July 28th, 2007 Julie Onofrio
A nationwide massage therapist licensing protest is underway by some who think that licensing is not necessary in the US.
www.thefreedomride.org is a new blog being written by Brandon Raynor, an Australian Naturopath and massage therapists who has moved to the US. He is also the owner of a group of massage schools www.brandonraynor.com that teaches massage therapy in the course of a 5 or 10 day long intensive massage program.
His website states:
Hence you may begin to realize how our massage courses at BRSNT differ to most schools programs. These can focus over 50% of their course time to learning excessive amounts of latin names for muscles (anatomy) and physiological terms, which could have easily and cheaply covered by doing a simple coloring in book at home.
A lot of other schools also dedicate a lot of their practical massage course hours to teaching you repetitive massage routines that are not designed to treat the specific needs of your individual patient. You may also start to understand why at BRSNT we guarantee to teach you better quality massage faster and more cost effectively than most other programs.
You will benefit, not only by saving money on course fees, and upon obtaining your qualifications after our 5 and 10 day intensives you will also be able to start practicing as a professional massage therapist sooner, and earn money at your new exciting career as a massage therapist!”
Finally someone who really can see through all the hoopla of licensing and legislation and provide basic massage training.
There is no proof that 500 hours of education that is required by most State Boards has anything to do with being a successful massage therapist. There is no proof that massage is harmful.
I had the chance to speak to Brandon yesterday about what he is doing. His passion for providing a simple yet profound method of massage comes through in every word he speaks. I will be following his tour and promoting his websites.
I have more written on licensing and legislation issues on my other blog at www.themassage-directory.com and don’t want to get into all of the licensing and political debates here other to say that the reason all of this is important is so that we can really get to the core of what is needed to create successful massage therapists and define our profession accordingly so that legislators and insurance companies will not have control over our profession.
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July 27th, 2007 Julie Onofrio
One of the things that is really missing in the massage profession is a way to bring massage and touch back into everyday life and into the lives of others. As we get more and more caught up in getting more training and education and trying to make a living doing massage, the concept of touch in the family and communities seems to get lost.
Even though I have been a massage therapist for 18 years the idea that you have to pay someone to be touched still strikes me as odd. How did touch and massage ever get so far away from the art form that it is? How did massage get so far away from being a regular part of life?
As a massage therapist trying to make a living, often the goals of massage sessions become trying to do every thing you can to get the client to come back and pay you again for another massage.
What about the concept of teaching people to fish - teaching people to massage each other?
One such way to do this is to start a massage group at your church as one of my guest authors has done. Carl Nelson has written some guidelines for bringing massage back to the masses - literally. He has started and facilitated a group where he teaches massage to members of his church. He gives some ideas for setting up tables and shares some articles that he wrote and recommends some DVD’s for teaching simple massage concepts that anyone of any age can learn.
This could easily be applied to any group that you belong to - sports groups, non profit groups, hospitals, nursing homes, schools…Where else can you see this happening? In book stores, coffee shops, parks, at beaches?
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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 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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