From Dinosaurs to Massages

For most people, including myself, the path to a true life’s goal is usually fraught with distractions. I was a pretty typical little boy in that. I wanted to be an archaeologist and find dinosaurs or an astronaut and tread on planets as-yet-undiscovered. I wanted to be an Egyptologist and meet millennia-old mummies and treasure.

These are the fantasies of every boy still trying to find out who he is. It wasn’t me, though. It didn't take the younger me long to grow into a realization that has continuously born me forward though life. He - that is to say, I - wanted to help people. I’ve seen a lot of sick and unhappy people as I’ve gotten older, and the need to do something about it has pressed in on me more and more as time’s gone on. Being a doctor, though, was never much of a thought. I’d seen too much of the allopathic system to have much faith in it. Hospitals were cold and unfriendly and left me with a bad feeling in my gut.

So I looked elsewhere for healing. I’ve grown to have a deep respect for those modalities known as “alternative”, the traditional and the holistic. I've even studied the basics of a handful of techniques, herbal therapy and energy healing foremost among them. Everything I’ve learned and experienced has led me to believe that true health is expressed as a balance inside and outside of a person, between that person and his environment, both internal and external. I also think that in order to achieve that we need to foster a reconnection of these forces in people, and also go about remediating the massive level of stress that permeates our society.

Massage therapy is a practice that helps to start a person along the path to that sort of health. One of the bitterest enemies to a healthy life is a continuously high stress level, and the use of intentional, therapeutic massage can help to bring a person’s body into a calmer, more receptive space. It’s why I think that massage therapy makes a fantastic standalone healing modality, but also a wonderful springboard for finding new practices. It’s easy to incorporate into an existing practice, as well, and it can almost always find a useful space in a person’s treatment plan. I’m attracted and excited by it’s versatility and openness.

As I said before and as I've known since I was a young boy - I want to help people. Healing is simply the act of fostering health, and that's the only thing that I can see myself doing with my life anymore. Everything else is just a memory to me and never in my life have I felt so drawn towards a path.

So I'm done with studying the basics of too many different systems and never going anywhere with them. I want to commit to one system of healing at once and truly study it. Massage therapy seems a wonderful starting point and a truly fantastic modality in its own right. Studying massage will help to give me confidence to explore and incorporate other healing systems. Going through and completing a program of study in massage therapy will allow me to do automatically upon graduation what I’ve been aching to do for years now – heal people.