Find Your Flaws, Improve Your Skills, and Gain Perspective: Teach.

I've always thought one of the best ways to get better at anything you do is to teach it to someone else.

My first job ever was working as an assistant instructor at my karate school. In college I ran the swing dance club and taught all of the lessons.

Both times, teaching greatly improved my skills. When you have to figure out how to explain something to someone else, you gain new insight and break down the elements you have always done without thinking. You figure out exactly how you do them, and why they're done that way - or if they should be done differently.

Teaching can show you where your weaknesses are. You find out what parts of your subject you don't know so well. You realize where you've always made a shortcut on something. But best of all, you figure out how to do it all better.

I haven't taught anything in several years, at least, not in a real class structure. Starting tonight, I'll be teaching a partner massage class at the student union. I'll admit that I'm a little nervous, because I've never taught anything on massage before. So inevitably, I will uncover some weaknesses, standing there, in front of my students. The good news is that they don't usually notice. They'll be busy trying to learn something completely new.

That's the other great thing about teaching: it gives you perspective. When you've spent years learning and building up a skill, it can be easy to forget how challenging it was at the beginning. We tend to take well-developed skills for granted, and trying to teach someone how to do something that you're particularly good at or have been doing for a really long time will throw that back at you. Sometimes it can be frustrating how slowly people learn and how very basic you have to be with your instructions. But it is a great reminder and reference point for how far you've come, and what you have to offer.

So I'm excited to teach, in spite of my nerves. I know the experience will make me a better Massage Therapist, and a better teacher. And hopefully, it'll make a bunch of other people better at giving their S.O.s and friends better backrubs. :)

Alternative Healing Therapies Article

Three posts in a day?!? I know. It's a little excessive, especially after being off the grid for 6 months. I'm motivated today.

Anyway, I've been freelancing for Wisconsin Woman Magazine for a few years now, and they've let me start pitching my own articles. Here are the ones I've done on healing and alternative medicine:

Alternative Healing Therapies, see page 24

The Many Types of Massage, see page 22 (My friend Laura Malischke did the photography!)

At www.wisconsinwomanmagazine.com you can find all of the previous year's articles online. I've also written ones on Planning a Second Wedding, How to Stop Arguing About Money, Green Decorating, Planning Your Honeymoon, Travel Experts' Favorite Trips, and more.

Meditation and Massage

I recently started doing massage at a place. I wouldn't call it a spa, it's someone else's business, they schedule the clients, and I show up to do the massages.

For many therapists, this is not the ideal situation - working when someone else wants you to, often with little to no breaks between clients, and not getting paid as much as you would if you were working for yourself. But I like not having to put any time into it when I'm not there, and so far it's working well.

Except for being exhausted.

It's taking a lot for my body to get used to doing this kind of work to this extent. What does this have to do with spirituality? A discovery I made.

Ascension is designed in such a way that you can use the techniques with your eyes open, or while you're doing activity. So I started using the Ascension techniques while doing massage. The techniques themselves are, in part, meant to bring us into a state of greater awareness. When you're doing basically the same massage routine for several people in a row, several days a week, it's easy to let your thoughts drift. But the techniques help me keep my thoughts from wandering too far off.

I often close my eyes while giving massage for similar reasons - it helps me focus on my sense of touch, so that I'm really feeling the muscles and the tissues beneath my fingertips. When I combine this with the Ascension techniques, I've found myself really sensing my clients' bodies' rhythms. It's almost as if the tissues themselves are telling me how fast (or slow) they want me to move and what would be most helpful to them.

As I do this, I tend to also get more in touch with my own body and how it wants to move to respond to the client's requests. I find I often move more like a Tai Chi practitioner, keeping my arms in closer to my body (so as not to stress joints by over-reaching) which also provides more stability in the massage techniques I'm using. I don't push my own body too hard when I am aware this way, so I find myself less exhausted and less sore after doing massages while using my meditation techniques.

Moving meditations often talk about moving with awareness and the value of really being grounded in our bodies. It amazes me how much of a difference it can make for my experience of giving a massage - I'm still using the same techniques and making basically the same movements - but the potential damage to my body and energy used is vastly different.

It's another one of those things that makes me really consider just how much our mental state, consciousness, and awareness can effect our health and experience of the world.