A Little about Massage Therapy

For those of you just beginning your exploration of the field of massage therapy, I'd like to extend a warm welcome. Soon you will discover the many resources you have available to learn more about the profession: the hundreds of helpful and knowledgeable people, the expanding number of massage schools and learning centers around the country, all the tools of the trade and where to find them, plus much more. This book can serve as a guide while you become familiar with new territory, new concepts, and new possibilities. It is filled with practical advice and how-to information that will get you up and running in your successful new business.

However, the most important information I hope to share in the following pages has much more to do with you than it does with any business form, insurance by-law, or tax code.

A meaningful career choice

Massage therapy, more than any other profession available as a career choice today, will bring you back into direct and meaningful contact with your fellow human beings. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we seek out ways to contribute to society, to give back to the family of mankind that supports us and that we are an integral part of. Yet, at the same time, we are forced by economic realities to engage in many occupations that don't give us the sense of giving and joy that comes from working wholeheartedly at a contributive, ethical livelihood. We feel stuck, chained to a system that offers no escape from the daily treadmill.

Choosing massage therapy as a career is a way to escape from that disappointing cycle, to add more enjoyment and satisfaction to your work life, and to make a very good living at it in the bargain.

An Alternative to the Technological Lifestyle

Most physicians begin their careers in medical school with the noble goal of relieving the suffering of other people, but by the time they graduate and enter the modern world of high-tech medicine, many find that something is missing. Even though they are highly trained and excellent at what they do, they've lost touch with the people they want to heal. A barrier of machinery and technology often comes between them and their patients. I am not proposing a back-to-nature plan that would do away with the advances of science. In fact, my own father's life was saved by sophisticated medical intervention, and I fully support the use of the ingenious tools that save lives and increase the quality of life for so many people. Yet, at the same time, something has been lost. John Naisbitt writes about this in his book, Mega trends:

The more high technology around us, the more the need for human touch. The more high tech in our society, the more we will want to create high-touch environments, with soft edges balancing the hard edges of technology....1 Our response to the high tech all around us was the evolution of a highly personal value system to compensate for the impersonal nature of technology. The result was the new self-help or personal growth movement, which eventually became the human potential movement.2

Massage therapy and other body-oriented techniques are not new, but they are even more important to us now than they were in years past. The more technology pulls us away from each other, the more we feel a need to get back in contact. As we fly apart from each other on jet planes and bullet trains and fast cars, we feel a little tug within that calls us back to each other, back to our own bodies, and back to the quiet stillness and healing energy of our planet that is always there.

How often do you spend an hour in a tranquil, softly lit room with a person, speaking quietly about things that matter, or simply not speaking at all, while working diligently to restore suppleness and health to that person's body, mind, and spirit? This scenario makes up the bulk of a working massage therapist's day. The quality of human interaction in this field is unsurpassed by any other profession.

The profession of massage therapy has become a way of life and a livelihood for thousands of people in this country. It is in a period of explosive growth right now, and for very good reasons: It is a way to serve; it is a way to communicate; it is a way to transform your good intentions into concrete benefits for your fellow human beings; and it is a way to train your sense of touch, refining it and turning it into an instrument for healing, compassion, and love.

Throughout this book I am going to be introducing you to some very interesting people who have chosen massage therapy as a profession and who have then gone on to create stimulating careers. Their real-life stories are called Profiles, and they will serve as inspiration and guidance for you as you take the first steps in the same direction.

My transition from amateur to professional

Let me begin by introducing myself. In 1983 I was twenty-three years old and living in Venice Beach, California, spending my day’s roller skating down the boardwalk and searching for ways to make ends meet while still enjoying the bohemian lifestyle the neighborhood was famous for. I was friends with actors, musicians, street people, writers, and health-food fanatics, and I was working in a juice bar for $4 an hour.

My roommate was a young filmmaker named David who was also a licensed massage therapist. I went to the screenings of his movies, and we traded massages occasionally, just for fun. I had never been trained in massage, but it felt natural to me, and David suggested that I check out a local massage school in Santa Monica and get my license, too, since that might be a good way to make some money while doing what I enjoyed.

I went to the massage school, but in my heart I felt that massage was something I could never charge people money for. It was too personal and I enjoyed doing it too much. It was more an act of friendship, support, and shared pleasure than a business transaction, and I assumed that my course work and licensing were all formalities, that I would continue as I had before when I graduated—giving free massages for fun to people I liked.

Then I lost my job at the juice bar and graduated from massage school at the same time. David told me he knew a man who wanted a professional massage. David was too busy making a movie to do the massage himself. Was I interested?

At first it was a dilemma. Would I willingly give up the image of massage I had as an intimate gift, turning it into a commodity to be traded for the almighty dollar? On the other hand, I literally did not have enough money in my wallet to buy a sandwich for lunch the next day.

I called the man. His house was beautiful, perched on a mountainside above the waves in Pacific Palisades. I walked in there with my friend David's battered home-made massage table, set it up in this man's den, and proceeded to give him the same kind of caring, nurturing, soul-communicative massage I'd shared with friends for years, all the while trying to push the idea of a money exchange out of my mind.

At the end of the massage, the man was extremely grateful and reported feeling better than he had for a long time. Then, reaching into his wallet, he extracted two $20 bills and handed them to me, smiling. "Thank you so much," he said, looking me straight in the eye.

That was a magical moment for me. Something clicked in my mind, and suddenly I knew that it wasn't "wrong" to be paid for doing something I loved that also made other people feel great! In fact, the entire concept of having to suffer and work for somebody else and perform some unwanted task just to get money seemed like a very bad idea. Who had thought up that idea in the first place? Why had so many people bought into it, including me?

I saw a new light shining at the far end of the tunnel of pennilessness I'd been living in since leaving my parents' home. As I left my first client's house, carrying David's table to my beat-up old Toyota, I considered the numbers: Forty dollars for a one hour massage was worth ten hours of work in the juice bar. If I could get just two paying clients like that five days a week, that would be like working a hundred hour week just for doing ten massages! The light at the end of the tunnel exploded with a flash, and I saw a sign.

Yes, a dollar sign. I had been converted. It was OK to make some money now that I knew I could do something I loved, not hurt anybody, and probably even make lots of other people feel much better.