Originally published in Massage & Bodywork magazine, August/September 2006. Copyright 2006. Associated Bodywork and Massage Professionals. All rights reserved.

Call it blind luck. Call it divine intervention. Call it what you will. Sometimes a door opens where you never thought it would be.
My favorite quote is from Joseph Campbell, American author on mythology and comparative religion. It reads: "If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living ... you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and ... doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be."1 Tracing back to the original source, I found this quote is actually an abbreviation of a longer version. But for me, and those with whom I have shared it over the years, it has more than sufficed.

How do you find your passion? What can move you toward your true purpose in life? What is it that lies deep inside you longing for expression? There is that moment in time, for each of us, when we know we are home. We connect with someone, with some new idea, with some new direction, and everything clicks. And we take off like a bird in flight, soaring through the skies, gathering strength and direction from the winds of change.


The Walrus Started It
Diana Freed has used massage and energy work on llamas, goats, pigs, sheep, and even an owl and baby foxes. One day a week, she steps aside from her thriving massage practice with humans to volunteer at a wildlife sanctuary. It all started with A Walrus on My Table, a book recounting a massage therapist's experiences with animal massage. While working on a postpartum patient, Freed was asked by the woman's husband if she knew of the book. Intrigued, she went straight to the bookstore after work, bought the book, and set off on a new path. That's not to imply that Freed abandoned her human clients. Her busy schedule includes duties as massage service coordinator for Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, Maryland, where she serves spine and joint replacement clients, as well as postpartum patients, in a program she established ten years ago at the hospital. Freed is also a massage and continuing education (CE) instructor at the local community college. But it's the animal world that has captured her heart.

Freed initially signed up for an Equissage course, and from that instructor also learned to work with dogs--her own dog serving as her first client. From there she pursued training in animal diseases to better understand the pathological issues involved. "Then I heard about Carol Komitor's Healing Touch for Animals (HTA)," Freed says. Having completed four levels in the program, with an additional level for healing touch with humans, she now integrates healing touch with massage for her animal clients.

Freed says the wildlife sanctuary is a great place to practice her craft, giving her opportunity to fine-tune her internal listening skills and to be focused and present. "I have learned that animals truly know you are helping them and accept that gift without judgement or a belief system about the work." Her love and passion for animal therapy grows each day, ushering her in unexpected directions. While taking a knitting class offered by llama owners, she learned that some of their fiber animals were having problems and soon she was applying her manual skills.

"So, like life goes, since the reading of the book, I found stepping stones at the perfect time during my journey of working with animals," Freed says. And where does she go from here? She's delving into the science of vibrational medicine to be better prepared to discuss her animal energy work with others, especially veterinarians. It's a matter of educating people and "getting them past the joke part of it," she says. "When you talk about the science of it, then they get it."


Shiatsu Snob Confesses All
I really was kind of a snob about shiatsu," says James Halsey, a massage therapist whose Eastern roots in shiatsu took a distinct hard-right turn in Texas. Trained eighteen years ago at the Ohashi Institute in New York City, Halsey says he harbored a narrow view of Western modalities. "I thought everything else was primitive--linens and oils and all that stuff. When I moved to Texas I was planning to build a shiatsu practice and continue working from the Eastern philosophic view of bodywork." Just one hitch. Texas required three hundred hours of massage therapy training for him to hang out his shiatsu shingle. So he signed up. "It only took about ten hours of semester one for me to realize that Western massage techniques were not only useful, but effective," Halsey says, and his view of bodywork was changed forever.

The shiatsu practice sort of went by the wayside, while his fascination with Western massage led to CE courses in neuromuscular therapy, myoskeletal alignment techniques, scientific core conditioning, and Zero Balancing. Eventually he had racked up more than one thousand hours of training and taken a new direction in his career. "Over the past six years my practice has evolved from relaxation into working with pain and injury clients, as well as clients with stress management issues," he says. "The studying never ends. It's a transformation. I see my practice continuing to change simply because I continue to study."

Halsey recently added Iyengar yoga. "It's another way to help people stand up straight." He quotes his yoga teacher as saying: "We only really need one yoga pose--because bodies are ignorant and not enlightened--to bring us to that pose which is standing up straight." This is in keeping with his focus of helping clients end their pain by correcting their alignment.

