What Massage Therapists Do!

Have you ever thought what massage therapists actually do? Ideally, they provide a safe, warm and comfortable environment. There are soft clean linens, warm aromatic oils, background music, their knowledge of how the body works, warm hands and a sincerely caring touch that guides you into relaxation of those tired and stressed muscles.

Why Do We Need Massage?

It is difficult to imagine the overwhelming scope of what just living day to day can do to our health and well being when we make the trained reactive acceptance to be in stress. We have been educated to deal with negative stressful events in many ways, but our first inclination is to react. Research indicates that the negative health effects of stress may be due to what has been called Accumulated Emotionally Reactive Stress Syndrome (AERSS). This means that the more emotionally negative issues that we are faced with and react too, the more we retain and accumulate stress in our physiology. Stress has been linked to a growing number of illnesses. Attached to all negative events there remains a direct connection to the emotions that either occurred at the moment of the event or shortly thereafter. Each emotional event can present us with an opportunity to make a choice of how we perceive that event. When we react we begin our walk down the path to being stressed. When under stress, we may exhibit a variety of indications that we are under stress, such as anger, frustration, increased anxiety, physical discomfort, higher blood pressure, shallow or hesitant breathing, insomnia, depression and much more. The important thing to remember is that our society has been raised in an environment that bombards us with things that have negative tastes, smells, images, sounds, music, violence, corruption and news etc. All of these touch us emotionally and place our physiology into a sympathetic nervous reactive state. Our Fight and Flight reactions release the stress hormones and the body goes into a defensive posture. Blood goes to the extremities and muscles tense up and as long as we retain the emotion connected to that which initiated the stress, our muscles will remain tensed up and our immune system