What I Do



I do in-home massage: I bring my table to you. I think it's usually it's better for people to be in their own space, and it's much better not to have jump up and drive after a massage.

My sessions are usually about 90 minutes long. Tell me if you have a time limit, so I don't go over it. If, on the other hand, you're someone who always feels that massages are too short, be sure to tell me that. I charge by the session, not by the hour.

I work mostly in silence. There are some kinds of work that require talking: for trigger-point and some kinds of stretching I need feedback. I always want to know if something is causing discomfort. But in general I find that talking, during a session, tends to keep the work shallow.

I'm trained in Swedish, Deep Tissue, and Trigger Point massage. I've absorbed bits of Tui Na and Shiatsu along the way. I love Thai massage, and have incorporated a few moves from it, but a real Thai massage is very different from what I do. For Thai you'd want to go to someone else.

When I started doing massage, I found it a lot easier to talk about what I was doing than I do now. A lot of theories have come and gone. My original faith in trigger point for treating persistent pain has dwindled: I can still do it -- I still know the pain referral patterns, and I'll check out the likely points if you've got local pain -- but the theory behind it has been pretty well debunked. But sometimes it helps.

Mostly I try to give the experience that I most want myself from massage: the experience of a reset, of being made new. As I imagine a snake feels after casting its skin, or a computer feels when it's rebooted. How exactly a massage accomplishes that is pretty mysterious: it varies a lot from person to person, and from time to time. It's improvisational. It takes a lot of paying attention, "listening with the hands," figuring out what works.