This may come as a shock to the average consumer. The USA is funny when it comes to massage therapy training and certification requirements. Each state has their own required amount of hours and other check boxes in order to receive a certification or licensure and in some cases it varies by city or county. It might surprise some people to find out that California is 1 of 5 states that has no state regulated licensure/certification. Where does CA massage certification come from? A private, non-profit entity: California Massage Therapy Council, or CAMTC. CAMTC was created by massage professiona ..read more

I have seen this client regularly, her and her husband actually. One visit, I started work on her back and she was unusually jumpy and sensitive. Usually, regular clients don’t react this way since their body is familiar with my touch. “Is there something going on?” I questioned Her husband, who I saw the day prior, received news that his cancer had returned. This explains why she was so sensitive to touch on her back. Why would this cause her back to be sensitive? Let’s look at this from a yin-yang theory. In Chinese medicine, there is a theory of the feminine (yin) and the masculine (yang) t ..read more

Some people ask, “How often should I get a massage?” A simple answer is: as often as you want. Just like anything in life, it depends on other conditions. You might have heard you should get a massage once a month but that is a naïve answer. If you get good, quality sleep, proper hydration and exercise, embody optimal eating habits for your individual needs, meet your social needs, etc., and manage stressors well, then you might not need a massage EVER. In reality, the majority of the general population falls short somewhere with these guidelines. Let’s take a look at a few different scenarios ..read more

Since this is National Wellness Month (every month is always something), I thought I would throw out a few things that you can jump ahead to if it sounds interesting. 1.       Habits: breaking old ones, creating new ones 2.       Boundaries: Do you know yours? 3.       Lymph, lymph, lymph 1. Improve Your Habits An acclaimed book, Atomic Habits by James Clear, was so good I read it twice in sequence. I’ll draw upon some of the concepts in his book. How do I break a bad habit? Bad (subjective) habits can b ..read more

I had a client say something like this some years back. Here are a couple of reasons why more massage therapists [in California] don’t invest in continuing education: 1.  We don’t have to. CE classes aren’t required to maintain a state certification (Florida requires 24 hours for every two years). 2.  It costs money. A 2-day CE course can run upwards of $600+ not factoring in the loss of revenue and travel expenses.   Why am I taking CE classes? There is always something to learn. I can’t know everything so I’m on this quest to find what interests me and how I can use acquired s ..read more

The pandemic hit. I was laid out sick with original flavor COVID-19 so shut downs happened at an opportune time. Of course, I didn’t know at the time I had it. After self-recovery, business was off limits. Pandemic Unemployment Assistance helped financially. Emotionally and psychologically, I was great, actually enjoying the peace and solitude. Honestly, before lockdowns, things weren’t going great for business. Years of struggling to make ends meet and all these missteps and bleeding money into things that weren’t working sucked. I saw the pandemic as an opportunity to re-invent myself and di ..read more

This person I knew from the local sober community made it about 8 months before he fell off the wagon. Again. He had been having trouble staying sober. I didn’t know much about him or his journey. We knew each other peripherally and I saw this as an opportunity to run my own case study using Reiki since one of my texts in the subject matter included a section on overcoming “bad habits”. Reiki is a spiritual healing technique that relaxes and stimulates your body’s ability to heal itself. Upon hearing my offer, he accepted, citing that he was willing to try anything. I created interview forms f ..read more

If you are reading this good job. You made it into 2022 with me. As many of you know, American icon Betty White died the day of New Years Eve. I watched her on The Golden Girls when I was much younger. She was 99. What a good, long run she had and it seemed as if she lived her life well. New Year’s Day I went on a quick, in & out hike up Museum Trail behind the Palm Springs Art Museum. Clouds strewn across the sky creating a bit of drama. I welcomed the texture. As with a lot of my previous hikes, a question that has haunted me for months resurfaced: What do you want, Richard? This meant ..read more

I pulled into the private community. The gate guard immediately recognized me being a frequent visitor on my clients access list. Parking in the driveway as usual, I pull out my massage table then feel the pocket where I would have the sheets and other supplies including massage lotion. Blank space. I unzip the pocket to find that I failed to pack a sheet set and my travel bag with my lotion, speaker, etc. Shit. The client just messaged about the side gate open for me. I call, explaining my buffoonery. Though they offer their own bedsheets to use I still had no lubricant for their deep tissue ..read more

What makes a good massage therapist? What keeps you going back to someone? I like to think that this is something that goes beyond what you might typically think. From my experience, I have had massages from people that were good for that time then I would forget about them later. Some occasions left me with better impressions that made me want to work with that person again and that was because there was a connection beyond the work we were doing. Prior to the 2020 pandemic I struggled with myself a lot. As with anyone it had to do with what was going on in my mind and how I thought and felt ..read more