As a former massage school owner for nearly 25 years, an educator, and a lifelong student of manual therapy, I’ve spent many thousands of dollars on continuing education and personal development over the years.

Some of those experiences genuinely changed my life. I was fortunate to study with gifted teachers who had something to offer that I don’t think I could have learned anywhere else.

And then there were other courses where the most valuable thing I learned was what not to do.

Over the course of a massage therapy career, it’s remarkably easy to accumulate continuing education.

A weekend here. A new technique there. Another certificate. Another modality.

And, of course, continuing education is important. We need to keep learning and exposing ourselves to new ideas, new research, and new ways of working. But after all these years on both sides of the classroom, I’ve come to think there’s a more important question to ask before signing up for the next course:

Am I buying continuing education hours, collecting another modality, or actually developing myself as a practitioner?

Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

And that’s what led me to put together this simple framework for evaluating a CE program, not as the final word, but as a way of thinking more carefully about where we invest our time, money, and attention.

You may have other criteria for evaluating a CE course and I’d love to hear them!

So when I’m looking at continuing education, there are five areas I think are worth considering.

1. The Practitioner — Who Am I Learning From?

Before evaluating the course, I would evaluate the person teaching it.

How long have they actually been in practice?

When did they learn the modality they’re teaching?

And perhaps most importantly: Do they actually use this work regularly with real clients?

Someone may have been a massage therapist for twenty years but learned the particular modality they’re teaching eighteen months ago. Those are two very different kinds of experience.

I’d also want to know something about their training. Who did they learn from? How extensively did they study? Did they receive mentoring or supervision? How long did they practice the work before they began teaching it?

There’s a kind of knowledge that develops only through repetition and experience. Working with hundreds or thousands of different bodies eventually teaches you things that weren’t in the original course manual.

And then there’s another question:

Can they teach?

Being an excellent practitioner doesn’t automatically make someone an excellent teacher. A good instructor can demonstrate clearly, watch students carefully, give precise feedback, answer questions without becoming defensive, and explain not only what they’re doing but why!!

I’d be looking for someone who has lived with the work long enough for information to have become understanding.

2. The Modality — What Am I Actually Learning?

Next, I would separate the modality from the person teaching it.

What does this work actually claim to accomplish?

Are those claims reasonable??

Does the modality have a coherent rationale? Is there credible evidence supporting it?

Not everything valuable in bodywork has been thoroughly researched. Clinical experience, traditional knowledge, and emerging theories can all be useful. But they shouldn’t automatically be presented as established science.

I feel this is especially worth remembering in an era when adding a few words about the nervous system, fascia, the vagus nerve, or neuroscience can make almost anything sound scientifically established!!

Scientific language isn’t the same thing as scientific support.

The modality should also be safe, appropriate to your scope of practice, and clear about contraindications and limitations.

And then I would ask myself a very practical question:

What will learning this allow me to do that I can’t already do?

That’s a useful defense against becoming a collector of modalities.

The goal isn’t simply to acquire more techniques.

It’s to expand our capacity as practitioners.

3. Course Design — Can I Actually Learn This in This Format?

An excellent practitioner can teach a worthwhile modality and still offer a poorly designed course.

How many hours of actual hands-on practice are there?

Will the instructor watch you work and give you feedback?

Is there enough time to practice something, receive correction, and then try it again?

Is the material organized so that foundational principles come before increasingly complicated techniques?

And perhaps most importantly, are the promises realistic for the amount of training being offered?

I think it helps to imagine skill development as a progression:

Exposure → Introduction → Basic Competence → Proficiency → Mastery

A six-hour or weekend workshop can provide wonderful exposure or a solid introduction to a body of work.

But mastery is something else entirely.

It develops through practice, feedback, experience, correction, and time.

A certificate tells us that we completed a course. It doesn’t necessarily tell us how well we can perform what was taught.

4. The Learning Experience — What Happens in the Room?

Massage and bodywork are unusual forms of education because we’re learning through our own bodies and through the bodies of other people.

We watch.

We touch.

We’re touched.

We experiment.

We make mistakes.

We notice.

And hopefully, we try again.

That requires a particular kind of learning environment.

Consent and appropriate boundaries should be modeled throughout the training. Students should be able to ask questions, request modifications, decline something that doesn’t feel appropriate, and make mistakes without being embarrassed or humiliated.

There should also be room to question the instructor. Yes!!

