Your Body Is Working Harder Than It Needs To
A massage therapist explains how to do more by doing less
I’a massage therapist, which means that I spend my days literally feeling the frustrations and confusions people hold in their bodies. If you are like most of my clients, you work hard and you often feel tense. You may feel burdened by the aches and pains of your body, and powerless in the face of all your commitments.
I’m not going to tell you to work less. Sure, fewer hours at the office and more hours on the meditation cushion would be nice… and probably impossible. But there is something you can do to ease the stress you carry around—a fundamental change you can make regardless of your job or the length of your to-do list. You can literally work less hard.
I teach other massage therapists how to prolong their careers by using their bodies more effectively. The longer I teach, the more I realize that we therapists and our clients are all suffering from a similar — and usually invisible — problem. As we do our most basic tasks, day after day, we use more muscular effort than is necessary.
For my fellow massage therapists, this over-efforting is obvious. We burn out at alarming rates; according to recent studies, 90 % of massage therapists are working “in some level of pain,” and the average…
