My Approach to Therapeutic Massage

My practice is primarily accessed by people who cope with chronic or acute physical discomfort as a result of life stresses or having sustained injury, or a combination of both. I see both young and young-at-heart clients, persons with lots of experience with massage, and others, who are just beginning to value the benefits of therapeutic massage.

I seek a balanced session with my clients: sometimes I need to elicit verbal feedback from you to give me clues on how you are experiencing the work—what does this feel like, where do you feel it, is this good pressure, etc. Whereas, one of my primary goals as a bodyworker is to help you reach a place of relaxation, so depending on what you present at the beginning of a session, you may have a lot of zone-out time, or there may be a need for us to dialogue to some extent about your experience of the work you are receiving. The zone-out process is crucial to letting the parasympathetic nervous system perform its job, but for addressing sports or repetitive-use injuries, the situation may require time for dialogue and would involve the use of multiple techniques (stretching, myofascial release, deep tissue massage, flushing, and many others) rather than your passively laying on the table to get a rub.

The majority of the work I do is considered "deep tissue" massage. I use multiple techniques to eventually access your "deeper tissues," such as fascia and muscle tissue that is literally not superficial—or close to the skin. Example: your trapezius muscle (related to your neck and shoulder) lies on top of various deeper muscles that sometimes hold a lot of tension in the human body, leading to loss of ROM in the neck and shoulder and painful headaches. My work, therefore, is intended to access those deeper muscles through different therapeutic massage techniques to help those muscles relax. This requires a certain amount of patience and buy-in from the client who is the only one that can determine how deep the pressure can go on his or her body. Sometimes it is difficult to let go of thoughts, fears, and expectation to allow a therapist to access deeper muscle as described above. The same scenario applies to the hip and posterior pelvis where chronic back pain arises in deep fascia and muscle that can take some time to access. Such scenarios would involve 3 sessions, for example, not just one. The reason is that deep tissue massage should never feel like anyone is forcing pressure on to you: it should feel as though the therapist is "leaning in," waiting for your tissue to meet the available pressure, which should feel like a gradual sinking and NOT forcing.

One thing you will not find on my table is a forcing of your body to take some amount of pressure I think you should receive for X problem. That's not how I work. On the other hand, if you are interested in deep pressure, you can expect to experience that on my table.