massage therapy journal

keeping you in touch.

  

Open Your Ears, Take Action

Scurlock-Durana says she had a career-changing moment when she listened to symptoms—cysts on her wrists—that arose soon after she graduated from massage school. At that time, she mostly practiced deep tissue work. "I sat down and had a conversation with this little lumpy sore place on my wrist," she says. "It told me I needed to stop doing deep tissue work."

This gave Scurlock-Durana pause. "I wasn’t coming out of sessions feeling juiced and energized," she says. In fact, quite the opposite. She realized her practice was exhausting her. "Step by step, I changed those clients," she adds. "I recognized that my body was sending me signals."

Listening to your body can pay off in spades, agrees Orloff. "Get very quiet. Ask yourself where the symptom is and what it means," she encourages. "You can always pose a question like, ‘How do I heal this symptom?’ Be receptive to the response, write it down and act on it."

The biggest misperception Greene sees with massage therapists and symptoms is that you can somehow work through any injury or pain. "We tend to get this idea as massage therapists that it’s normal to have some amount of aches and pain from doing massage, and that if you just work through it, it will go away," she says.

However, if you don’t pay attention, that’s exactly where the seeds of later injury are typically planted. If we don’t figure out what’s going on, we often keep re-injuring ourselves.

Some may not seek help because they don’t understand what’s happening. So if you have baffling symptoms, invite a friend, colleague or former teacher to watch you work. They might be able to give you insight into your symptoms and what may be causing them.

When you can’t figure out what’s causing the pain or how to make it go away, seek medical help from a provider you trust. "The operative thing is timing," says Greene. "The longer you wait to do something, the more likely it will be that you will have to take time off or it will interfere with your work."

According to the survey done by Greene and Goggins, massage therapists tend to seek care from other massage therapists. "That’s fine," says Greene, "but it needs to be part of a treatment plan where you know what you have."

Healing may take active treatment, and some amount of rest and recovery. Tell yourself it’s OK to take a break. "The greatest healers that I know—and those I trust—are those who deal with their own issues as they come up," says Orloff. "It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It [actually] makes you a better healer."

Ahuna agrees, and walks her talk. She recently took a week off after hurting her thumb while massaging athletes in Colorado Springs’ Olympic Village. She rested, slept and healed. "It’s very important to me to listen to what my body is telling me."

Back <1 2 34 5 > Continue