Twenty Ten or Two Thousand and Ten?

I'm going for the former.

Just sounds better.

Happy New Year!

A Massage Therapist's Right Thumb Wishes Everyone a Merry Christmas!

Yep, Artie likes to dress up in a Santa outfit every Christmas.
He's nice and snuggly buggly in his wee suit.

Have a good one y'all!

My favorite client....

......gave me WAY too much for Christmas!
I just opened the envelope, D!
That was WAY TOO much!
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!

When a client loses a loved one...

...what do you do?
What do you even say?
I got an email from a client a couple of days ago telling me her son passed away suddenly and she wouldn't be able to make her appointment. I couldn't even believe that she had the presence of mind to email me. Her son was only 29 and he wasn't expected to die - he just got sick and things went from bad to worse very suddenly.
I've been in the same situation before - where clients have lost someone close suddenly, but every time this happens I'm at a new loss on what to do. I'll go to the funeral, send a card and have a the tissues near at hand when they return to getting massages. The thing is, I'll probably bawl my eyes out next time I see them. I'm not an emotional person. Seriously. But there's something about losing a loved one that just makes me cry, especially if it's someone young and the death is unexpected.
One time a client showed me a tattoo she had got to remember her brother by - he also had passed away young and suddenly. SHE wasn't crying, but as soon as I saw that tattoo I just lost it.
How do you handle it?

Know What's Lovely?

When clients bring you all these wee lovely gifts at Christmas.
Lots of lovely gifts.
It's brilliant!

Six Word Saturday AGAIN!

DEARY ME. ANOTHER WEEK GONE ALREADY?


I've been busy.
I mean - REALLY busy.
For example, yesterday I had a chair gig all day. The day before that I had a 8 am start of a chair gig at an office until lunchtime and then table work all day- didn't get home til 8:30.
Wednesday was table work all day.
Tuesday was another chair gig and table massage.
It's been crazy.

I need to be better at promoting myself at the chair gigs though. On the Tuesday gig I was with 2 other therapists - both seemed really nice and the 3 of us had actually done the same venue last year. It was a mothers group get together at a local church - there were having raffles, food, pampering things with someone doing hand treatments etc. Anyway, one of the other therapists was WELL organized. She had cool promotional stuff, wee presents in bags and 10% off coupons in them etc. Now NORMALLY if I wasn't so busy I would have thought of this and got my act together and I was sort of kicking myself when I saw it.

So I'm thinking that when times are slow I should just put little packages together like that for the chair gigs and just have them ready for the next time.

Preparation is a good thing.

Where does the time go? I thought I'd only started playing Six Word Saturday yesterday!

Wee Sally Has Got Me Playing This.....

"TOO MUCH TIME ON THE COMPUTER"

I think that is pretty much self explanatory.

All I want for Christmas is...

- A Snuggie - with my business logo on it and matching snuggies for my husband, cats, friends, family, neighbors and neighborhood coyotes (they look cold).

- A good GPS designed for geocaching that makes me feel like Spock (yes, I use multimillion dollar satellites to find tupperware in the woods)

- A Kindle. (One of my brothers and I got my Mum one and I'm going to see her reaction over skype when he gives it to her on Christmas Day. How cool is THAT?)

- A Maserati - only because I like singing the old Joe Walsh song, that's all

- World Peace

- The cure for cancer to be found/let known and for the cure to involve having a massage every day.

NOTE: These are NOT in any particular order.

A Massage Therapist Strips

But not in the way one might think (which would be a bad thing. Really).

Today I stripped myself of reflexology. Yep, I took it off my website, including my Christmas Specials and I'm taking it off my trifold master copy and I threw away my chart the other day.

Mad, eh? Especially since I'm going to lose income from this decision.

I've been learning quite a bit these past few weeks. I mentioned the book in an earlier post and I've been doing some digging into research findings and answering some questions for myself. The end result has been that I now don't believe that reflexology works.

