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One of the reasons that massage licensing boards and other associations are in favor of licensing massage always seems to come back to the idea that massage can do harm to clients and the public should be protected from harm.

The Safety of Massage by Edzard Ernst had the conclusion: “Massage is not entirely risk free. However, serious adverse events are probably true rarities.”

Keith Grant also did research on medline publications on “Injuries Reported in Medline as Related to the Practice of Therapeutic Massage (.pdf file) — 1965 to 2003″

The abstract of this paper states his conclusions;

“Medline citations from 1965 to 2003 were searched for cases relating
significant injury to the practice of therapeutic massage. Eleven such cases
were found from over 12 million medical citations. While this number is far
too small for statistical analysis of injury patterns, six recommendations for
training and practice were obtainable from these reports on mechanistic
grounds. A conclusion of the general safety of massage follows from
the paucity of report injury cases in conjunction with corroborative
insurance statistics.”

Others use the claims of individual massage therapists of stories from clients who were ‘injured’ by other massage therapists in the form of bruising or other stories of massage sessions that were lacking in results.  While I am sure there are many cases of this type of problem, the harm is minimal enough that they don’t report it.

What some will find harmful, others will find beneficial.

The claim that licensing is needed to protect the public from harm has yet to be proven.  Until then, what needs to be done is to study the current licensing and the effects of licensing on a massage therapists ability to create a sustainable massage business and also provide quality service to clients.  The variations in the laws of each state vary so greatly and leave the massage profession looking unorganized and unprofessional.  What is allowed and accepted in one state is not allowed in other states.  Are you still wondering why it is so difficult to build a massage practice ?

Please let me know what is going on in your state as far as licensing and legislation issues?  Does the licensing of massage affect your ability to build a practice?  If you are in an unlicensed state do you think that licensing is needed?

Please fill out the forms in your specific state from this chart at www.massagetherapycareers.com

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Fear is a tricky emotion. It is often disguised under other emotions - anger, frustration, sadness and others. There are really only two emotions - love and fear. If it isn’t love - it is fear.

Your fears of building a successful massage practice of finding a dream massage therapy job are really a great opportunity to learn more about your beliefs.
Whenever our beliefs are threatened we move into fear.

What is underlying our fears is usually the Fear of abandonment, rejection, conflict and engulfment. These fears come from early childhood and the way we were brought up. Fearing rejection or fearing that we are not good enough will leave a massage therapist frozen and unable to step out and do the marketing that is necessary to build a massage practice. People will give up easily saying ‘that didn’t work’ and go on to the next career mainly because they believe their fears are true.

If you remember from massage school and the theories on stress syndromes and the fight or flight reactions, living in a constant state of fear leaves us living in a constant state of ‘fight or flight’ which causes certain physical changes in our bodies:

- Our immune systems, digestive system shut down to allow all energy to go to other systems.
-Our thinking becomes unclear so our brains can just focus on getting out of danger. We don’t have time for deep reflective thought.
- Excess cortisol is produced to combat the inflammation, but overproduction of cortisol leads to a breakdown in tissues often leading to career ending injuries.

Deane Juhan states in his book “Job’s Body” :

Sustained levels of adrenaline and cortisol have other disturbing effects. These include high blood pressure, gastric ulceration, atherosclerosis, suppression of the immune system (which would lower one’s resistance to diseases and infections of all kinds), sterility and significant personality changes”

The way to overcome fear is to take action - take small steps that are achievable and don’t cause much stress. As you build up your self confidence you will be able to take bigger steps.
The other thing to start doing is to look at your thoughts that are creating these fears. Where are they coming from? What beliefs do you have that create these thoughts and feelings of fear? Just recognizing that they are just thoughts and are not real can take away some of the fear so you can start taking the steps.

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How do you find a good massage therapist - one that meets your needs for comfort, personality, philosophy and technique?

With so many variables and so many different needs, it can be like looking for a needle in the haystack.

• Get a referral from friends or family members.
• Get a referral from your physician or other health care provider.
• Look online by searching for ‘massage, your city on Google. While this may seem risky you should be able to tell by the quality of their site and by the fact that it is even being found by Google.
• Check with one of the professional associations directories
  ABMP, AMTA or IMA. While this is not a guarantee of service or reliablity or professionalism, it does indicate that the massage therapist made the extra effort to get found through their professional association.

But then once you find one how do you know if they are a match for you? How do you know when you are getting a good massage or working with a good massage therapist?

…..You will just feel good. You will also feel comfortable with the therapist.

