Shiatsu Massage, Victoria BC, Melissa Phillips

Shiatsu Journey

January 8, 2009

Choosing a school is like goldilocks picking the right porridge

Filed under: 5 Three schools — Melissa @ 7:01 pm

I had a positive connection with my spa manager and we would talk about my future plans. She knew that I wanted to go to school to learn massage soonish and she totally supported me. At that time I was considering going to school for however long I needed and then either stay at work part time or go back with my diploma. Even though it was hard work as an attendant and I saw how it was for practitioners I still really enjoyed the place. I never thought I would want to open up my own practice, let a lone work by myself. To work at the spa the practitioner had to have at least 2200 hours of training.  So I had my goal.

I also decided to set a foundation of ideas of what I wanted to learn from the school that I would go to. I described it often to people that I was building myself a house.  In the past I have had experiences that were like the roof of the house, but I didn’t have the walls or foundation to really get what those experiences were teaching me. So learning about the body was me putting down the cement for the foundation.

After I had my first shiatsu session I decided to take an introduction shiatsu class at a local acupressure school in Victoria to see if it was what I wanted to learn. I also took another class that was on a style of healing I had never heard of before called Jin Shin Do.  Both classes made me feel happy but I liked how shiatsu focused on the whole body not just the emotional issues.

Jin Shin Do focuses on 45 acupressure points. The practitioner will pick a few to work with during the session and they may hold only 2 points for an hour.  (Later when I went to the school I finally ended up, there was a Jin shin do therapist across the street from my school; I have a link to him on my links page. I went to see him a few times and found it to be very healing.)

So after the introduction class I was certain I had chosen the right healing path. I decided to apply to the school the introduction was located at. They of course accepted me.  This was in the spring time, but I was not to start classes until September.  The summer went by and I was looking forward to starting class.

A week before I was supposed to have my first class I got a call. The fulltime shiatsu program was canceled. There were not enough students. The owner of the school gave me two options. I could take the part-time program starting October 3rd, a month later. That program was still filling up and there was a slightly better chance of it actually happening. Or I could learn Jin Shin Do.  I would have to take the anatomy course with the Jin Shin Do students though.

I decided not to take the Jin Shin Do program since it is not used at the spa and I had the intention of going back. My manager at the spa was again very supportive. I was suppose to work only one day a week in September but they allowed me to go back to full time during that month as I waited to start the Shiatsu part-time program.

The anatomy class at the school started to make me feel uncomfortable since most of the students were practitioners of other healing fields so they already knew stuff. One classmate even started taking over the class, by talking about how she could see auras and that she could teach us that. Everyone else in the class was impressed, including the teacher, and she said she would give the floor to that student the following week.  I am not saying that seeing auras is a bad thing. I just felt like it was inappropriate to talk about this when I was still trying to figure out about the meat of the physical body from a western perspective.

In the middle of September, after I had taken two anatomy classes I heard the owner talk with someone else about how there were still a chance that people would sign up any moment.  But I knew right then that the program was not going to happen. I talked with the practitioner who had originally suggested I work at the spa about how the program wasn’t going to happen. She asked if I had considered Vancouver since she had a friend who had a school there. She gave me his information and website.

My husband and I decided that we could make it work. He would stay in Victoria with our cat, and his already established career, and we would see each other on the weekends. So I emailed the school, and called him the next day.

The owner of the school said no. He believed that it would be unfair for the current students to allow a new person in after they had already established a bond. I was going to be three weeks behind after all. I was crushed.

Later that day I went to a friend’s house and talked with her about my dilemma. I told her how there was another school in Vancouver, but I had little hope that they would allow a late person to be accepted as well. But my friend suggested I call them anyways. The secretary knew of the situation of my original school, since they had a connection with the Victoria school and the owner was totally understanding of it and was ok with people transferring. The following day my husband and I went over to meet the administrator, as well as to check out the school.

The funny thing was the first two schools were only 1000 hours. The first school had said I could take more classes afterwards to make up the full 2200 hours and so I had thought that would be ok. I didn’t want to have to move out of Victoria after all. The final school was actually the best since its program was a FULL 2200 hours based on western perspective of the body.  I started school, a week later, on October 3rd.

