ABOUT A SESSION

Here's the part where I step into a first person narrative. I articulate my work best directly.

I -deeply- believe that massage therapy is the key to pain resolution in a vast spectrum of cases. In a decade of service, I've seen clients who were convinced they needed surgery resolve their pain through manual therapy. Consider what massage is: a targeted soft tissue manipulation for a long duration of time. A modality that is so focused and lengthy should be considered at the forefront of pain resolution, in my opinion.

That being said, I understand the skepticism. I've received more general, pleasant but hardly effective massage sessions than I can count, and have left feeling frustrated to have spent no small sum of money in hopes of feeling better to return to google to seek out someone else. On the flipside, I've received truly masterful bodywork that resolved months of chronic pain in a single session. 

I've been the frustrated athlete, living every second of my life in chronic pain. Walking, bending over, any small, common movement was difficult. On top of that, I couldn’t do the things I loved to do most. I would have conversations with friends but had a hard time listening; the constant pain arrested my every thought. I’d look forward to going to sleep each night to catch an 8 hour break of anguish, and hope I’d “feel better in the morning.”⁣ When I finally found the right practitioner for me, I peeled myself off of the massage table, repeated the same movements I constantly did to check in with how bad the pain was in that moment, to find only a faint resemblance of what had prior arrested my body. I thought, "holy sh--. I feel like my injury is coughing up its final breaths."

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That’s what I chase in my work. I want my clients to get off the table and say, “holy sh--.” To move in ways they were afraid to before. It’s not the most profitable business model, but I want to get people out of pain, efficiently, whenever possible.

So, what will our session look like? I do a lot of myofascial release in my work. This is slow, dry connective tissue work that takes into account the body's trains of movement, rather than focusing on individual muscles (the body doesn't work in such specific, dissected parts, afterall.) Our connective tissue is what envelops our musculature and bones, and I seek the paths of most resistance to encourage freer, painless movement, and for our bones to find their way back to their optimal positioning, if out of alignment. Trigger point therapy is done where trigger points are present, these are hyper-irritable spots in already irritated muscles that can cause weakness and pain, both directly felt and referred pain, in the body. Rhythmic proprioception rebalancing is used throughout the session to confuse our detrimental postural states and influence reception to structural change. I do use an (unscented, grape seed based) oil for more conventional deep tissue work. (Allergic reactions to grape seed is extremely rare, but if you are allergic, I have an alternative.) Our session may include active release technique and active and passive flexibility work.