Key Point

• Embrace the repetition that’s at the heart of bodywork; then, reinvent each session depending on your client’s needs.

Giving a great massage is hard. We spend a long time trying to get it right. And yet, that’s not the hardest part of our work. What makes being a massage therapist hard, I believe, is giving a great massage again. And again. And again. And again. 

The hardest part of being a massage therapist, in other words, is replicating the therapeutic benefits of our work over and over. It’s not enough to take care of the client on our table right now. We also need to give a great massage to our next client, and to the one after that, and to our very last client of the day, and to our first client next Tuesday. That ability—to keep giving great massages—is what separates a good therapist from an exceptional one. And it’s what makes the difference between burning out after a few years and still loving your work decades from now. 

So, how do we do it? How do we ensure the massage we give two years from now is going to be as good as the massage we give two days from now and as good as the massage we are giving right now? 

October will mark my 20th anniversary as a massage therapist, so I’ve had a lot of time to think about this question. I’ve also been teaching other massage therapists for more than a dozen years; I’ve worked with many therapists who are soaring in their careers, and many who are flailing. It’s taken me a long time to arrive at this answer, but I think the key to (continually) giving a great massage is a paradox: repetition and reinvention. Or more specifically, the key is figuring out how to reinvent as you repeat. 

The Paradoxes of Practice

As I try to articulate how therapeutic success occurs, I keep returning to three ideas. These seem like contradictions at first but are essential to a happy career. I’m going to call them the paradoxes of practice: 

1. Giving a massage can seem really complicated, but it’s actually simple.

2. The kind of work we do doesn’t matter as much as how we do it.

When we can make sense of these two paradoxes, we can embrace the third and final paradox: 

3. A great massage occurs when we use the same strokes but make them feel unique: when we use repetition to reinvent.  

If you recognize these paradoxes—if you embrace them—you’ll have a much better chance at having a successful and satisfying career. The reverse is also true: There are lots of ways therapists burn out—mentally, physically, emotionally—but all of them stem from ignoring or denying or fighting against these paradoxes, rather than embracing them. 

Let’s explore how to recognize these paradoxes in your work so you can appreciate them, rather than be stymied by them. 

Paradox No. 1: Complicated But Simple

Being a massage therapist is complex. It can be confusing and overwhelming. For every session, we have to consider the unique needs of that client; we have to absorb their medical history—sometimes during the short walk from waiting room to treatment room—and figure out how to adapt our strokes to ensure, at the minimum, their safety and comfort. And then, if all goes well, an hour later, we do it all over again with our next client. 

In addition to the pressures of each session, we also have the larger complications of how to create a career. How do we take care of ourselves while we take care of our clients? How do we grow our work? What continuing education classes should we take, and what modalities should we focus on? The possibilities are incredible, especially in our era of increasing specialization, but they’re also utterly daunting. 

And yet, beneath all that complexity is something equally important: Massage is really, really simple. In every session, with every client, we use a few different tools and move them in a few different ways. I remember getting to the end of my first semester of massage school and feeling like I missed something, like my teacher must have skipped a bunch of lessons. I thought, “Effleurage and petrissage and vibration? Compression and tapotement and cross-fiber friction? Really? That’s it?! A whole school of massage from strokes you can count on just one hand?” 

The same is true of our tools. You probably use barely a handful of points of contact: the heel of your hands or your fists, your forearms, maybe your fingertips and thumbs (if you haven’t blown them out yet), maybe your elbow when you feel daring. A few of us use our feet or cups or other tools, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule. 

In other words, to be a good massage therapist, there are endless details we need to know, precautions we need to keep in mind, and adjustments we need to make; but the actual implementation of a massage—the craft of contacting our client—is incredibly simple. That simplicity is both the great beauty of our profession and a big problem. 

It’s easy to forget, especially the longer you work, how much you can achieve with so little. We transform the way another human feels in their body using just our hands. We can create ease and improve efficiency with only a few techniques. I can’t think of another profession that can accomplish so much change with so few ingredients. At the same time, I think this is a big part of why our careers tend to be so short.

Our work is inherently repetitive. Incredibly repetitive. Painfully repetitive. We have only a few strokes to choose from and only a few points of contact to deliver them. Yet, we want to make every session special, unique, and wonderful. 