"To be honest, I think that if you're going to do anything, you need to continue to study what you are practicing, especially if you are going to be in the healing arts. I've even considered taking a spa class just to see what's going on." Ever expanding his horizons, Halsey says, "I'm really interested in where it's going to go from here. I'm always learning. When I'm no longer doing that, I think I'm done with the practice."


Two-Hour Connection to France
Jeanette Rabourdin took a two-hour class in aromatherapy and landed in France. Well, not literally in the same day. As a budding massage student, Rabourdin signed up for a CE course in aromatic stone massage. During the two-hour segment on aromatherapy, she suffered a severe reaction to an essential oil. "I wanted to know why, it got me curious," she says. So curious, in fact, that she eventually traveled to France for a week to study aromatherapy with experts Daniel Penoel and Kurt Schnaubelt.

What happened next was one of those serendipitous twists of fate. "While in France I learned a remedy to help cure shingles," Rabourdin says. "I mixed two different aromatherapy mixtures, one for the pain of shingles and one for cell regeneration. I thought, I doubt I'll ever use this." But upon returning home, she found that her mother had developed shingles. Rabourdin went to work, ordering the necessary oils and mixing up the blends. "My mother applied both mixtures and within two weeks the shingles were gone and she had no pain. I am grateful for what I learned in France to help my mother to better health."

Rabourdin currently combines spa work and private practice with her role as admissions specialist at Somerset School of Massage Therapy in New Jersey, where she received her basic training. Aromatherapy has become a way of life for her clients and herself. After adding shiatsu to her toolbox, Rabourdin signed up for a class with Schnaubelt on the application of aromatherapy with the meridian lines. While at the seminar, she received an ayurvedic treatment and enjoyed it so much, she's going to add it to her CE schedule. "It still blends in the different types of oils but takes the Eastern mindset, so it connects to my work with shiatsu," she says.
This summer Rabourdin is headed back to France for an advanced aromatherapy seminar with Penoel. The full week of classes will cover treatments for respiratory ailments and digestive, female, and viral issues. Rabourdin says her life has changed because of CE courses. "Seeing the positive aspects of aromatherapy in my daily life, I cannot wait to continue my education."


Circle of Life
When Kate Kennedy graduated with an associate's degree in physical therapy at age forty, little did she know she would find her life's purpose as a doula. Although occasionally offering massage services to friends and family in pregnancy and labor, she had established what would be considered a traditional practice with chiropractors and hospitals, working hard at it to pay off student loans. It was a CE course that changed all that. Kennedy received a brochure for massage therapy birth assistant (MTBA) training from B.A.B.Y., Inc., and, needing the credits, she signed up. "I went to the course and loved it," she says. Developed by Sandy Gordon, the MTBA program goes beyond that of doula training. "Sometimes doulas are seen as a support person, but with skills in massage therapy, there's a world of things you can do to support (the mother)," Kennedy says.

At first, Kennedy had doubts about making a transition to a doula career. Still paying off debts, she needed steady massage employment. "I really longed to be in it more, but there was not an easy way to get into it full time. My day job was not going to understand if I called in because I was at a birth all night." Then came the opportunity to open a private practice in St. Louis on her own schedule, and the flexibility to birth assist when she chose. Through word of mouth, her doula business grew and she now partners with another practitioner, each serving as the other's backup. "I'm mainly doing birthing at this point--and a little massage therapy with my immediate family. It's something I will forever be lending a hand to because I believe in it so much."

At the other end of the spectrum, Mary Myers views her work as helping people to leave this world. But like the teamwork surrounding the rite of birth, she says dying is another rite that calls for gathering friends and family in support and celebration of the loved one's life. Her present focus is a far cry from her previous interest and training in the spa industry.

As a massage therapist in her mid-forties, Myers was concerned about continuing her practice into retirement. "I love helping but to keep at the pace I'm going, I don't want to get burned out. The spa industry, that's fun stuff." Having incorporated such spa niceties as stone and dry brushing massage into her private practice, she thought she had established a direction for her career. Then death intervened.