A good teacher doesn’t need students to adopt their worldview. They should be able to distinguish between established knowledge, theory, clinical observation, and personal interpretation.

Most importantly, I want an instructor to teach students more than where to put their hands.

I want them to keep asking:

What are you noticing?

What are you feeling under your hands?

What changed when you slowed down?

What happened when you used less pressure?

What happened to your own breathing and effort?

What happened to the person you’re working with?

This is where something important begins to happen.

We’re no longer simply learning to perform techniques.

We’re learning to perceive.

5. After the Course — How Does This Become Part of My Practice?

The workshop ends. We collect our certificate, pack up our sheets, say goodbye to everyone, and head home.

Now the real learning begins.

What happens Monday morning when there’s no instructor standing beside your table?

A good CE program should provide some kind of bridge between the classroom and actual practice.

That might include good reference materials, demonstration videos, practice assignments, follow-up questions, practice groups, advanced training, mentoring, or supervision.

Not every introductory workshop needs an elaborate support system. But the more sophisticated the work, the more important continued feedback becomes.

And then there’s our responsibility as practitioners.

We have to practice.

Not simply repeat what we learned, but practice deliberately:

Practice → Notice → Evaluate → Adjust → Practice again.

Instead of immediately looking for the next workshop, perhaps we spend some time actually living with what we just learned.

Use it.

Question it.

Notice where it works and where it doesn’t.

Let real clients teach us.

Ask for help when we get stuck.

Six months later, I think there’s a much more interesting question than whether we can remember every technique from the workshop:

Has this training changed the way I work?

Maybe we’re palpating differently.

Maybe we’re listening more carefully.

Maybe we’re using less effort.

Maybe we’re making better decisions.

Maybe we’re communicating differently with clients.

Maybe we’re noticing things we simply couldn’t perceive before.

That’s integration.

And that’s when continuing education begins becoming something much more important than continuing education hours.

From Collecting Techniques to Developing a Craft

There’s a temptation in massage therapy to keep looking for the next thing.

Another workshop.

Another technique.

Another certification.

Another modality.

But there comes a point in our professional development when the most useful question may no longer be:

“What should I learn next?”

It may be:

“What do I need to practice more deeply?”

You can take dozens of workshops and remain essentially the same practitioner.

Or you can encounter one excellent teacher, study one worthwhile body of work deeply, practice it for years, receive feedback and mentoring, and allow it to fundamentally change the way you touch, perceive, think, and work.

So before registering for your next continuing education program, perhaps don’t begin with:

How many CE hours do I get?

Ask instead:

Who might I become as a practitioner by studying this?

That seems to me a much better measure of continuing education.

Am I buying continuing education hours, collecting another modality, or actually developing myself as a practitioner?

Leave a comment

We use the word somatic everywhere these days, somatic therapy, somatic coaching, somatic movement, somatic healing.

But the ideas underneath modern somatics are much older than the terminology.

For more than a century, a remarkable collection of movement teachers, psychologists, bodyworkers, philosophers and researchers kept arriving at variations of the same realization:

The human body cannot be adequately understood as a mechanical object that simply carries the brain around.

The body senses. It adapts. It learns. It organizes itself around experience. And much of this happens outside conscious thought.

Modern neuroscience is finally giving us better language for some of what these early pioneers were observing.

The Body as Machine

Western medicine gained enormous power by learning to examine the body objectively.

Bones could be studied. Muscles isolated. Organs examined. Diseases identified. Injured structures repaired.

But there was a limitation hiding inside that success.

The body was increasingly understood from the outside.

Something began to disappear from the picture:

What is it like to experience a body from the inside?

Around the turn of the twentieth century, several different groups began exploring that question.

The Movement Pioneers

Some of the earliest roots of modern somatics came through European movement and physical-culture traditions.

F. Matthias Alexander began investigating how unconscious habits of posture and movement interfere with natural coordination. Rather than simply correcting posture from the outside, he became interested in awareness and the interruption of habitual patterns.

Mabel Elsworth Todd, whose influential book The Thinking Body appeared in 1937, explored how imagery and awareness could change movement organization. Her work eventually contributed to what became known as Ideokinesis.

And then there was Elsa Gindler, one of the largely forgotten mothers of modern somatic education.

Gindler wasn’t particularly interested in giving people another set of exercises to perform correctly. She encouraged students to carefully investigate breathing, standing, sitting and movement for themselves.

