One Thing I Wish I Had Learned in Massage School

What’s one thing you wish you had learned in massage school?

There is so much to cover in a massage program. The program I helped build kept changing every quarter as we added and added to the curriculum. There are endless things we wanted to teach to the students. Over time we found we had to cut some things out, simply to leave enough time for hands-on practice and lots and lots of repetition. That seemed to create the best opportunity for the students to thrive and become skilled massage therapists.

Cutting things out of the program was painful. It made me think about all of the things I didn’t get to learn in massage school when I was a student. We learned about so many things… hydrotherapy, reflexology, shiatsu, geriatric massage, pregnancy massage… the list goes on and on. I remember them giving us bragging rights as they told us that what we were learning in school was equivalent to a pre-med degree. I suppose the Anatomy & Physiology and Pathology classes mostly covered that.

Then they told us that doctors spend only 70 hours or less (if I remember right) learning the muscles in the body, and then they told us how many hours we were spending on learning muscles—basically the entire program, minus A&P and Pathology. It really puffed us up and I felt like it gave us the confidence to go out and conquer the world of bodywork.

I remember feeling like I got a great education. I passed the boards with high scores in all the categories… I was so proud of myself, and of my school. Proud. Hmmm. Pride can be an asset.

It can also be a liability.

I think what I would have liked to have learned more of in massage school is humility. By the time I left school I knew I absolutely LOVED learning. But I wondered what else there was to learn, since I already knew so much (literally laughing out loud now about this…) It was hard to drop $500 or more on a continuing education course without someone recommending it, because, 1) I was a single mom, and 2) if I was going to spend that much money, what guarantee did I have that the class would be good?

I have to say I took some classes that were great, and some that were not so great. Even at the classes that were not so great, I still learned something I could use.

Some people don’t like the word humility. It sounds like something for simple people, one might think.

I think humility keeps us open to learning. It’s hard to fill a glass that’s already full. I remember being kind of checked out at some point in massage school. I was already getting deep pressure, giving decently effective massages (according to my fellow students and family), and I shut down the doors to learning, except in the A&P course. We had a fabulous A&P teacher and I had so many questions for him.

Since then I have learned that just because we have one not-so-great experience with a certain type of bodywork, that doesn't negate the fact that it is effective, at other times, and for other people. The night that we got a little introduction to Craniosacral Therapy and Myofascial Release I didn’t have a fabulous experience. We didn’t receive any step-by-step instructions, nor were we taught what the rhythm was supposed to feel like in different places in the body. So I felt nothing. I came away with the idea that CST and MFR were sub-standard therapies that didn’t have an ounce of effectiveness. (If you’ve read my other posts, you know how I got corrected on this later!)

I’ve also learned the importance of becoming aware of what I don’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know, one of my mentors used to say. We learn so much in massage school and gain so much confidence, that we can become over-confident and forge ahead forcing the body to release tension, when in reality, the body has put that tension there for a darn good reason. We could end up de-compensating a healthy pattern that is protecting the person from greater problems if we are not careful.

I know this because I have done it. I have also had it done to me. One of the practitioners who did it to me called it a “healing crisis.” Crisis, for sure! I’m not sure if any healing came out of the experience, but my body felt like it was in crisis, like I had been run over by a Mack truck.

I wish I had gotten a little more humility and awareness in massage school that there is still a lot that we don’t know yet, upon graduating from massage school, and some enumerations of what those things might be, so we could have a direction we could take our learning. A place to start asking questions and digging for answers, if you will.

Fortunately, experience teaches us these things. We figure out fairly quickly that we don’t know as much as we thought, the theories don’t always play out well in practice, and sometimes we make people worse. That drives us to look harder, learn more, dig deeper, and spend hard-earned money on good continuing education, only so we can continue to realize that there is so much more to learn that we will never learn it all.

In learning this, though, we also learn about some of our blind spots, so we can at least figure out where to exercise caution, when it might be a good idea to refer out, either to a doctor, a PT, an Acupuncturist, or a colleague who has gone down a different rabbit hole of learning than we have.

How can we know whom to refer to? By getting work done on ourselves! One thing to add to this rant about humility is that this skill we have learned in massage school is really awesome. It helps people a lot, and it is a great bartering service. I have bartered over the years for many things. Now I mostly trade for bodywork of as many kinds as I can find time for. It always helps me to learn something, and often I end up referring some of my clients to the people I trade with, or even the people I pay out of pocket for.

I would love to hear from my readers about what they wish they had learned in massage school, or if you have any ideas for classes you would like me to teach, send them my way!