Some organizations will tell you to ask questions like:

• How long have you been doing massage?
• What are your credentials?
• What is your experience?
• What training have you had?

Most of these things don’t really matter when it comes down to it. Licensing and certification will not guarantee that the massage therapist will be a match for your needs. It may help you to feel better to know this information before going in which can be helpful, but just keep in mind that newly licensed massage therapists can be just as effective as people who have been in the field for awhile.

Part of getting a good massage is also about knowing what you like and being able to ask for it. So many people assume that massage therapists are supposed to know where and how much it hurts or how they feel and they think they should just put up with whatever the massage therapist is doing. While massage therapists can often feel tight areas they can not tell how it feels to you.

A great massage therapist will be able to work with you to get that information and feedback from you so they can adjust their pressure or technique to your comfort level or the level you need.  A great massage therapist will explain to you before hand either through their writings on their website or when you call or visit in person, just what their philosophy on healing and massage is.  That way you can see if their ideas and what they value match yours.  Having a support team of like minded individuals is important on the road to healing.  A survey done by the Eldon Taylor author of ‘Choices and Illusions’ found that “The physicians attitude was the most important factor in determining whether the patient lived or died”.  (While massage therapists don’t often work with that extreme of an example - the jist of what he is saying I think is that a positive attitude is most important in the healing process and having someone who supports your process is really helpful.)

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This summer has been a really exciting time for owners of Site Build It! (SBI) Websites. SBI! is the all in one hosting and business development system that I use and recommend for making a living online or promoting your massage business online.

They keep adding new features it seems like every week! The big release of the summer was Content 2.0 which allows the users to post their own content - kind of like a cross between myspace and a wiki. The result is an interactive website and the expanded ability to do things like create a directory or testimonials.

The most recent is the new Brainstorming (Version 2) which is a piece of software that actually will help you decide on a site concept or a niche for your website. The way this works is that you start brainstorming different topics that you know a lot about or are passionate about and choose keywords people might use to find a site that you develop on the topic. The Brainstormer brings back data such as the search volume and the number of sites out there to give you a profitability potential of the concept. You can then compare the results and choose a profitable topic for your site. It also helps you choose profitable keywords for your massage business site so that it will get you to the top of the search engines much faster and will also help you get better results (get your most wanted response - which is a phone call or email for an appointment!)

If you are still on the fence about a website for your massage business, or making additional income through a website or even making a living online using this system, you can take a look at the forums and read about all of the other people doing the same thing. The forums are really like one big family of people helping people. Whenever you don’t know how to do something or want feedback on your site or need help with anything - the forums are the place to go and get information. You can actually take a look at the forums through my special login which I can give you when you email me.

I have also gotten some recent comments about SBI! and their simple user templates and the lack of design abilities. You can do most anything with the design if you know other software like Dreamweaver or Front Page. The thing is that hiring someone to do a fancy site may look really nice - but what good does a nice looking site do if there is no one to see it. What people are looking for is information anyway. (They do actually have some updates in the works for the blockbuilder templates to hopefully make things more appealing to those who really think they need it.)

With all of these improvements the Content 2.0 does cost and additional fee of $100 per year but you can test it for free for 25 pages to see if it is something you can use. Everything else is still included in the $299 per year…

analyze it - checks your pages for you and tells you what you need to do to make your pages more search engine friendly.

- link fix it- checks your pages for broken links and sends you an email to fix them. Broken links make search engines unhappy.

-SBI! stores all your pages in a database instead of a regular web server. Every activity, including spider visits, rankings, traffic, etc. is tracked and analyzed, based on the content of your pages, the changes you make to your pages, and its effect on your rankings, spider visits, traffic, etc. Because of this, SiteSell is THE authority on SEO advice (other than the SEs themselves, of course). We can trust what they say is important (or unimportant) for our site rankings, because they base their advice on solid data, not theory or anecdotal “evidence.”

-WorldSubmitter creates a Sitemap file for your SBI! site, locating it at the “root level” of your Web site. This is an XML file, in the Sitemaps.org protocol format, that contains information about all the pages on your site. This file is updated if you add, delete or edit a page on your site.
WorldSubmitter automatically pings (informs) Google, Yahoo! and Ask once per day (if you’ve built, edited or deleted a page), alerting them to changes on your site. This tells the SE spiders to “come and get” all your pages and update their indexes with your new, edited, and deleted pages.

-A video and written Action Guide to help you plan your site concept, figure out how to make money, guide you in creating a site and helps you track your results so that you can keep improving and finding sources of income

-Value exchange - automated link exchange system for getting back links to your site which helps the search engines find you.