Something revolutionary was happening.

The authority was beginning to shift from:

Someone outside your body knows how your body should be

Your own experience can become a source of information.

Gindler’s work strongly influenced Charlotte Selver, who later brought Sensory Awareness to the United States and became an important presence in the emerging Human Potential Movement.

Psychology Discovers the Body

Another stream came through psychotherapy.

Wilhelm Reich, originally a psychoanalyst working in Freud’s world, noticed that psychological defenses weren’t expressed only through thoughts and words.

They appeared in breathing, posture, facial expression, movement and chronic muscular tension.

He developed the controversial concept of character and muscular armor.

Not all of Reich’s theories survived scientific scrutiny, particularly his later ideas. But one observation proved enormously influential:

Our psychological lives and bodily organization aren’t separate processes.

Reich’s student Alexander Lowen carried these ideas into Bioenergetic Analysis, working explicitly with breathing, posture, grounding, movement and emotional expression.

The body had entered psychotherapy.

The Body Becomes a Learning System

Then came Moshe Feldenkrais.

Feldenkrais made another extraordinary shift.

Instead of primarily asking:

What’s wrong with this muscle or movement?

he became interested in:

What has this nervous system learned?

His Awareness Through Movement lessons used slow, exploratory movement to help people perceive distinctions and discover alternatives.

The practitioner wasn’t simply correcting the body.

The organism was learning.

That idea looks remarkably contemporary today.

Structure, Movement and the Whole Person

Other pioneers approached the same territory from different directions.

Ida Rolf developed Structural Integration, influenced by structural anatomy, yoga, osteopathic ideas and movement education. She emphasized relationships across the entire body rather than treating isolated muscles.

Milton Trager explored gentle passive movement, asking what might happen if the nervous system were repeatedly given experiences of greater lightness, ease and freedom rather than being forced toward correction.

Marion Rosen explored gentle touch, breathing, muscular holding and awareness.

Ilse Middendorf approached breathing as something that could be experienced and allowed rather than constantly controlled.

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen eventually brought developmental movement, experiential anatomy, perception and multiple bodily systems together in Body-Mind Centering.

Different methods emerged, but an increasingly recognizable philosophy was developing beneath them:

The organism is not merely something to manipulate.

It can perceive.

It can learn.

It can respond.

The Felt Sense

Then philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin, working in the intellectual environment surrounding Carl Rogers, began investigating why some psychotherapy clients seemed to change more deeply than others.

He noticed that successful clients often paused and attended inwardly to something they couldn’t yet quite put into words.

Gendlin called this bodily knowing the:

felt sense.

This gave us another important piece of what we might now call body intelligence.

The organism can contain meaningful information before conscious thought has organized that information into language.

Esalen: The Great Crossroads

By the 1960s and 1970s, many of these streams began meeting.

One important meeting place was the Esalen Institute in California.

Movement education, Gestalt therapy, bodywork, meditation, Eastern contemplative practices and emerging humanistic psychology encountered one another there.

People associated with approaches such as Rolfing, Feldenkrais, Sensory Awareness and Trager circulated through this broader Human Potential environment.

Esalen didn’t invent somatics.

But it became an extraordinary crossroads where previously separate traditions could influence one another.

Finally, We Get a Name

By the 1970s, much of the revolution had already happened.

Then Thomas Hanna helped give it a unifying language.

Hanna popularized the contemporary use of the word:

SOMATICS

The distinction he emphasized was profound.

There is the body viewed from the outside, the body as an object.

And there is the soma, the living body as experienced from within.

Both perspectives matter.

Medicine needs the first.

Somatic practice explores the second.

And neither gives us the complete human being by itself.

Then Neuroscience Begins Catching Up

The early pioneers didn’t have today’s brain-imaging technologies, computational models or understanding of nervous-system function.

Sometimes their explanations were wrong.

But many of their observations were remarkably prescient.

Modern neuroscience now gives us concepts that help explain why bodily experience matters.

Interoception

The nervous system continuously receives information about conditions within the body, heartbeat, breathing, visceral activity, temperature, metabolic state and much more.

The brain isn’t disconnected from the body.

It is immersed in an ongoing stream of bodily information.

Proprioception

We continuously sense position and movement without consciously calculating them.

The organism knows where its parts are and continually adjusts movement accordingly.

Neuroplasticity

Experience changes nervous-system organization.

