Five years into my career as a massage therapist my hands were sore from treating, I had developed a psychological aversion to having lotion on my hands and I was unable to make any significant headway treating the chronic pain patients who seemed to be coming to me in greater numbers at my private practice than ever before. I really felt that my career as a massage therapist was over and that it was time to look at other health disciplines so that I could treat more effectively. My first thought was physiotherapy but my physiotherapy friends convinced me that I knew enough and that wasn’t the answer. Chiropractic? Possibly, however it wasn’t cost effective as I would have to move my young family quite a distance to do so. So what am I to do? I feel like I still belonged in health care but what was I going to do for a practice?
Away at a health conference, two of my friends ( a massage therapist and a physiotherapist), who solely practiced this style of gentle myofascial release, suggested I receive a treatment from them. It was the single most significant treatment I had ever had up to that point. I got up from that treatment and felt a significant shift in my body and a lightness of being I had never felt. I decided then and there I knew my path forward was to become a student of this type of myofascial release and learn as much as I possibly could.
After returning from my first three seminars on mfr I was told by the director of Myosymmetries (a chronic pain research and treatment facility I worked at part time) that he no longer wanted me doing massage therapy treatments, I was to start doing myofascial release full time. I’m not going to lie, this scared the hell out of me and yet, I knew this was what I had to do to continue my practice as a health care professional.
My first patient was a man with pelvic and hip restrictions and as I stared at his body, something inside me said ‘just take a leg and start a gentle pull’. So I closed my eyes, slowed my breath and tuned into where I felt the pull in the hip. The technique didn’t feel quite as obvious as it had when I was doing this technique in the course but I just kept with it telling myself, Less is More. and the body guided me from the leg pull to a psoas release, a posterior knee release and then to the piriformis. When the treatment was over my first thought was ’I wonder if this has made any difference at all?’ I almost felt like a fraud because I was sure the little effort I put out would not yield any real results.
The patient in question returned two days later as per my treatment plan for him and I I felt my fear and worry fall by the wayside as he said he felt a significant change in his hip and pelvis pain. My trust in the gentle process of ‘less is more’ and listening to where the body wanted me to go actually worked! We still had a long way to go with treatment as his symptoms were chronic but I felt confident that if I stuck to this gentle process, I could help change this man’s situation. It was the beginning of an amazing career shift!
25 years on, I have no hand (or body) pain, I don’t ever use oils and I have helped hundreds of patients make significant change in their chronic pain.