In Qoya, the intuitive movement classes that I teach, I say “movement is medicine.” In that context, I mean that movement helps us to connect to our bodies, and in so doing to connect to our emotions as well. We can find powerful emotional healing through movement.

But it’s also true that movement helps us to find physical healing as well.

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First of all, I need to reduce the frequency--two newsletters a week is awesome, but entirely unsustainable for me right now. So instead of sending out newsletters on Wednesday (for paid subscribers) and Sunday (for all subs…

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“This is a skull. There’s the temporalis muscle, at the temple. And the masseter at the jaw. You can feel these with your fingers. Especially if you clench your jaw.”

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When I was researching massage schools, Pam, at IHSI, told me that the career life expectancy for a massage therapist was 3-5 years, largely because of injury and repetitive strain. At their school, they focused on teaching proper biomechanics for doing massage: using a low stance with bended knees instead of

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She suggests rephrasing and reframing a lot of how we think about cleaning and self-care, to encourage self-compassion and remove the moral judgements that creep into those internal conversations. As a result, I've been thinking of "returning a room to functionality," or "resetting the room" instead of "cleaning."

Simply living in a space means we're disrupting it. A dish gets brought in, books are taken off the shelves, a dog leaves fur on the sofa, a wrapper put in the trash can, dust settles on the floor.

Resetting a room, making it functional again and ready for use, means undoing the things we've done to it--putting away what's been gotten out, removing what's been brought in, cleaning the dirt that's accumulated, emptying the trash can that's gotten filled.

Without this "undoing," things perpetually grow more disordered and messy. There's no escaping the need to regularly reset a room to take care of the detritus of life and living.

But restoration isn't just limited to housekeeping. Bodies need it too.

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I was so wired after class yesterday afternoon that I couldn't get to sleep last night. It was as if I'd had a cup of coffee. We're finishing up the muscles of the shoulder, which includes the upper arm bone, the shoulder blade, and the collarbone. Our focus yesterday was on learning a stretch for a tiny muscle that lives right between the collarbone and the first rib, the subclavius. Our instructor demonstrated the subclavian stretch on me, and then we all practiced on each other. It was, I think, the effect of the treatment that kept me awake

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In contrast to most of my education, which involved a lot of reading and only a small amount of hands-on anything, massage school is, as you can imagine, tightly focused on learning skills. We have about thirteen hours at school each week: all but four of them are either learning hands-on techniques or participating in actual massages. The book-learning is important for us to understand what we're doing, but the actual hands-on learning is essential.

The subclavian stretch was, to be honest, a bit gruesome to learn, since it involves gripping the collarbone and holding it against the movement of the upper arm. It looked uncomfortable as I watched it done to someone else, and felt painful when it was applied to me. I didn't like it while it was happening. But once my subclavius was thoroughly stretched, which my classmates could see from how the collarbones floated above the ribs instead of being stuck onto them, I immediately felt the benefits.

My posture was better, I could stand up a little straighter with my shoulders less rounded. I felt more open, like I could breathe better. It felt great. More than great, really.

Of everything we've learned in class so far, and that I've had practiced on me, this had the most dramatic effect. Hours later, at home, I could still feel that openness, with a buzzy sense of excitement and joy. Even after I'd turned out my light and was trying to go to sleep, it was still there. Eventually I slept--and when I woke I realized that some of my morning aches and pains weren't there, especially in my shoulders.

This experience comes on the heels of discovering that a client I’ve been treating at our clinic has had an improvement in the condition that we’ve been working on. She’d previously been told that she’d just have to “live with it.”

It’s exciting to have these experiences seeing the impact that bodywork can have—on myself, and on clients. As someone who tends to do a lot of work on the computer and inside my head, making a difference in the physical body is incredibly exciting.

This wasn’t the newsletter I was planning on writing. But when I sat down this morning, still aware of my newly stretched subclavius muscles and my open collarbones, still excited from the feedback my client, this is what came out. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

This is my ninth week of clinical massage school, out of thirty-seven. We're working on learning the muscles of the shoulder and the back right now, and how to treat them. In class yesterday, Dan, our teacher, gave us a handout on assessing and treating the shoulder. It listed seven different qualities to look for while feeling the muscles:

1. tissue density, comparing one side to the other

2. temperature--does it feel hot or cold?

3. does the tissue move, or is it rigid?

4. localized soreness or tenderness?

5. feel for nodules, knots, ropes, which could be signs of muscle spasm or fibrosis

6. check for crepitus (grating sound or vibration when the tissue is moved)

7. stiffness or a loss or range of motion

The list ends with a statement that we're generally feeling for the environment of the tissue.

As I was reading it, it seemed a little familiar. By the time I got to that last statement about the environment of the tissue, I realized what it was.

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A couple weeks ago in class, our teacher pointed out that a central explanation for disease and imbalance, both historically and in complementary medicine, is deficiency and congestion. It seems relevant to the meditations on weight that I'm working on for the Sunday newsletters, so I'll play with it a little bit here first to work through the implications.

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We're getting into the more intense memorization now, focusing on the actions and attachment points for the muscles. By January, we'll have memorized information for almost every muscle of the body. In some ways, I'm frustrated that I don't know everything RIGHT NOW, but at the same time, I'm grateful that things are spaced out the way they are. Because boy, is it a lot to memorize.

This week we're focusing on the superficial muscles of the back. This is the second set of muscles that we've worked with, and much more complicated than the rotator cuff muscles that we studied a couple weeks ago. With this set, there are nine separate actions that the muscles are responsible for, everything from tipping the head back to raising the shoulder or raising the ribcage when you deliberately take a breath. Similarly, there are fifteen total attachment points. Some are straightforward (the spinous processes of cervical vertebrae 1 and 2) but some are very complicated (medial border of the scapula between the superior angle and the superior portion of the spine of the scapula).

In medical massage, knowing everything about a muscle is important because it gives us the tools to treat disfunction. If a client says that their upper back hurts, this in-depth knowledge of anatomy helps me to understand that, in this case, the underlying problem is actually with the muscles of the chest. And I can treat those muscles specifically through knowing exactly where they attach to the bones. Even in the few weeks that I've been working in the clinic at our school, I've been able to see how effective our approach is.

But the memorizing! My poor brain!

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I'm doing my training at the Integrative Health Sciences Institute, with Dan Morris. Right now, we're right smack in the middle of week five of a course that's just about forty weeks long--my cohort of six will be graduating in January 2024. Judging from how quickly the last month has flown by, that'll be in no time at all.

We've started studying synovial joints, which are all the joints that move (in contrast to the more-or-less fixed joints like the sutures of the skull and sockets of the teeth). Synovial joints are interesting because they all have a fully enclosed joint capsule which is filled with a protective fluid. Even the joints between the small bones of the wrist have this fluid-filled capsule.

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