Massage Therapy Journal Spring 2025

16 • Massage Therapy Journal

When my wife asked me to help with the dishes, I remained silent and immobile. She got irritated. Then I got irritated at her irritation and we spiraled into a loop of ongoing frustration. After I had some time to reflect, I realized that from the time I get up in the morning to the time I go to bed at night, I’m catering to the needs of others. Ultimately, I understood I wasn’t being real about my own limitations. Self-Care Requires Self-Love As a massage therapist with a background in training and a previous interest in physical therapy, I consider myself keen on the topic of self-care, and that is knowledge I share with my clients. For example, part of my regular intake involves asking clients what they do for self-care. Here, I’m usually referring to activities such as hot/cold therapy, stretching, going to the gym, yoga or meditation.

Massage instructors I’ve had throughout the years have helped me fall in love with the massage therapy profession more and more. Observing their work and listening to their wisdom gave me hope for a lifelong career facilitating healthy changes in my clients through hands-on support. What I learned and continue to learn from my teachers is that self-care is much deeper than simply stretching between sessions or making sure to take time off from demanding work schedules, though these things are important. Instead, self-care is an ongoing process of self-love that inevitably weaves itself into our work. To be effective, self-care needs to be integrated into other aspects of ourselves, including our emotional and spiritual health. When we equate self-care with self-love, we instantly recognize that there is more to caring for ourselves than staying healthy enough to sustain a long career as a massage therapist—our physical bodies will continue to age regardless of our recovery methods. Self-Care: Understanding What’s at Stake Massage therapy is a demanding profession, both physically and mentally, as we know from the number of massage therapists who are forced to leave the profession—either temporarily or permanently—because of injury or burnout. I myself have felt like I was close to the end of my own run on occasion. I continually draw inspiration, however, from the stories of practitioners with 20, 30, 40 years or more in the industry and practices that are as vibrant as I felt on my first day of class. When you spend time with such people, you realize that it’s not just their physical endurance that sustains them, nor some magical energy. Their bodies age and ache just as much as anyone else’s. In most cases, the difference is their holistic approach to self-care, which includes not just managing physical health, but also managing energy, taking ownership of stress, continually finding inspiration, seeing the bigger picture, having the right motivation, weathering the storms of loss and facing the fears of change.

These activities are all on my own list of things I use to help restore myself. Even so, I still sometimes feel like my work as a massage therapist isn’t sustainable, and that worries me because massage is the only career I’ve ever really trained for or known.

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