Plato identified three absolute values – goodness, truth and beauty.
It’s easy to see how massage therapy utilizes truth. We endeavor to be, when possible, evidence-based. We rely on the complex and fascinating truths of anatomy and physiology.
And goodness is eminently part of our work. Massage is perhaps the most direct application of kindness in the entire realm of healthcare – since we get to spend a whole hour in compassionate contact with the client. Due to this extended contact, we have to pay even more attention to ethical behavior and the observation of healthy boundaries in the professional context.
Both of these are fundamental to the scientific and moral grounding of massage.
Yet perhaps the deeper and less discussed impact of massage is that quality of touch and connection which gives rise to the experience of beauty. Art centers on this experience. Massage is as much an art as a science.
People come to us so often having lost their sense of being beautiful, not primarily externally, but internally. Out of harmony, frustrated with tension and pain, often the last thing they will feel is their inner beauty.
Yet this is perhaps the largest part of our job – to help restore the clients’ sense that inside themselves, they are beautiful. Their inner workings of physiology are wondrous miracles. The complex balancing of the hundreds of anatomical structures is a lesson in harmony – as much as a Bach fugue. When these inner workings are enhanced and brought to the client’s conscious or unconscious awareness, they are struck as if by a work of inner art which is their life.
Each person is a masterpiece. They just don’t know it!
It’s our mission to illuminate this beautiful, wondrous person through the art of massage therapy, using goodness and the light of truth.