January 4, 2009

The first session

Filed under: 4 Experiencing shiatsu for the first time — Melissa @ 6:33 am

I decided that a poem was the best way for me to describe my first shiatsu experience.  Enjoy!

Ocean breath

The hum of waves
roar from her mouth, calmly.
By a simple brush of her hand
along the spine. I feel
my back let go. Worries
drift away. I am
in this moment aware.  Silent
thoughts release pain
as she holds
one point and then another.
I remember to breathe
while the ocean surrounds.

January 3, 2009

A job at a spa found me

Filed under: 3 Spa life — Melissa @ 5:44 am

I worked at Starbucks for 2 years, while also trying to finish the manuscript. During my second year I connected with a regular client and asked her what she did for a career  one day. She said she was a massage therapist. I said oh, neat. I want to learn that in the future. Since secretly while I was consciously focusing on writing, I was also  starting to get the itch to learn something new. I was scanning massage school websites all over Vancouver Island, and dreaming about taking classes. I told her I wasn’t sure  what style I wanted to learn. She suggested I try working at her spa first.

Six months later I was working at the spa as an attendant and just finishing off working at Starbucks. I was also still working on the manuscript.

I was the jane-of-all-trades, maid, grunt worker, you name it, for the spa. The very first day I arrived I was a minute late and the toilet in  the woman’s locker room overflowed. My new supervisor and I went right to work at cleaning up the space. It was not the perfect start. Cleaning the mess helped me calm down  from being stressed about being late. And my supervisor was super cool, and was not mad at me for being late. I was still use to Starbucks, having to punch in on the correct  time, or getting in trouble if we did it too late or too early.

There are two worlds in the spa: one in the general lunch room and the other with clients. It was amazing watching practitioners contort their faces into smiles that  everyone except the client knew as being fake. Or a loud person changing their voice to calm and  sweet. Clients loved the spa I worked at and I even took pride in  working there since it was very pretty. But I knew that I would never use the mineral pool, or what we attendants liked to call people soup unless I knew it was totally  cleaned. Every day we had to clean the scum off the edges, not really pleasant when you think about it. Or the steam room, which seems nice but that is a whole other story.

Working at a spa must be peaceful is a false statement. I was constantly helping the practitioners set up their treatment rooms, then running to clean the locker rooms,  cleaning the lunchroom since the practitioners rarely helped clean their own mess or changing light bulbs in the front room, and finally folding laundry. There were many other  tasks that I had to do, I would have a list to follow but often I would get torn from the list to help someone else. I was very busy working there but I did get to see what it  was like being a practitioner and being able to have cheap sessions with them.

I also got to see what it was like to be a practitioner working at a spa. Newbies got little clients, and were supposed to help me clean up the spa but they chose to sit in the  lunchroom to read books instead. Practitioners that had been there a long time would often get more clients than they would really want, and have little time for breaks. I  didn’t understand then how draining a session could be if you don’t have time to relax between sessions. Often they only got about 10 mins between each session, barely enough  time to go pee, if I were not there to help them set up their next space.

Now it may seem I have negative thoughts about working in a spa. My experiences were not all bad.  I actually think working at a spa has many benefits. Such as working with other people, having to not worry about administration or marketing and being in a beautiful setting. I wanted to share the negative to stop people from idealizing working in a spa, like I had done in the past. Working in a spa is a job where as I decided now to have my own space. It is still a job but I am my own boss as they say. And that can be just as hard.

I finished my manuscript while working at the spa and sent it to my friend’s publishing house. They turned me down, but I was already expecting that. I just wanted to follow  through with my decision to send it to them. I worked at the spa for 4 months before I had my first shiatsu session. I had thought shiatsu was a name of a type of dog, but realized that was shih-tzu.

Wanting to be a writer

Filed under: 2 Writing life at university — Melissa @ 5:13 am

So many words often float in my head. I was always going to be a writer since it has always been apart of me. I wrote my first story for my grandparents when I was 9 years old about three mermaid sisters. It was seven pages, seven chapters. Throughout my teens I was determined to be published as a poet, with out succeeding except only through the school yearbook and my religions newsletter.  I then went to university still wanting to be a poet. A teacher forced me to realize I was not as sorrowful or as strong with my words as others like him by giving me a rotten grade. So I tried writing fiction but again a different teacher thought I sucked. The nice thing about the first year writing program at University of Victoria was that we had to do all three genres: poetry, fiction and play writing.  Before I gave up on writing all together I had my last genre, playwriting. The last play I had written for my grade 12 class got an F since I was not interested in it at all.

