THE DIFFERENCE

“This isn’t massage… is it?” asks, the new-to-me person on the table. My 6 years of practice in NZ has revealed, this massage is different to what you’re used to.

“I’m trained in Canada…”, I suggest, going on to credit the professional standards and support Massage Therapists have in British Columbia. My skills have been reared and maintained overseas in a profession that has been regulated for over 70 years; we are some of the most educated and highly trained professionals in the field of soft-tissue work. My training greatly informs the techniques used here.

At Well Within, we use a myofascial lens to assess and address the whole body rather than treating its parts, spending our time working out what’s happening with you as a whole in lieu of stalking your pain. In an intricately reversed game of body Jenga, we plan to understand where the balancing act is happening before intervening and undoing the carefully curated solutions your finely tuned system produces for its problems. It’s important to note, however, the techniques we use here are not specialised and it does not take an expert to use them. In actual fact, you can do myofascial release yourself; popularised in the last handful of years, there are techniques you can do at home so long as you’ve got a ball, roller, or surface to use. As is it with any craft, the expertise is not in the techniques but in the capacity one has to achieve the outcomes expected and the wisdom to know what to do when the tools fail.

I do, however, need to communicate this better : where we find our work fitting on the spectrum of body work in NZ. In highlighting the confidence we have in evidence based techniques such as myofascial release to deliver outcomes in our massage therapy practice, we are naming the methods we prefer and aligning ourselves to existing practices and practitioners who we resemble more of in this country.

Starting this month, you will find our sessions being called “Myofascial Integration” while I remain, as per my qualification, a Registered Massage Therapist (RMT). I hope by being more explicit about the distinctness in the hands-on side of our work, it will honour your sense of the difference and be a clearer reflection of the type of treatments we do here!