"What started it was I kept having clients who were battling cancer, so the whole death thing was starting to come into my life." There was the client too weak to make it to the office, near death, and in need of a home visit from Myers. "I wasn't even sure what to do. I just followed my instincts. I supported the family." The experience shifted her thinking.

Browsing through an issue of Massage & Bodywork, Myers came across an advertisement for a video on Comfort Touch, a modality developed by Mary Kathleen Rose for working with the ill and elderly. After purchasing and viewing the video, she contacted Rose, who invited her to a CE workshop. The class gave Myers the grounding she needed to pursue Comfort Touch and to follow a new calling in her life. Now passionately involved with hospice work, she has been inspired to share with others what she has learned about being with those who are dying.

"The feedback I was getting from the patients was incredible," Myers says. "Family and friends were curious. That's when I decided I want to start teaching this." Seeing how unprepared family members were for this experience was her lightbulb moment, she says. With Rose's blessing, Myers is developing a class to offer in her local community.

Myers equates a good death with a good birth. "I want to help people understand it a little more and how we can learn from people who are transitioning," she says. "I really am enjoying life more now that I'm working with people who are dying. Part of what hospice teaches me is how do I want to live my life here and how do I want people to celebrate it. It opens the door to a whole new way of looking at this life."


Renaissance Woman
After ten years as a veterinary technician, Kathy Gephart left the field to train as a bodyworker. "I was burned out and needed something new and was not happy with the ever-present vaccinations and drugs that Western medicine instills in not only human medicine, but also upon our four-leggeds." She became a massage therapist, blending structural integration, reflexology, reiki, and flower essences into her practice.

Gephart says she wasn't sure how one would do reiki on animals, but she was interested in the idea. "I stumbled--we know better than that ... we are led to certain experiences, there are no coincidences--across some information on a technique called Healing Touch for Animals (HTA). Since I was already a human therapist, I really did not care to go through schooling to become an equine or canine massage therapist, but the more I read about HTA, the more intrigued I was." Circumstances intervened, however, and Gephart put the notion on the back burner for several years.

"One day while walking past a desk at my place of practice, a piece of paper flew off the desk, whirled around in front of me and came to rest, face side up, at my feet," Gephart says. It was the HTA brochure she had put aside. "I gasped and knew it was something I needed to investigate more closely." Even more serendipitous, she discovered that HTA instructor Komitor was located in a nearby town. "I took her level one training about two years ago and have found myself becoming much more called to the animal kingdom once again.

Gephart says working with animals has brought a sense of balance to her practice. "Not only are they most receptive to energy work, but I also feel the needed connection back to the land that I receive when I go out on ranch calls." She's added two adopted greyhounds to her family, providing both with the benefits of HTA treatments at home. "I have found that practicing HTA and other forms of energy work have also opened my crown and ajna chakras so much that I again have the ability to communicate somewhat with the animals, one of my greyhounds in particular," she says.

With her ventures in vibrational medicine expanding, Gephart recently added tuning forks and has her eye on studies in thought field therapy. "I've had to reel myself in a few times," she says of her continual branching out. But a lot of it has to do with preservation as her body ages. "I don't want to be doing the physical aspect, so much so I'm looking ahead to find something I can do without expending so much energy." For now that means building her animal clientele and energetic healing, but she's already mapped out the future. In two years when her daughter graduates from school, Gephart will be heading back to the classroom. Combining her energy experience with training in nutrition and naturopathy, she plans to become a holistic educator, helping people to make healthy choices and "showing how one little link in the web affects everything else."


The More You Know ...
I don't know who I'd be or where I'd be without continuing education," says Hilmar Moore, an Austin, Texas-based massage therapist specializing in Zero Balancing (ZB) and Ortho-Bionomy (OB). In his mid-fifties, Moore retired from education to reinvent himself by entering massage school. "I was old enough to know that was going to lead to something," Moore says. "I had talked to therapists and saw there was a whole world of bodywork, so many directions you can go. I thought, 'I wonder what I'm going to find that's going to be my specialty.'" It was through CE courses that he found his niche.

