stretching
Getting the Massage You Need, When You Need It
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010 | exercise, Health, health tips, Massage, nutrition, Seattle, stretching | No Comments
There are a few ways people think about getting a massage:
“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.
Listening to Your Body: Don’t Wait until It’s Too Late
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 | exercise, Health, health tips, Massage, nutrition, Seattle, 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.
Springtime in Seattle: Connecting Massage to Daily Life and Healthy Movement
Saturday, April 24th, 2010 | Business, Groin Injury, Health, health tips, Massage, Seattle, 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?
Finding the Deep Center of Gravity (Part 1.)
Saturday, April 10th, 2010 | Groin Injury, Massage, networking | No Comments
Let’s face it, we all want to feel better. As a massage practitioner I know this fact in a deep way. Clients come to me with a long list of stresses, strains, pains, aches, and just plain old built up body tension.
No only do I understand this, but the bodyworkers I often network with know this as well. People want to feel better, in every part of their body. Even in certain areas it might be difficult for them to talk about. Pain that comes up when they stretch or move a certain way that shouldn’t be so painful.
One thing that I’ve been discussing with my fellow healing profession workers is my shift in focus to groin and pelvic injury treatment.
Since this is a delicate subject, even talking about it with other massage practitioners can be like opening a can of worms that either calls for a lengthy discussion or becomes a conversation stopper.
You never know.
In our society, the genital region is taboo and working around this highly charged area is something most massage practitioners and bodyworkers just do not do. And I get it. I completely understand why groin and pelvic work isn’t all that popular with my fellow massage practitioners.
Let me put this out there: People truly need this type of elemental and integrative body work. So much of our culture’s stresses and long-term pains are held onto in the pelvic region.
Who knows if it began with the repressed way we’ve held things inside for generations, and it may date back to the whole formation of this great big crazy body of a country (the body inside our own minds, the body politic, the bodies of all these humans around us we come into contact with), but healing and release needs to happen more often.