This gives modern biological grounding to something pioneers such as Feldenkrais understood experientially: movement can be learning.

Implicit Memory and Learning

Experience can shape perception, behavior and physiological responses without necessarily becoming explicit autobiographical memory.

This gives us a more precise alternative to the popular phrase “the body stores trauma.”

Muscles don’t literally store traumatic memories like files on a computer.

A better statement is:

Experience changes the organism.

Predictive Processing

Contemporary neuroscience increasingly understands perception as an active process.

The brain doesn’t simply wait for sensory information and then respond. It continually generates predictions about what it expects to encounter and updates those predictions through incoming sensory evidence.

Our history therefore participates in shaping what we perceive now.

Autonomic Regulation

The nervous system is continually adjusting physiology in response to changing internal and external conditions.

Breathing, movement, touch, social interaction and environmental cues can all become information within this regulatory process.

Co-Regulation

And the organism doesn’t regulate in isolation.

Human beings affect one another through voice, facial expression, proximity, movement, touch, predictability and relationship.

We are embodied organisms regulating in environments populated by other embodied organisms.

So What Is “Body Intelligence”?

We don’t need to make it mystical.

Body intelligence doesn’t mean:

The body always knows what’s best.

Nor does a bodily sensation automatically reveal objective truth.

A more useful definition might be:

Body intelligence is the organism’s capacity to sense internal and external conditions, integrate information, anticipate needs, regulate itself, learn from experience and reorganize behavior, much of it outside conscious awareness.

Your conscious mind isn’t calculating every muscular adjustment required for you to stand.

It isn’t consciously regulating blood pressure, digestion or temperature.

It isn’t calculating every movement necessary to walk across a room.

Yet your organism is continuously accomplishing these things.

That is a very real kind of biological intelligence.

From Correction to Conditions

And perhaps this is the thread connecting the early somatic pioneers with contemporary neuroscience.

The mechanical model asks:

What’s wrong, and how do we correct it?

The somatic perspective introduces another question:

What conditions help this organism sense, learn and reorganize?

Alexander explored interfering less with habitual coordination.

Gindler taught people to notice.

Feldenkrais created conditions for learning.

Gendlin taught people to attend to what was present before words.

Hanna distinguished the externally observed body from the internally experienced soma.

Different methods.

Different theories.

Different generations.

But gradually they helped create a profound change in how we understand ourselves.

The body stopped being merely the thing being worked on!!

It became a participant.

And now, more than a century after some of these experiments began, neuroscience is giving us increasingly sophisticated ways of understanding why.

Perhaps the most important legacy of somatics isn’t another collection of techniques.

It’s a different relationship with being human:

Pay attention.

Become curious about what the organism is already doing.

Create conditions for learning rather than immediately imposing correction.

And recognize that beneath our conscious thinking is an extraordinarily complex living system that has been sensing, adapting, predicting, regulating and learning all along.

The Essence: Body intelligence is the organism’s capacity to sense internal and external conditions, integrate information, anticipate needs, regulate itself, learn from experience and reorganize behavior, much of it outside conscious awareness.

Would love to hear your thoughts? Anyone you would add to the mix?

Leave a comment

I’ve spent much of my life exploring what helps human beings heal, grow and change. Meditation came first for me, many years ago. Then came bodywork, massage therapy, breathwork, personal development, coaching, relationships, neuroscience, nervous system regulation, and more techniques and approaches than I could possibly count.

And yet, as I look back o…

Read more

We have become extraordinarily sophisticated at pursuing experience and surprisingly unpracticed at inhabiting it.

We know how to want.

We know how to plan, anticipate, improve, acquire, achieve and move toward the next thing. We make bucket lists. We plan vacations. We upgrade houses and phones. We pursue relationships, careers, spiritual experiences, healing, personal growth.

And none of this is necessarily a problem.

Wanting is part of being alive.

But I’m beginning to wonder whether somewhere along the way we became so good at moving toward life that we lost some of our ability to actually be inside it.

There is an interesting piece of neuroscience behind this.

Dopamine is often called the brain’s pleasure chemical, but that isn’t quite right. Dopamine is deeply involved in motivation, anticipation and wanting. It helps create the feeling:

Go get that.

And sometimes the anticipation of something can be more compelling than actually having it.

Think about something you’ve really wanted.

A new car. A relationship. A trip. A house. A promotion.

For weeks or months there can be tremendous energy around it. You imagine it. Research it. Talk about it. Fantasize about what life will be like when you finally have it.