Something happened in my usually-vacant head. I had someone come for a session on Saturday and my "talk" was not the same. I felt like I was selling snake oil. Now, don't get me wrong. I think a lot of my clients felt something from reflexology, but it may well have been just a placebo effect or it may just have been from getting a relaxing foot massage, but I don't believe in the theory of reflexology any more - this has all come from reading and looking at research findings (plus some help from the folks on the website that I bailed from last week).

Isn't it funny how life is like a continual school?

Question

On the one hand the portly dude in red would bring joy to poor kids all around the world.
On the other there's pure diagnostic genius and a sarcastic wit that's just awe-inspiring. If Gregory really existed I'd work on his poor leg for nothing - now THAT'S saying something!

Unlearning "Stuff" from Massage School

Know how we were all told about having to drink water after a massage to get rid of lactic acid and other metabolic waste from the massage?

Well, scrub that out of your brain. It's wrong.

There has been research that shows it's wrong and here's a good article on the flushing out toxin myth


This article is by Eric Grant and the guy is a great source on information on all sorts of topics got to do with massage.Here is a list of his other articles


Happy reading, everyone!

Do you think that maybe someone should give their prize back?

Check out this bloggers cartoons on Al Gore. He's getting hit hard.

Get This Book and Wonder.....

(NOTE: if the amazon widget isn't showing up click here)

...WHY, WHY, WHY are we not taught this in school?
Canadians are. Canadians are way ahead of the game massage education wise, which I've wondered about a lot. Maybe it's because they've got better beer there or something. Maybe it's because our big political bodies here in the US have been at each others throats so much. Who knows?

Anyway, we're not taught research literacy in our massage schools and we should be. There's a reason for this. When we think about taking on new modalities it's very easy to find all sorts of claims on the internet and in books and magazines which are presented in the form of research. The only problem is I never knew the difference between a Systematic Review and a Quasi-Experimental Study or other types of studies. Turns out this type of information is pretty important. I mean, really important. I'm saying pretty dang amazingly mind-blowingly important.

Educate yourself and then research the research. Quiz your teachers too. There's a good chance they don't know this stuff either. They should. Everyone should.

"FRIENDS, ROMANS, COUNTRYMEN. LEND ME YOUR EARS....!!!"

I woke up thinking this might be a good idea.....

...since I've been stressed, knocked about and disillusioned about things lately - most of which has been brought upon me by my own doing and stupidity.

But after working all day I got a glimmer of hope and the hope came from my clients since they're just so nice. I'm very lucky to have nice clients. Today I had 7 clients. Three of them were new, and three of them needed a prenatal massage.

I have a 'referred by' line on my intake form and some people say they just found me on the internet, but I probed one of the pregnant clients today to see where and how she found me. She said there is an infertility group discussion board and someone on there had recommended me. It was good to hear. Since the internet is playing a part in my stress, it's ironic that this came up. I did a wee search to see if I could find something on an infertility board, but couldn't find anything, but I did find this which I didn't know about. It's weird the way you find stuff that people are writing about you when you own a business.
It made me smile.

Yep, I'm glad for my clients, especially the ones that are pregnant - so I went off the idea of visualizing human extinction as the day went on! I think that might be a good thing.

And ye keep on learning!

I'm getting philosophical here - sometimes things happen to direct you from "taking sides" in a situation where sides should not be formed.

Lately my inner she-geek was drawn to what I thought would be a bunch of gorgeous learning about stuff that's right up my alley - like boolean operators and maybe some sleek algorithms. I like boolean operators. They're logical, true and good.

Instead I found myself falling into an online blunder (created by my own stupidity) which forced me to bail a website, but I also started to come to the conclusion that a massive split is forming between the energy workers in our profession and the science based workers. The blunder forced me away, but I'm sort of half glad of it. I don't want to be a part of something that promotes "crapping on the other side", which was what I was witnessing in part. Progress really should be positive and a lot of what I saw wasn't positive. "Let's call the other side names" was what I witnessed the most. Not exactly productive or educational. Oh well.

I've a question - why does life have to have so many freakin' "sides" and we're always expected it pick a "side"? "Sides" suck.

I got kicked off on a learning mode which I'll probably continue on my own though since my interest was peaked.

Note to self - be careful what you sign yourself up for - it mightn't be what you think.