Some Benefits of Massage
- Reduce stress by receiving supportive, relaxing touch
- Tune your body for improved physical and mental performance
- Get nurturing attention for yourself from a caring professional
- Rediscover comfort and ease in your body
- Recover and realign after injury
Massage is a powerful combination: touch from a caring person that uses skill and technique to address specific pain and tension in the body, while at the same time making you feel relaxed and validated in your body. In this hour your body can experience relieved headaches, released tightness and constriction. Breathing deepens, circulation improves, pain is reduced. Massage clients find ease, fluidity, renewed strength and energy. Your body becomes a better place to live in.
I believe that relaxation is the key to the results of massage. We all have stresses in our bodies, from jobs, from relationships, from our lives. Stress causes us to experience increased blood pressure and heart rate and stress hormone levels. Blood flow is reduced to the organs, the extremities (cold feet and hands) and the immune system. These effects begin to feel normal. We get used to feeling chilly and unable to sleep, full of little aches and pains, not feeling hungry and overeating, having indigestion and coming down with every cold that passes by.
In the same way that stress can trigger these symptoms, deep relaxation can relieve them. Hormones of relaxation increase blood flow to the organs, telling the body that it is in a safe place and there is time and space enough to recuperate. Massage Therapy is a powerful way to help your body find this place to heal and regroup. To help you get to a place of relaxation, I try to make my office a calming and safe space, with relaxing music, clean, comfortable and beautiful surroundings and the option of lightly scented aromatherapy oil. I encourage clients to let me know what they need to be comfortable.
Of course, massage is only one way to achieve relaxation. Other favorites include yoga, meditation, warm baths, exercise, music, and progressive muscle relaxation. I encourage everyone to use any and all that they find helpful in their daily lives.
However, massage therapy goes beyond general relaxation. I listen to, observe, and think carefully about how your body manifests tension. I choose specific massage techniques to bring greater relaxation and circulation into areas that are constricted, and general relaxation encourages the body to feel safe enough to allow those changes.
Whether you're suffering from job stress, recovering from an injury, or something else entirely, massage can help you!
Types of Massage I Offer
Muscular Therapy is the foundation of my work. Developed by Ben Benjamin, it fuses techniques that promote general relaxation with anatomically specific techniques that address your unique pattern of tension. Muscular Therapy includes a wide variety of pressures, speeds and rhythms of massage. Muscular Therapy can be helpful for anyone who has pain or soreness due to tension. It is not just the massage you receive but includes self-care education as an important part of your healing. At your first appointment, we will start with a tension assessment and determine a treatment plan together.
Sports Massage is not just for elite athletes. It can help anyone who is physically active, especially if you are looking to improve your athletic performance. It is a powerful tool to help you improve speed, agility, strength and flexibility while reducing soreness and injury. Depending on your training schedule I can include deep tissue techniques in your session. It is better to schedule this more intense work when you will be able to take it easy the next day. Sports massage feels energizing and will usually include some assisted stretches and range of motion techniques as well as more traditional massage strokes.
Myofascial Release is a technique that is growing in popularity. It feels deep but subtle and is the slow unwinding of adhesions and stiffness in locked-down connective tissue (also called fascia), which is the thin layer that surrounds and supports your muscles and becomes tendon at the end of the muscle. Connective tissue is a continuous web that, when it becomes stiff and locked down, can limit your postures and movements, exacerbating tension. Myofascial Release can produce startling results, making your movements feel freer and posture more natural.
Pregnancy Massage is safe and helpful throughout the childbearing year. It provides relaxation, reduced pain & soreness and an easier birth.
Zero Balancing falls broadly into a massage-like category, but is very different from Massage Therapy. There's no oil, and there's no undressing. The actual work of Zero Balancing is a routine, a series of tractions and fulcrums to joints and bones with the intention of creating openness and freedom. This isn't traction in the chiropractic sense, using force to open joints, but a more quiet waiting traction that provides space for something to move and open in a new way, but will also allow anything that needs to stay stuck (if it is protecting an injury, for example) to do so. Instead of focussing on the muscles and tendons (which is what I've been doing for the past 15 years of my life), ZB looks at stuckness in the joints and bones, which we explore from a place of groundedness and ease, respect and trust. ZB is hard to explain, but I attempt it hereand the national organization's page is here.