations of the evening. And the next day, I’ll wake up feeling right as rain and undisturbed by the slightest remaining symptom.
I’m sure Tenzing Momo would love it if you stopped by and bought the Wellness Formula from them, but I’m sure its also available at one of our other awesome local establishments such as Rainbow Remedies up on 15th on Capitol Hill, or if you have no other local herb and wellness shop to support go to Super Supplements, and I’m sure they’ll have it.
Don’t roll over for the cold and flu bugs going around. I urge you to spend money on this, even if your budget is extremely tight. There’s not much worse than getting sick while you’re broke.
Take care of yourself! Have your favorite products on hand so you’re ready to face all those viruses and bacteria at the first sign of a scratchy throat or the sniffles.
Stay healthy! Good luck!
Motivation to Stay Healthy and Active
Friday, February 12th, 2010 | Featured, Health, health tips, nutrition | 3 Comments
Don’t Wait till it Hurts
Monday, December 21st, 2009 | Featured, Health, Massage | 6 Comments
I know better than most people how easy it is to put off receiving bodywork until my body hurts so bad I can’t move.
There’s a resistance most of us have in this society against taking care of ourselves.
We feel that we can solve our problems with our logic and intellect. Staying stuck in modes where thought is master and all our actions are based on what our minds want.
When in these “mind-modes” our body’s needs tend to be forgotten or at least
“tuned-out” in order to meet the needs of our minds.
Is there something wrong with this?
No and yes.
Your life is yours to live as you choose. My message is: usually when people start actually taking care of their body’s needs – they are dealing with damage that’s already been done, and pain becomes their motivation to heal.
There’s nothing “wrong” with this – unless you have a desire to live a better and more comfortable life.
Having a body that is pain-free only comes when you maintain your health in a way that addresses body tightness and structural misalignment before they turn into pain, injury or more debilitating maladies like fusions of joints or bone spurs.
Say you have a tight back. It feels tight and uncomfortable, but you keep working anyway. The tightness turns into pain once in a while. Then it gets more frequent. You keep working because you can “live with the pain” while working. You’ll find you can still work even though you’re in pain; it becomes habit. You keep working and pushing your pain aside, and think maybe you should get a massage but instead you think the money it takes to go to a good massage therapist isn’t worth it because you can still live and work relatively well through your daily pain. Years go by, and you’re doing little to nothing for your tight back and the pain that you have just gets a little worse everyday.
Then something happens.
You lift a heavy box and turn around to set it down and feel something “go out” in your back, or you slip and fall out of your chair while reaching for something at work. “All of a sudden” you have so much pain in your shoulder or low back that you can’t sit for more than 3 minutes without having distracting pain.
You finally decide to see someone about the pain because it’s so bad it’s got to be something serious. You get an x-ray that shows you have a slipped disk or fusion in your neck vertebrae.
Those types of serious spinal injuries happen due to “little accidents” or “slip-and-falls” (*note – this does not include injury from serious fall, crashes and extreme emergency life threatening situations) because your soft tissue was so tight. Your muscle tightness made your structure unstable. When an unstable, weak, misaligned and imbalanced body gets tipped, jostled or pushed into even a “small” accident – the likelihood of injury and chronic pain issues become huge.
Choosing to “live with” and ignore your pain will make it easier for you to get hurt in more painful and lasting ways.
As a health care practitioner, I meet many people who “live with their pain.” They argue for their ability to ignore their pain, saying things like “I don’t hurt that bad” “It’s just a little tight, I can still get by just fine” “I don’t have the time or money” “Massage is too expensive… and by the way you charge more than other massage practitioners so I can just go to Massage Envy and Pay forty bucks to get a massage, if I really needed it”
Not to bash my fellow heart-giving colleagues but employers like Massage Envy don’t pay their employee therapists nearly enough to care about your pain and injuries and be motivated to apply the effort and diligence it takes to truly address and correct their clients’ injuries and pain.
You can PREVENT injury with regular cheap massage.
But once you’re “feeling it” it’s too late. The damage has already been done.
For those pain and tightness patterns to be truly addressed – you need a therapist who has put their focus into really dedicating themselves to YOUR healing process.
Doing injury treatment work isn’t easy to give or receive and it’s not the kind of massage where the massage practitioner can just blissfully rub you and make you feel all warm and fuzzy the entire time.
Injury Treatment takes focus, study, practice and a shit-load of compassion to do it with skill or effectiveness.
You know why? Because people destroy themselves everyday. They hurt themselves. They do not see how they created their pain and injuries with their own choices and neglect.
A healer could really stand in judgment for the tragic results that neglect produces in their client’s bodies.
That’s one of the top reasons why the average career span for an LMP is about 2 years. (A few other top reasons: low cash-flow and injury while working.)
Most of the retired LMP’s I have met told me they couldn’t stand to see people destroy themselves anymore. They got to know what peoples’ lack of care for themselves looks, feels, smells and sounds like on an intimate level.
That’s pretty heavy shit, man!
Seriously. The ways people hurt really tugs at any healer’s heart. But even if someone is a so-called “accident prone person” we healers can clearly see what, in our clients, draws their injury.
I think a great healer recognizes the duality of all people wanting to both destroy and heal themselves and just loves people anyway. Let me say that again: we continue to love our clients anyway.
We see the organic naturalness of this consistent opposing dynamic between healing and destroying because all humans seem to have it in one form or another.
We can have compassion for our client’s situations without judgment. We can gently show them how to understand the ways they are hurting themselves, and kindly (sometimes sternly) how to reduce the “destroy-self” compulsions and increase the “heal-self” habits and motivations.
Really good healing work is often not particularly fun.
It makes sense why someone would avoid getting healing work because, on some level, they know it’s going to make them face their choices, selves and destructive habits and why they are in the place of being in pain.
Not to mention – purely on the mechanical level – injury treatment massage can hurt. Knots and tightness tend to hurt when they are massaged and released.
Seasoned receivers of massage will talk about “good-pain” that comes when tight muscles or “knots” get massaged into less painful or tense states.
So it’s your choice to live your life as you desire. I honor all paths whether they lead you to my door or not.
I trust that you know what’s best for you to have a life that fulfills you. And I’ll support your healing in whatever way I am allowed.
I am allowed to voice my opinions and give advice based on the interests of healing my clients and operating my business:
Please don’t wait.
Please get bodywork soon and choose to heal before it hurts and especially before the pain you have right now turns into something worse that may never heal to ideal standards again.
Do yourself a favor: Don’t ignore your body.
Spend the time, money, effort and attention it takes to live a better and more comfortable life. Think about doing it soon.
Your body is your vehicle.
Maintain your healthy body – and you’ll be able to live longer with less pain and more vibrancy and freedom.
Overeating is a habit overcome…
Friday, December 4th, 2009 | nutrition | No Comments
Overeating is a habit overcome best by awareness and discipline. I notice food stops tasting as good after my hunger is satisfied.
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