Then you get it.

And surprisingly quickly, the extraordinary becomes ordinary.

The thing that once occupied so much of your imagination becomes part of the furniture of your life.

And the mind begins looking toward the horizon again.

What’s next?

There is nothing wrong with this system. Without it, our ancestors probably wouldn’t have explored beyond the next hill. We wouldn’t build things, invent things, fall in love, write books or imagine better futures.

The problem comes when pursuit becomes our primary way of experiencing life.

Because life itself never happens in the future.

It happens here.

This cup of coffee.

This conversation.

This body.

This person sitting across from me.

This particular morning that will never occur again.

And I increasingly think that inhabiting those moments is a human capacity—a capacity that can become stronger or weaker depending upon how we live.

I notice this in myself.

Sometimes I’ll catch myself moving through an experience while simultaneously thinking about the next experience.

I’m eating while thinking about what I’ll do afterward.

I’m talking with someone while part of my attention is already preparing what I want to say.

I’m enjoying something while another part of my mind is figuring out how to repeat it.

Even pleasure can become something we stand slightly outside of and manage.

And perhaps that is why practices like mindfulness have survived for thousands of years.

At their deepest level, they aren’t simply relaxation techniques.

They teach us how to arrive.

To feel instead of immediately interpreting.

To notice instead of immediately changing.

To stay instead of immediately moving on.

To experience this breath without needing the next breath to be different.

There is an enormous difference between having an experience and being present enough to receive it.

I suspect many of us have accumulated far more experiences than we have actually inhabited.

We’ve traveled without really arriving.

We’ve eaten without really tasting.

We’ve touched without completely feeling.

We’ve listened while preparing to speak.

We’ve accomplished something and almost immediately started thinking about the next accomplishment.

We’ve loved people while forgetting, for long stretches of time, to simply look at them.

Maybe the answer isn’t to stop wanting.

I certainly don’t want to stop wanting.

Desire gives life direction. Curiosity pulls us toward discovery. Imagination allows us to create things that don’t yet exist.

But perhaps there needs to be another movement alongside it.

Pursue—and arrive.

Seek—and receive.

Imagine the future—and inhabit the present.

There is a time for becoming.

And there is a time for simply being here.

As I get older, I find myself increasingly interested in the second one.

Not because there is nothing left to pursue.

Quite the opposite.

There is still plenty I want to experience, create and understand.

But I’m becoming less interested in collecting experiences and more interested in how deeply I can enter the ones I’m already having.

Perhaps one measure of a life isn’t simply how much we experienced.

Perhaps it is also:

How much of our life were we actually there for?

I owned a massage school for 25 years, The Body Wisdom Massage Therapy School. We started off as an school of Somatic Therapies, The Body Wisdom Institute and our tagline was “Wisdom of the Body Guides the Process.” That being the case working with process in real time while performing some type of bodywork or physical processing technique like TRE was our specialty. In the meantime Trauma-Informed has become quite a buzzword in the massage industry and beyond.

Massage schools have taken to teaching separate Trauma-Informed CE courses. My feeling is that this should be part of the core curriculum not a stand-alone. After all we are not teaching massage therapists to become psychotherapists! We only need to teach them what signs to look for first in themselves and then recognizing the state of their client and adapting their technique as necessary.

That’s why I created this resource to train MT’s on what they need to know to be effective in this space without needing to take a separate CE course. This guide is really a free Trauma-Informed CE course in a box.

What you’ll learn in this guide

• What Trauma Is

• The Body Keeps Score

• How Trauma Is Held

• Core Principles of Trauma-Informed Care

• Scope of Practice & Professional Ethics

• Building a Referral Network

• Informed Consent & Documentation

• The Client Intake Process

• Creating a Safe Physical & Relational Environment

• Communication Techniques & Consent Scripts

• Other Ready-to-Use Scripts

• Recognizing Trauma Responses During a Session

• Grounding & Regulation Techniques

• Adapting Massage Techniques

• Working With Special Populations

• Practitioner Self-Care & Vicarious Trauma

Download the complete Trauma-Informed Massage PDF below

Trauma Informed Massage Manual 3

311KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Trauma-Informed Massage is not another modality. It’s a set of principles that can be applied to most any other health care situation. It’s really just a way of thinking about every interaction we have with a client and how small changes in how we communicate can completely change someone’s experience on the table.