Don’t Wait till it Hurts
Monday, December 21st, 2009 | Featured, Health, Massage
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.
6 Comments to Don’t Wait till it Hurts
Your comment “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” is entirely false. You will either care about your client’s injuries and pain, or you won’t. It’s an inherent character trait to care, or not to care, and what you get paid doesn’t change that.
Kelly G.December 21, 2009
Sounds like a therapist who could not get a job with Massage Envy and is a little bit jealous. The Massage Envy I go to is great and the therapist I use has 7 years experience. The average experience at the one I go to is 5 years. I have been getting massages for 20 years and these are some of the best. I know the clinics are all individually owned, so others could be different. When you look at the fact their therapist do not have to pay advertising, supply sheets, lotions, etc., plus they get a lot more business I think the pay is probably a lot better than being on your own.
Thanks for your comment! I appreciate it! so you said: “You will either care about your client’s injuries and pain, or you won’t. It’s an inherent character trait to care, or not to care, and what you get paid doesn’t change that.” to be fair – I think we are both quite right and we are both generalizing. We are looking at the exchange of money and the ability for a practitioner to care about their clients to treat them with the care they really need. I think we are both right and wrong because it differs from practitioner to practitioner. It is, indeed an inherent character trait to care or not to care for one’s clients. I do find that many therapist that no longer do massage, that did care for their clients became burned out because the energy they gave to heal their clients could not sustain their lives or their willingness to continue treating their clients. I find that practitioners tend to make less of an effort in their body work when their compensation does not satisfy their needs. They don’t do REALLY great work when paid 15 bucks an hour. The one’s that do, often I find there is a resentment for giving so much of their energy to their clients when they do not feel they are getting enough money for having given that energy.
It seems you assume that I would want to work for massage envy and that I am jealous. That would be very wrong. I would not want to work for that company. I have met so many massage practitioners who have very poor opinions of the place. I have never tried to work for them because I would not choose to work for a company who’s business model demonstrates a devaluing the worth of massage, and a conditioning of the general public to expect their massages to be cheep as well as practitioners to expect to get paid less than what their work is worth. Most massage therapists are so kind and generous. In my opinion, Massage Envy is like the Massage Industry’s version of the corporate franchise McDonalds. The franchise business model is always about the bottom line before anything like quality or proper professional compensation. but to be fair, places like massage envy don’t exactly advertise as having experts in the fields of certain injury treatments, specific bodywork methods or modalities that one would seek out for quality and specificity needs. The great thing about Massage Envy is that it gives you exactly what it promises: a cheep massage.
Steven ColeFebruary 2, 2010
I’ve been to a Massage Envy here in the SF Bay Area, and felt the whole experience to be so much less than any other massage practitioner I’ve ever been blessed with. Their price is *very* attractive, because there’s no way I can afford getting worked up as much as I’d really like, but I still won’t go back.
Sierra: thanks for motivating me to get my butt back to my massage therapist.
I had a friend I watched go from pre-massage school all the way into working for massage envy.
I was astonished that over the course of 2 to 3 years, my friend went from engaged fully with massage, curious about method and compassionate with those he massaged, to embittered and struggling to survive with little patience for the clients who he fully understood did not care about his art.
He now only gives massage to friends for free.
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December 21, 2009