“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.

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?