While Moore was enrolled in a class on body movement techniques during his first semester at The Lauterstein Conway Massage School (TLC) in Texas, he added side-by-side CE training. After seeing an instructor use an OB technique, Moore was hooked. "My karmic antenna reacted instantaneously," he says. "Who knows exactly how that happens? I asked a number of questions, but my instructor said she'd talk to me about it later. At the end of class, I had learned more and booked a session with her. It turned out there was a class in two weeks, not offered at TLC, unfortunately. I took it and within three years was a certified practitioner of Ortho-Bionomy."

Following OB training, Moore became interested in working with the bones. "Massage therapy is almost always soft-tissue work," he says. "I remembered David Lauterstein saying, 'If you want to know about bone energy, study Zero Balancing.' So I went by the school for a conversation with David, bought Fritz Smith's book, Inner Bridges, and enrolled in my first ZB class. I entered the certification program and now am a practitioner."

Moore says with these two systems he can meet the needs of his clients. "Both came from continuing education classes and allow me to work with quite a varied group of clients, most of who come with injuries or chronic pain issues, and most of who need only a few sessions to be well on their way out of pain and discomfort." He feels confident in his practice and with his training, but says, "I continue to take classes in both forms of bodywork and cannot imagine that I will ever cease to do so. Look at all we have to choose from. The more you know, the more you can learn, and the more experience you have, the more you can learn."


A Standing Ovulation
Colorado's Mary Kathleen Rose is well known to many of us as developer and instructor of Comfort Touch, and for her contributions to Massage & Bodywork. But we recently discovered another side of Rose, that of Rose the artist. She tells us her participation in CE workshops a few years back rekindled an earlier artistic passion and inspired her to create again. And of all things, she credits a dissected cadaver for opening the flow.

Rose's experience in Gil Hedley's human dissection workshops naturally complemented her work as a massage therapist. "Hedley's approach to teaching allows each student to pursue the study of anatomy based on personal areas of interest," she says. "So of course I was curious to see what is inside the body. Seeing and touching the layers of body tissues and organs and seeing the relationships of all the parts in the dissected cadaver has enhanced my appreciation of the human body." This carries over in her practice, she says, but the impact stretched further.

"Participation in the labs was also inspiring as I began to see the body in new ways, respecting the aesthetic beauty of the form itself," Rose says. From her teenage years through college, she had pursued art studies, particularly in sculpture. "Many years and many forks in the road later, I found myself in the anatomy class and felt the convergence of these roads and interests in my life."

Upon completing Hedley's CE classes, Rose reached back into her artistic passion, creating several artworks inspired by her lab experience. Gut Feeling is a mixed media piece of copper, silk, and embroidery that becomes a hands-on interactive sculpture as it is opened up to reveal the small intestine and an embroidered poem. "After dissecting the pelvic bowl and female anatomy in another course, I was inspired to paint a mural on a garden shed called A Standing Ovulation," Rose says. "Set behind my living garden, it depicts a stylized representation of the internal structures of female anatomy in a garden of plants and flowers, reflecting the similarities in these beautiful forms in nature."
Rose's story highlights another important aspect of continuing education--that of nurturing the therapist's heart and soul. For her, it came full circle, integrating bodywork with her creative essence--a true synergy of body, mind, and spirit.


Not Always a Writer
It seems only fair to share my own CE story. Talk about doors opening where you never knew they would be. In the early 1980s, while living in Florida, I accompanied a friend to a scuba retail shop. As I stepped inside, the sales clerk asked if he could help me. Who, me? A scuba diver? I'd never considered the idea. I signed up, became an avid diver and bought an underwater camera. Not knowing an f stop from a stop sign, I took an underwater photography course from a renowned expert. Ten years later, as a photojournalist for Skin Diver magazine, I found myself on assignment in the Cayman Islands interviewing the very expert who had taught my first class, even photographing her underwater for the feature story.

***

Embrace continuing education as a wide-open door leading you to your bliss, your passion, your purpose. Whether it's for a new technique, a new specialty, or a new way of viewing yourself and your world, step through that door and live the life you ought to be living. Thank you, Joseph Campbell.


Note
1. This abbreviated quotation is from the 1998 PBS series The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers.