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.

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.

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.

When I hear someone say they use a massage therapist, I cringe.

Ours is the healing profession that you join with, partner with, and come out more whole with because of this unique partnership. We don’t have a massage practice so we can be used by clients.

We’re in it so we can help, heal, and take care of people’s bodies in way they never could do for themselves.

My clients come to me and they receive bodywork from a skilled massage practitioner, and in my case, they receive bodywork and massage care from someone who specializes in helping people with pelvic and groin pain, lower back pain, muscle strain, and injury massage treatment.

There’s already enough using and being used going on in our world. Don’t add to it.

Create a new thought process, and create a healthier mindset toward your body and health.

You might use a toothbrush or a vacuum cleaner, but you open up and receive a massage from the best massage therapist you can find and work on your deep physical places and processes.

Massage practitioners are partners in care, and they become partners in healing.

While it may seem to some like I’m splitting hairs by focusing on this word “use” I’m not.

Ideas matter in our world, words matter, and who you have perform your bodywork matters a great deal.

Every one of you reading this in Seattle and around Puget Sound can decide today to begin working toward a healthier body, making better choices in healthy movement, and schedule a massage treatment. The rest is up to you.

Take care of your body and treat it well. It’s going to have to last a lifetime.

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?

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.

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.

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!

Most healers and body-workers I have met through the years have hearts so big and generous – they want to give their healing skills to everyone.

They know they can benefit anyone they touch.

But what is best for my client? What does any perspective client REALLY need?

Some times it is clear: they want to heal their low back pain, for example.

Sometimes is is very unclear what needs to be healed. I find that most people, however – when they seek healing – will be often naturally guided to find the healing modality and practitioner(s) that will be of the HIGHEST GAIN to their healing paths.

Another way of saying this is: when you find the correct practitioner and modality FOR YOU – you will leap and bound into greater expressions of good health in a relatively short period of time with regular treatments or even just one treatment.

Good and lasting healing is often something of an investment in time and money.

Sometimes something like chronic low back pain takes a year or two of consistent injury treatment sessions to completely heal the pain so that it hardly comes back. (I ask you this: how long did it take for the pain to get there?… a lifetime, perhaps?)

The point of that ramble is: because clients often have specific needs – it would only make sense that practitioners of healing arts SPECIALIZE in one or two things – aka- they create a niche for themselves so that those searching clients find exactly what they are looking for in a healer.

I found out, years ago, that my passion for massage was invigorated by the assessing and treating of pain and injury in the groin and pelvic regions.

My motivation for improving my skills in treating the hip and groin made me feel “in” the “student mind.” Like being in massage school, I was so excited and fascinated to learn and practice bodywork.

Because of my personal interest in this aspect of massage, I have become adept at treating trauma, pain and injury in the groin, pelvis, low back and hips.

I helped heal physical trauma in the pelvic region, as well as the psychological, mental, and emotional trauma that is so often associated with the pelvic region.

To wrap this all up – it seems wise to choose your practitioner with care.

If you know what you need – find and go to a specialist.

If you know you want to improve the quality of your life and you know you need healing but you don’t know where to look: try energy healers, talking therapies, movement therapies, mystical therapies or things you would not have tried otherwise as well as socially accepted modalities.

Sometimes finding your perfect healing match is part of your healing path. Sometimes finding a practitioner who can help deeply heal you is like stepping out of your box and out of your comfort zone.

I would say too, that a healing practitioner – finding their niche can be a part of their healing path as well.

For my fellow practitioners: get specific, if you aren’t already.

We are not in competition. We are working together to save and improve the lives of the people on this planet.

Niche yourself!