“I have a pain in my lower back and it won’t go away. I’m scheduling a massage.”

“It’s been a few months, and I’m feeling out of balance. Getting some deep tissue bodywork done seems like a great idea.”

Most times, people wait until their body sends them a clear message, and it’s usually connected to pain.

Maybe this is the message you’d hear if you listened more often:

“I want to make sure my body is in optimum shape, and getting a massage is part of preventative medicine. I know that regular massage treatments help provide greater freedom of movement, ease pain, and help me achieve a more active life.”

Many people aren’t so fortunate, and they’re disconnected from their bodies. I want you to listen to your own body, and feel the healthy energy flowing through it. Try to stay in touch with how your body feels, not just every so often, but stop and listen at some point every day. For some people, seeing or feeling is a better way to picture this getting in touch with the body. Whatever works for you, let your mind guide you.

Listen to your body when it reminds you of the pain, stiffness, and lingering pain that it feels. Maybe you have pelvic or low back pain, or there’s stress you feel from a past injury. If it takes time to gain more freedom of movement after an injury, give yourself time, but work with your body, learn to move again and feel how your body responds as it heals.  Our bodies were designed to help themselves and heal themselves, but nature can only go so far without intervention. Nature wants healing hands to help nurture bodies to a more healthful state.

Stretching before running or taking a long walk is important. Making healthy dietary choices as often as you can is vital. Choosing to receive a high-quality massage treatment to help you through Seattle’s autumn months is an idea worth acting upon.

For most clients, the freedom of movement and increased energy levels are enough to make scheduling a massage worthwhile, and for others it was keeping chronic muscle and tendon pain out of their lives for days or weeks, and for others, therapeutic massage adds real clarity and lets them focus on the activities they’d like to do.

As the body ages, pain management isn’t just a sometimes thing, it is something one is always concerned with in a number of ways. Maybe you have an old sports injury that flares up when cold weather returns, or chronic pain related to an ongoing physical condition. Rather than just take pills or put up with problem areas in your lower back, your joints, or neck and shoulders, schedule a professional massage and experience the rejuvenating effects of professional body work.

The benefits are clear, and the more often you receive a massage, the more your body responds. Here are just a few of the ways that regularly scheduled massage treatments can help you:

•       Higher energy levels
•       Greater freedom of movement
•       Decreased levels of stress and anxiety
•       Improved circulation
•       Reduction of fatigue

We all have priorities in our lives, and taking care of our health means so many things to each person. Healing massage therapy is what I bring to peoples lives, and when clients experience the type of deep tissue work I can do, they literally breathe a sigh of relief. This is gratifying to me, since I know the increased vitality and pain relief that can come from bodywork is an important part of a health regimen.

Ask yourself if it’s been too long since your last massage therapy treatment. Think about how much better you’ll feel afterward.

Yes, we are lucky to be living in a city like Seattle, full of vibrancy, culture, and so many great people. Remember: being healthy and taking care of one’s body with a therapeutic massage is an essential part of enjoying life.

You’ve reached that point. Getting a massage has become necessary. Your body already knows, but your brain tells you to put it off for a few days or weeks longer.

We’ve all been through challenging times during the past few years, but something is in the air—so many people agree—something vital has opened up again.

A lot of lives have been affected, and many people in Seattle and in our whole culture want to find a better way—they want to find a way to do more of what feeds their spirits, and what makes them whole. The ideal is to do what you love for a living.

All of our lives are busy, we’ve all got dreams and plans, and taking care of your physical being is a part of doing what you love to do.

If you need to receive therapeutic bodywork, listen to the side of yourself that wants to make time for healthful choices.

What gets you excited about getting up every morning? What makes you the completely alive self that you want to be?

Turn your likes into loves, and love your physical body by scheduling a massage that will get you on track to feeling better.

There are some definite changes in the air, and people want to feel more alive, more connected. Part of the learning and healing process is getting that therapeutic massage you’ve been putting off for a while.

Ask yourself if you want to get closer to loving what you do. If getting the deep tissue massage that you’ve been putting off is part of your healing process, I’m here.

The calendar says we’re still in summer (for a few days), but the chill in the air makes it feel like we’re already in autumn.

One thing your body may be telling you is how the colder weather reminds you of your body’s stiff areas, uncomfortable tightness, and old or new injuries that need some massage therapy care.

In the hot weather our muscles and ligaments expand, and this jello-like effect is what we experience throughout the summertime. We move easier and walk faster, with the sun in our hair and the warm weather on our skin.

When the first few cold snaps occur, our joints and muscles feel a stiffness that we haven’t felt all summer.

A massage therapy session can help to restore the body’s natural flow, and help to restore your structural alignment that has gotten out of place from bad habits, overuse, and just pulling a muscle the wrong way.

Yes, your body can be restored to a more active-friendly mode of being. And of course, you want your body to act like its spring or summer, even though the calendar says we’re in autumn.

Let’s try something.

Stand up and stretch to the side, first one way then the other.

See if you can locate the tight spots that feel as if you haven’t used them in months. These are the areas where deep tissue massage work can help loosen up problem areas or old injuries, and create the freedom of movement you want.

Joints and cartilage need to have work done on them so they don’t become rigid and stuck in the same rut, kind of like the way minds need to be exposed to new ideas and concepts to they can stretch out.

Improved circulation, being able to move in ways you couldn’t (even the day before), and getting the blood moving to joints and stiff and sore muscular problem areas—all of this helps your ongoing healthy body movements.

Stretching more freely, and sleeping more soundly, are two of the immediate benefits that you’ll receive from getting an early seasonal massage.

So, hopefully this will remind you to come into my Capitol Hill massage clinic and receive that well-deserved massage you’ve been putting off for a while.

After all, a new season is just around the corner…

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.

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?

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!

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 ]]> http://www.sierrafaye.com/http:/www.sierrafaye.com/motivation-to-stay-healthy-and-active/feed/ 3 http://www.sierrafaye.com/http:/www.sierrafaye.com/just-remember-to-relax-and-tak/ http://www.sierrafaye.com/http:/www.sierrafaye.com/just-remember-to-relax-and-tak/#comments Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:24:42 +0000 sierra http://www.sierrafaye.com/2009/11/just-remember-to-relax-and-tak/ Just remember to relax and take deep breaths. Really deep breaths. A few of them. Right now, maybe.