I believe that we are a soul with a physical body to express our authentic selves. When we physically express our authentic personalities we thrive and experience vitality. When we physically express attitudes that are not in alignment with our unconditional authentic selves we experience stress. Stress is defined as two opposing forces pulling away from each other, think of concrete or bones and stress fractures. In our case we have an authentic personality and what some call a fear based or ego personality. No matter how clever we try to become our ego based personality cannot change our authentic personality. All the effort we make to not follow our authentic personality results in the stress that we experience in our physical bodies, hence the expression “we keep our issues in our tissues”.
At our massage studio in Berkley, we practice Clinical or western medical massage and Holistic massage techniques, i.e. Reiki and Thai massage. After a massage session with us, our clients are treated to tea and encouraged to relax and allow their treatment to integrate and really soak into their bodies, even our clinical clients are encouraged to journal, take Epsom salt baths and expect emotional energies to come to the surface. This is because our physical bodies mirror our emotional bodies, and when you remove the toxins and release the tense muscles caused by stress the emotional energy naturally comes to the surface in order to release as well. If you are aware of this and are willing to let go of the attitudes that caused the stress in the first place, massage, clinical or holistic, is an amazingly healing process. If you don’t make the connection you will blame the tense muscle in the same place all the time on the physical rigors of life.
The ancient Toltec believed that as spiritual beings we have the power to create our personal realities, and those we created through physical expression, especially through our words. Our words are an expression of our subconscious beliefs, or more accurately what we choose or agree to believe. When we agree with someone we share their reality. I believe that people inherit or grow into the attitudes that cause bad knees or bad backs rather than inherit genetic bad backs. I read that Hawaiians once used massage and energy healing to remove every physical, emotional and mental trauma from adolescents in a ceremony to prepare them for the adult journey of their lives, kind of like a clean slate. I’m sure this looked like magic to the first visitors to the islands, but it made me think about how much dysfunctional beliefs I could be carrying from childhood into adulthood, more importantly how were these subconscious beliefs affecting my life now, and how can I release them once and for all.
The earliest physicians used massage and diet as their main arsenal against disease and illness, responsible for the health of emperors in ancient Japan, these healers were on call 24hrs a day and ranked very high in courtly life. There earliest writings and medical texts on massage, thousands of years old, all describe beginning treatments with a prayer, they addressed the spiritual body first, then the emotional, then the mental and then the physical. They knew that understanding the spiritual, emotional and mental was just as important as physical knowledge of the body.
We experience emotional energy flowing through our bodies every second, yet the connection between physical health and emotional health is greatly overlooked. We spend billions of dollars on dissecting cells and dosing them with chemicals aiming for results that ancient wisdom tells us can only come from within. We have all heard that chicken soup is a cure for a cold but few make the connection that a good diet is good for a life, this is the same for massage, a massage is great when you want to feel better but regular massage is better if you want to feel great. We are just not used to feeling good most of the time, it’s like we have forgotten that feeling good is our natural state. When you are feeling good you’re thinking well, and if your thoughts are creating your reality then feeling good is the answer to changing your reality, not vice versa. Massage is 100% potent, feel good, all natural, clinical medicine.
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Aoghain Lakes McLocha
Massage Lifestyle Coach/ Therapist, Reiki Master Teacher ~ Contact him at: (248) 542-3073 or visit: thebalancemassage.com.
