First Month of School!

I'm now in my fourth week at school so I thought it'd be a great time to give you all an update on how things are progressing. First of all, I love it! I am having so much fun just learning techniques and all about the human body...how we heal, how we develop, what causes pain and illness, etc. Classes have mostly consisted of Swedish Massage so far since that's what we have to learn first to start in the student clinic and begin working on the public. But, we've had introductory courses on the following as well: Tai Chi Chih, Philosophy of Natural Therapeutics, Living Foods, Sattvic Polarity, and HIV/AIDS and Chronic Illnesses.

Random picture of a man doing some
Tai Chi Chih

Tai Chi Chih (chih is pronounced chuh) is really cool. I don't really know how to describe it so I'm stealing this language from the www.taichichih.org website, "T’ai Chi Chih is a set of movements completely focused on the development of an intrinsic energy called Chi." Basically it's about pulling in energy and pushing it away. But the reason we're taught this in my massage school is to help us with our body mechanics when giving a massage. There is a lot of rocking back and forth in the Tai Chi Chih and that's sort of how we're supposed to give a massage, by using our entire body and sort of rocking from front to back. Anyways, it's a super relaxing exercise and the moves have a lot of fun names like "pulling taffy."



The Philosophy of Natural Therapeutics class was mindblowing. I learned about the difference between Allopathy (basically modern medicine) and Homeopathy (natural remedies). There is a lot of details here but the main belief of natural therapeutics seems to be that taking drugs to treat our illnesses only suppresses them and leads to chronic illnesses and diseases in the future. I found this pretty interesting and it sort of makes sense in my mind so I haven't taken any medications since this class and am trying to abstain from taking things like tylenol whenever I can. The first test was when I had menstrual cramps this past week. I have had debilitating cramps since I can remember so this was a challenge but for some reason, just knowing I wasn't going to take anything, made them seem not so bad...though maybe the frequent massages I've been giving and receiving also helped make them less intense. It's a start, but the one drug I won't go off is the pill, which may be one of the worst considering it messes with your hormones. I am sorry but the rhythm method is not my cup of tea and I don't want to take any chances when it comes to my uterus. 


On to Living Foods. As you may have guessed, this class is all about switching to a mostly raw foods diet. On the first day of class we cut and juiced our own wheatgrass and also learned how to grow our own. I am not a fan of wheat grass though apparently one shot is equal to like two or three pounds of greens. The taste stayed in my mouth through the night and into the morning, yuck. But we also made a yummy citrus smoothie and a veggie soup that sort of tasted like we were drinking salsa. I'm always trying to be healthier so I like this class. I have a feeling I will get to try a lot of things I haven't before and that's always fun. I have no plans (yet) to stop eating meat though. However, I have recently cut down a lot on red meat due to lack of funds and just trying to be healthy. Luckily, my Living Foods teacher is not a full on vegetarian and believes we should all listen to our bodies and eat what makes us feel good. A pretty good philosophy if you ask me.


Sattvic Polarity I also really enjoyed. We're going to delve more into Polarity later in the year but Sattvic is our introduction to it. Polarity is basically the energy therapies and deals with chakras. The theory is that our bodies, like all living things, have positive and negative charges (like a battery) that, when they get out of balance, can cause pain and emotional issues so they need to be recharged. In Polarity you have to touch people with the opposing hand to help heal. So if our right sides of our body are positive and left is negative, we'd touch the person's left hip with our right hand to get energy moving. Energy can be felt in many ways, but it's usually felt as a heat. The teacher had us put our hands on each other to feel where we were hot and cold and try to get the cold areas to warm up and let energy flow between points of the body. I was surprised, but I could actually feel the hot and cold and how they would change and whatever we did, also made me feel better. Sorry, it's sort of hard to explain, but I'm curious to learn more.

Hilarious picture of a Sattvic Polarity technique. You're supposed to put the lower hand up higher on the butt (which would of course also be covered by a sheet) but this makes it look like they are inserting a finger up there, haha! I promise that it involves nothing of the sort!

The other class we had was HIV/AIDS and Chronic Illnesses and we just started to discuss how you deal with people who have chronic diseases differently than a healthy person. Some of what we've learned so far is just that you really have to be extra careful with cleanliness and not treating them when you are sick, because their weakened immune systems make them more susceptible to catch something and when you're really sick, catching a cold could be the difference between life and death. Also, the duration of the massage and the intensity will vary based on how sick they are. You need to consider how you may pick up on their emotions and stuff as well and basically, they may just need someone to talk to who's not involved and won't bombard them with opinions on what they should be doing.


That's it so far. I'm excited that as we get past all the Swedish massage classes, we'll get to learn about a lot of other modalities I know almost nothing about : ).