July 20th, 2007 Julie Onofrio
I started my first website www.thebodyworker.com after gathering information to start an apprenticeship program for a friend of mine who didn’t want to go through the standard massage school routine. Here in WA State it is allowed under our licensing.
Keith Grant speaks highly of the idea of apprenticeship programs in his white paper on the Issues of Massage Governance saying :
“actual practice requires very limited memorization of facts. The massage
practitioner must have the deeper understanding required to find information as needed and
then to be able to use it to make therapy decisions in the face of ambiguity. Research indicates
that the environment that seems best able to foster the understanding leading to usability has
much in common with traditional apprenticeships [19, 20].”
A recent posting on the Body_Work Yahoo Group informed me that apprenticeship programs are alive and well in Australia.
Becoming a massage therapist is such a mix of learning anatomy and science and learning to apply this to a wide variety of conditions and working with clients as people which brings a whole other challenge in creating professional boundaries. This can’t really be done in any training program no matter how many hours one puts into it. It is really just like any other profession - like going to law school doesn’t make you a lawyer or accounting school doesn’t make your an accountant or even having a child doesn’t make you a parent. It is more about the process and the process continues until you stop acting in whatever roles you have chosen or in death.
So I am in the process of researching apprenticeship programs and how to set them up and what would it take for licensed states and even unlicensed states to accept apprenticeship training for licensing requirements. I would love to hear others thoughts and experiences on this.
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July 18th, 2007 Julie Onofrio
Carl W. Nelson | July 18, 2007Keith,
I remain most grateful to you for your gracious manner and your numerous insightful contributions. Your reference in #25 to Deane Juhan prompted me to write the following:
Deane Juhan is the author of the landmark bodywork classic: Job’s Body: A Handbook for Bodywork (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press) 1987; Expanded Edition, 1998; Third Edition, 2003. Of the first two editions, over 80,000 copies have been sold. This well-written book gives a richly detailed picture of how and why the body responds to therapeutic touch, providing a reader-friendly yet scientifically reliable and detailed introduction to the human body. The book surveys bodywork practices showing how they can alter deep-seated patterns of body and mind.
After three and a half years as a doctoral candidate in English literature (specializing in William Blake) at the University of California - Berkeley, in the late summer of 1973 Deane Juhan had his initial experience with Esalen Massage as an impromptu gift from Ken LeBlanc, a member of the Esalen Massage Crew. This event took place on a Saturday evening in one of the communal tubs within the Esalen Hot Springs Bathhouse forty feet above the ocean surf pounding at the bottom of the cliff at the coastal center of Big Sur. Deane knew in some premonitory kind of way that one of the significant events of his life had just happened. This led to a sudden change in his career.
Then, after three and a half months from landing at Esalen and after having served as a night guard there for about two months, he took a weekend workshop on Esalen massage presented by Bill Liles. Deane describes this transforming event: “Bill walked over and stood by my table where I was trying to reproduce what I thought I had seem him do, and he just stood there and stood there. I was starting to get very nervous and finally he just put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I can’t correct what you are doing. I have nothing to teach you. You’re a natural. You just keep doing what you’re doing.’ Nobody had ever said anything like that to me about anything I’d ever done. I mean I wasn’t a natural at anything I’d ever tried to do. It was all hard work. And it really hit me, it was another one of those slaps across the side of my head. And I said, ‘Maybe I should do this, because nothing I’ve ever felt has ever felt like this and I’ve never been rewarded as quickly and as sincerely for anything I’d ever done like this.’ This just seemed like the thing to do.†Bill suggested to Deane that he apply for a job on the Esalen Massage Crew whereupon working on four crewmembers he was immediately accepted and found himself with a full schedule as a professional.
Deane has described Bill Liles as the one who first showed him how to give the Esalen Massage experience to others, as one of the best massage therapists that’s ever worked at Esalen, and has described him, too, as a poetic therapist. I, too, like numerous others, feel the same way. Later, Milton Trager, M.D., selected Deane as one of the first five practitioner-instructors to teach his work.
So Deane Juhan with not more than 20 massage classroom hours from a master became a professional on the world-renowned Esalen Massage Crew! From this light the New York requirement of 1000 massage classroom hours to become a massage therapist is absolutely absurd.
In Touched by the Goddess: The Physical, Psychological, and Spiritual Powers of Bodywork (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press) 2002, Deane Juhan presents a collection of essays with a passionate call to the global community of somatic practitioners to recognize deeply and fully the value of their work, and to share that recognition as far and wide as possible. He views the impact of skilled and nurturing touch from a great variety of perspectives – political, social, individual and public health, the purely physiological and scientific, evolutionary, and philosophical. His early training was academic, and he has devoted his life to the study and research of somatics, as well as to its practice and teaching.
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July 17th, 2007 Julie Onofrio
A website is worthless unless it is found by search engines. If it isn’t getting you a few new clients a week or month it isn’t doing it’s job.