-Rss/Blog It! - adds a blog and rss system to your whole site which pings the search engines everytime you update or add a page.

-Search it! - Brainstorming and research tool Free for anyone to use.

-Search Engine HQ - Shows all site pages, with Search Engine rankings for each page which tells you what search engines found you using what keywords, plus it automatically creates the Search Engine Sitemap you can submit to Ask, Yahoo and Google, plus keeps it updated!

The list goes on but you can see it all for yourself when you decide you order you SBI! site.

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One of the most challenging parts of becoming a massage therapist is the way we think about doing massage or being a massage therapist. People come in to us with a pain, stress or injury and want our attention - want us to fix it. We are often taught in massage school to do just that with the techniques that we learn and the knowledge we acquire. All of this learning and knowing can go to a massage therapists head and make them start thinking that they are the ones’ that are doing the healing for the client. It is really confusing to figure out - Who does the healing?

I believe that our bodies are really just a messenger of something deeper that is needing attention. Figuring out what needs attending to is really the challenge. After receiving 4 years of Integrative Manual Therapy which addresses the internal workings of the body, I learned that there is much more to healing. My IMT practitioner would treat my internal organs such as my liver, spleen, intestines and it would relieve the pain in my neck and back. But even with that - who is doing the healing?

Our bodies really are a reflection of our thoughts and beliefs. Healing and changing on a deeper internal level is something only you can do for yourself - not any client.

The book “Zero Limits” by Joe Vitale takes it to the extremes. It is a book about a psychologist who healed a whole mental ward at a hospital by working on himself - a method called Ho’oponopono meaning ‘to make right’ or to ‘rectify’ that is practiced by ancient Hawaiians. He calls it cleaning - cleaning out all of those old thoughts and beliefs that keep you from living a connected inspired life. The memories we hold- conscious and more importantly the unconscious ones are just old programs that aren’t working any more. You can sometimes tell when you are running an old program by the way you feel. If you are feeling anything but love and joy- it is an old program. But it is also not a sure way of knowing as our feelings can come from other places too.

‘Zero Limits’ is the place where we are free of these old programs - “No memories. No Identity. Nothing but the Divine” he says in the book. Part of the problem is that we don’t ever really know if something is coming from our mind and past or the Divine.

Our intentions can also be confusing. We have the intention of building a massage practice but we struggle. When you are intending to do something you keep fighting what actually is which takes you out of the present moment. It blocks inspiration which is the true connection with our ‘zero limits’.

Most of what happens in our life is only a projection of our programs.

When we are faced with clients who are in pain he says the question to ask is “What’s going on inside of me that shows up as this person’s back pain?”

Thinking about this possibility makes my head hurt it is so mind boggling. I have thought about this in the past. If people are coming to us in pain are we really doing a service for them by ‘taking it away’ or trying to take it away with our massage techniques? It is taking total responsibility for everything in your life. These people are in your life to show you just that.

“You are acting from either memory or inspiration. Memory is thinking; inspiration is allowing. Most of us by far are living out of memories. We are unconscious to them because we are basically unconscious period.

The divine sends a message to you and if your memories are playing you won’t hear it.

From Divinity, you will receive inspiration. An inspiration is from the Divine, but a memory is a program in the collective unconscious of humankind. A program is like a belief, a programming that we share with others when we notice it in others. Our challenge is to clear all the programs so we are back to zero state, where inspiration can come.’

Basically all this guy (Dr Hew Len) did was say “I am sorry and I love you” to heal himself.

Our thinking that we can heal others with what we do is really the ego attempts to make ourselves feel better about ourselves. While there isn’t anything wrong with that for the most part because our egos are also showing us what parts of us need the most healing, there is much more to healing or being a healer. I actually dislike it when people call themselves a healer. I won’t go to anyone who thinks or says that about themselves.

Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System for Wealth, Health, Peace, and More (Hardcover)
by Joe Vitale

The Science of Being Well - How our thoughts create everything in our life including our physical symptoms and health or lack of health.

Inspiration: Your Ultimate Calling by Wayne W. Dyer-Inspiration, Dyer writes, is the opposite of motivation and goal-oriented thinking, the latter, “grabbing an idea and carrying it through to an acceptable conclusion.” Inspiration, on the other hand, is when “an idea has taken hold of us from the invisible reality of Spirit.” To Dyer, getting rid of ego in all its manifestations is the first step to connecting with the power of inspiration.

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