The result is that for many of us therapists, the longer we work, the more the reality of massage and the ideal of massage diverge. Do you remember when you first graduated from massage school? If you were anything like me, you had a vision. Every massage you gave was going to be amazing—a gorgeous experience of healing, learning, and growing, a co-creating of something marvelous and life-changing. 

That vision glistened. It buoyed me. And then that vision ran into reality: a bunch of effleurage strokes to the back. Then the backs of the legs. Then the fronts of the legs. Then the arms. Then the neck. Then you’re done. Then you do it again. 

This reality, when it really sinks in, can be brutal. I remember when I started working, fresh out of massage school, at a busy spa. I started each shift by getting 10 flat sheets and five face cradle covers from the supply closet. I set up my room for the first client, and then the rest of the day was a blur: giving each client as much time as I could, then changing over the table, then doing it again. After a few days, a depressing thought took over my brain: I’m just making a bed over and over! I saw my career stretching out ahead of me, just a series of endless sheet-and-face-cradle changes. A dwindling stack of clean sheets; a growing pile of used sheets. And then the next day, the same thing all over again. 

The repetition can feel daunting. It’s easy to become a robot and go through the motions, to perform your massage on autopilot. That’s why so many of us burn out. Instead, we need to embrace repetition. We must use the simplicity of our work and make it an asset instead of a detriment. 

Paradox No. 2: The Same Thing Many Ways

Another amazing thing about our profession, in addition to how simple it is, is that we make our clients happy in so many ways. Some of us practice reiki. Others practice myofascial release. Some adamantly follow the latest double-blind research studies. Others are sure that the true value of our work cannot be explained by science. And yet, the clients keep coming back! 

It often feels to me like our profession should be plural—“massage therapies” instead of “massage therapy.” The singular simply can’t contain the variety of what we do. But what’s more confusing is that it all seems to work. Why do some of us swear by pressure that is painful, while others insist on feather-light touch? How can both of those techniques feel good? How can so many modalities make our clients feel the same things: less stress, more ease?

To find some answers, I did what I always do: talk to you, my fellow therapists. I have a wonderful community of nearly 2,000 therapists who receive my weekly newsletter. I decided to ask their thoughts on what the ingredients are for a great massage. My questions were simple:

• Tell me about a great massage you received. What made it so memorable?
• Tell me about giving a great massage. What is it that makes that session amazing?

This informal survey was revealing. The answers were numerous and varied widely. Not surprisingly, a few therapists mentioned the music they play, the kind of lubricant they use, luxurious sheets, or the table warmer they love. 

You know what no one mentioned? The modality of the massage. No one mentioned—either in talking about a great massage they received or a great massage they gave—whether it was a deep-tissue session, Swedish, myofascial, or anything else. I find this fascinating. 

Instead, what therapists mentioned, over and over, was presence: the incredible value of simply listening to the client, of remaining in the present, of working with intention. The ways people said it varied, but the message remained remarkably consistent: The actual techniques used don’t matter as much as the spirit in which they are used. 

In these testimonies, we arrive again where we started: The modality we use isn’t as important as we think. Or: Intention is more valuable than technique.  

Of course, we all have likes and dislikes. I will always prefer more pressure to less pressure. I am a sucker for cupping but have never been amazed by gua sha. Surely you have certain styles your body craves and other modalities you are uninterested in, or even repelled by. Yet, the underlying truth remains: The lightest of Swedish massages, performed with love and attention, will feel better to me than the deepest of deep-tissue sessions from a therapist who is just going through the motions. Meaning outweighs modality. Every time. 

And so, regardless of the kind of massage we offer, the key to greatness is our intention. And the way to sustain intention? Embrace the paradox. 

Paradox No. 3: Repetitive Uniqueness 

You need repetition to be an effective massage therapist. It’s impossible to do our work without repeating our work—without doing the same strokes again and again and without constantly using the same points of contact. At the same time, repetition can be a career killer. (Those bland, cookie-cutter massages don’t do anything good, for you or your clients. Too many of them will end your career, either via boredom or injury.)