Some how I had sparked the teacher’s interest and I got one of the best grades in that class. So my writing journey at the university was planned for me. I took classes on play writing and wrote many different plays. I studied film as well and thought this was something I wanted to pursue for a career. During my 4th year at the university I decided to direct and produce my own play. I wanted to test the waters of the theater world. I got friends to act, who were not actors and had support from many other friends to get the play performed at the university. It showed for 2 nights, and we made just enough money to break even and to have a great after party. I was extremely stressed during the whole production since I did not know how to delegate well and thought I needed to do it all. I realized after the experience what I could have done to make it not as stressful if I had only the courage to say I needed help.

I was just about to finish my university life with two paths of writing lifestyles that I could do without a clue of which one was right. So I decided to ask for help. I always wanted to write children books even before I started university. Throughout my university life I was very active in my religion. We had a youth council that was formed with a collection of 12 people under 25 from all over the world. I joined the council for 5 years as the newsletter editor. My job as editor was to encourage children and youth from 5-25 to write or do some sort of artistic creation for the newsletter that got sent out to more than 10,000 people all over the world. I taught workshops at seminars that were based on how to bring out spirit in their creative works. Working with children made me want to write for them.

And yet I had also studied plays and films during school so I had the world of entertainment to pursue. I decided that I would ask one of teachers, who was a published children book writer if he would be willing to be my mentor ( or more like if he would be interested in reading my story.) I thought if he said no then that meant I would go on the other path. It was an easy choice. He said sure.

It was not an easy choice. I got a job as a barista for Starbucks after I got my university fine arts degree since I realized I needed to make money while I wrote the best book ever. The first 4 months that I started on this career as a writer I tried to work on that important story but had the worst writers block. I was too overwhelmed by all that I wanted to do with the story. And to make matters worse I had a whole other story itching to come out. In the end I decided to let go of the first one and followed the second story’s journey.

I had a friend from school working at a children book publisher. I asked her if she would be willing to read the book. She said sure. She was not an editor then but she was willing to try. She ended up taking classes on becoming an editor and used my manuscript as her first book to edit as she learned to become one. She still works at that publishing company and is now an editor. She told me the story was sweet but she wasn’t sure if her company would want to publish it. I continued to work on my manuscript after I had her look at it the last time.

January 2, 2009

Hello friends,

Filed under: 1 beginning — Melissa @ 11:25 pm

When I was in my teens I use to give friends and family massages all of the time. They would often say that I was really good. I never really thought it was that big of a deal, since it was so easy to do. So I said maybe when I turn 50 I’ll learn how to be a massage therapist. I was determined to be a published writer first. For a brief moment when I was 16 I had thought I wanted to learn something other than writing.

A friend had introduced me to acupressure, one point on my hand when I was 16. So I was curious to learn more. There was an acupuncturist set up in the small village, Brentwood Bay, that my high school was located so I went to see him about this eastern stuff. He started talking to me about charkas, which I felt a little uncomfortable with since he started by describing where the root charka was. I didn’t like a man in his 40’s talking to me a 16 year old about my private parts! (But really he was just trying to help me understand that I need to ground myself, and send energy down through all of my charkas to the earth.) His office also smelled like pot but he told me the smell was from an herb called sage which one burns to clear the space. (Little did I know I now use sage to clear my own home once in awhile 14 years later.) He also lent me a couple of books. The first book I read quite fast and gave back to him. The second, well I still have it. I tried reading the book he ‘lent’ me. I had always thought I would go back to give the book back, even bought him a thank you card. I would read a few chapters and then stop I left it for months until I felt the urge to read it again. I often started at the beginning again only to stop half way. For many years I did this while I focused on my writing.

Many people often ask me how did I discover shiatsu and why did I decide to do this as a career. I have decided to publish a blog on my website to share how my journey to becoming a writer helped me become the therapist I am today.

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