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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.

Tags: Massage, Seattle, self-care, stretching

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?

Tags: deep tissue, groin massage, Massage, self-care, stress, stretching

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 15^th 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

My longest-term goal is This:

I will be able to

walk

Wipe my own butt

And feed myself

Until the day I die.

Now there are plenty of other good goals to have for one’s entire life but these ones are the ones that motivate me most to continue caring for my health.   I find that I consider deeply the long-term effects of things like eating candy or drinking alcohol.

I want to feel good now AND 50 years from now.

There have been many times over the years I would try to tell my friends to drink more water.   They would say to me “I don’t feel sick! I don’t want to drink water. I feel fine and I’ve been drinking diet Coke for the last 4 years, (9 years, 19 years) That doesn’t apply to me” or something along those lines.

It’s one of those things that people do to destroy themselves, I think. (I have compassion for that.  I destroy myself as well in the ways of eating, drinking or lifestyle.  I have said in other posts that I recognize this.)

If one is told that something is bad for them – and they do not want to consider the advice – I believe this is a way to stay oblivious to one’s health.  It’s a form of self-delusion.  A way to stay fixed into immediate gratification by not considering long-term effects.

Scares the shit out of me to think of the health problems one would face after consuming so much processed food over a long period of time.

I can imagine our nurses, surgery experts and nursing-home employees could speak much on the subject of diseases caused by poor maintenance of the body.

It’s not like I want to have a body that’s pristine and unused in my old-age.

I just want to be able to

Walk

Wipe my own butt

and feed myself

Till the day I die.

This is my solid motivation to stay active and healthy everyday

Just remember to relax and tak…

Friday, November 27th, 2009 | health tips | No Comments

Just remember to relax and take deep breaths. Really deep breaths. A few of them. Right now, maybe.

drink water!

Friday, November 13th, 2009 | Health, Uncategorized, health tips, nutrition | No Comments

drink water!

I am stretching my arms into t…

Friday, November 13th, 2009 | Health, health tips, stretching | No Comments

I am stretching my arms into the sky and taking a big deep breath! People with abdominal surgery history need to stretch *regularly.*