In order to have search engines find you there are many different things you can do - most of which I outline in my Free Ebook called “Creating a Website that works” that I have available at my website www.workless-playmore.com
The basic things are:
- Choosing a domain that says what you do and where you do it (massage-denver.com)
- Using keywords, descriptions and proper naming of file names for your pages
- Creating high quality content - at least 30 pages. This can be done gradually over time.
- Use a rss system or blog to notify the search engines when you add new pages or posts
- Create Google and Yahoo site maps and submit the site maps to the major search engines ( do a search for google and yahoo sitemaps and find free software that can create these or this comes with your SBI site automatically and it is updated regularly)
- Submit your site to search engines
- Get high quality links from other service providers in your neighborhood.
- Add your link to free directories
-Write ezine articles for the free articles directories
- Study your traffic results and find out what keywords people are using to find you. (SBI has a in depth system for doing this and even will tell you what pages to add to your site)
- Wish or just use SBI
So it takes time and energy to get your site to the top of the search engines and a nice looking , expensive site is really worthless if it isn’t getting found by search engines.
Most people just want an 8-10 website to promote their practice and that is a great way to start and all you need if you use SBI and their complete action guide. I just did a site last month for someone in Manalapan NJ -manalapanmassage.com and it was on the first page of Google in 4 days after submitting it to the search engines using the proper search engine optimization methods outlined here.
Let me know if you have any questions or are interested in hiring someone to do your site for you. I am making myself available for massage therapists for $500 to create an 8 page website (that is in addition to the $299 fee to Site Build it!) After that you will have complete access to the site and be able to make changes, add as many pages as you want and take your time learning SBI and the steep learning curve.
For more information on SBI
For more information on Hiring Me
Hire me as your SBI coach
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July 16th, 2007 Julie Onofrio
I haven’t been blogging much this weekend as I got caught up in researching blogs and how to make money just with Blogging.
I like blogging much better than building websites because it is really easy to post. The thing that I am learning is that there are a whole list of things you can do with your blog to get it found by search engines - most of what I have learned from Site Build it! but I think I have even been able to take it beyond SBI.
The Ebook that I spoke of last week is taking me longer than I thought because of all of these things I have been finding out about blogging and using wordpress blogs in particular. The reason I went with wordpress mainly is because the had the most understandable documentation on their main site about how to use it.
One of the things I came across was this great article called “Sweet 16″ -the 16 things you can do to to build an internet business. It really isn’t anything different from the SBI concept, but I like how he put it all together.
I have actually started a new site that I am keeping a secret because I want to see if I can create traffic without telling everyone here to go there! Wait till you see!
Some of the changes I have made are around the link structure so some pages that I posted links to are not going to be found. I know I will have to suffer the loss in traffic for a bit but the changes in the long run will help get traffic.
I also found out that you can print wordpress blog posts and just get the post and the ads show up but the rest of the blog doesn’t so you can just print the text and info. I am trying to figure out how to get rid of the ads in the print view.
I also added a donation section after reading that one of the top bloggers does this and this is his second highest source of income after Google Adsense. You can find the link at the top.
I also am adding some behind the scene plugins - google analytics, meta tags and seo plugins along with a google sitemap plug in and also just a regular site map which you can find a link to at the top of the blog. This will also help with traffic.
I will be writing about all the plugins I am using and why and how to set them up in a wordpress blog in my ebook - that I don’t know when will be coming out as the sun is out! and the Google dollars are rising!
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July 14th, 2007 Julie Onofrio
One of the major
themes in all helping professions revolve around the idea that people need to be helped and don’t have the resources that they need inside to take care of themselves and heal.
I just read a great explanation of it in a book called “Living in the Light” by Shakti Gawain
She says:
Victim consciousness is the belief that we are helpless; that the world, people and the economy do things to us and we have no choice but to accept what is dished out to us…
As victims, people enlist rescuers to save them. Rescuers do not know how to take care of themselves, so they focus on helping others, unconsciously trying to fulfill their own needs in and indirect way. They need victims to care for. A rescuer believes that others are weak or powerless and need his help…
You can’t be a rescuer, though unless you believe in and have a victim inside you…
To transform rescuing, we need to take responsibility for our own pain, and get in touch with the poser of the universe within us to help with our own healing…
The energy stays stuck as long as people are focusing on others as the problem or the solution…
Rescuers do not see how much they need help. They are so busy helping others, they cannot see their own pain. When they start to feel their own feelings, they cover them up by finding someone else to take care of…
The only way to help others is to do exactly what you really want to do.
OK I could probably quote the whole chapter but what it is saying really sums up all that I have been saying and learning for myself. The clearer I get about what I desire and I do that by checking in to see what feels the best, the easier things come to me in every aspect of my life.
Resources:
www.thebodyworker.com
The code of the caretaker
Posted in Ethics, Recommended Reading, The Code of the Caretaker, The Wealthy Massage Therapist | No Comments »