What’s the solution? How do we work with repetition, rather than get stuck in repetition? You already know the answer: reinvention. I believe that within every repetition lies the possibility for reinvention. It can be hard to wrap our brains around this concept since these two concepts seem like opposites. But I think this is a truth our bodies already know, even if our brains can’t articulate it. When you give a great session, you are already manifesting this idea, even if you’ve never thought about it. 

Indeed, when we get right down to it, I think this is really what intention consists of. You use the same strokes over and over, but you make each stroke feel unique. You give the client an experience they have never had before, even though you use points of contact you’ve used countless times before. In other words, what we call intention is, at its essence, reinventing each repetition. 

Even though repetition and reinvention seem like opposites, it is more useful to think of them as inseparable. That can manifest in good and bad ways. In other words, they can be opposing forces—after all, when you give a boring, uninspired massage, chances are you do a lot of repeating without reinventing. Yet, when we work with intention, these two forces aren’t opposing each other; rather, they are in harmony with each other. When our work is intentional, every stroke we give is both a repetition and a reinvention. 

Once we embrace the power of repetition, we can see how its twin—reinvention—exists on multiple levels. When you work intentionally, reinvention can occur within our sessions, our clients, and our careers.

Why is that repetition helpful? I think the answer brings us back, once again, to reinvention. Because when we give a great massage, we reinvent each stroke, even as we repeat those strokes. We reinvent each stroke for the need of that particular client, and the particular part of that client’s body, at that particular moment in time. 

That repetition gets boring, uninspiring, and bland when we stop reinventing, when we do the same thing over and over without recognizing the uniqueness of each client and of each muscle. So, even though I do a few effleurage strokes down the paraspinal muscles of every client, each stroke is slightly different—to match the pace and the pressure that client needs at that moment.

I repeat in order to reinvent. And I reinvent each repetition. Those changes are sometimes conscious and obvious, particularly with my regular clients. One week I’ll start a client in the prone position, and the next week in supine. I’ll work lighter than usual if a client is feeling particularly frazzled, or deeper than usual if a client is particularly in tune with their breathing that day. 

But I think the more profound reinventions are actually the smaller ones. These occur when we are fully present in the moment, when we are imperceptibly adjusting every contact, when we are not rushing to get to the end of the stroke or the end of the session but are creating every contact in tandem with the client, and when our whole body is responsive to the client’s whole body. With such intention, I could give what looked like an identical massage to two clients, and yet, each massage would feel utterly different to each of those clients. Even if I repeated the same strokes in the same sequence, I would be reinventing every moment of contact to match the unique needs of that client, that nervous system, and that moment. 

The result of that reinvention then spreads to your client. When you give an amazing session, the client who gets off your table is slightly different from the client who laid down on that table. In other words, you help the client reinvent themselves.

I want to be very clear about the limits of this reinvention. My opinion is that too often, in our enthusiasm to help clients, we exaggerate the benefits of massage. This doesn’t help clients or our profession. So, I don’t believe we can “take away” our clients’ knots, “eliminate” their pain, or “fix” them in any way. (Just like us, they are not broken objects; they are dynamic beings in need of care, not repair.)  

However, when we work with intention, when we embrace the possibility of reinvention via repetition, we can offer something that is perhaps subtler, but also more important than the exaggerated claims of our profession. With a great session, the client can feel a little more at home in their own body when they get off the table. They move with a bit more ease. Over time, they may even evolve beyond some of the limiting beliefs about how their body works (or more importantly, how it doesn’t work). They live in greater harmony with their nervous system.

Last, but not least, reinvention is just as important for us as therapists. Our work needs to shift and grow to remain satisfying. Sometimes, this happens in obvious ways: You feel like deep-tissue work isn’t helping your clients enough, so you take advanced courses in orthopedic massage. Or you tire of working endlessly with athletes, so you alter your outreach to try and get more pregnant people on your table. 

These more obvious reinventions of our work are fantastic. But I think small reinventions might be even more valuable. Sometimes we reach for a big change—a new modality, a different spa, an additional client population—hoping it will make the hours we spend in session more satisfying. But if we are stuck in our sessions, if we are lacking intention with our current client, making a superficial change—no matter how big it is—isn’t going to improve that more fundamental, more underlying problem. 

Instead of reaching for a big, superficial change, we should focus more on the moment-by-moment, stroke-by-stroke possibilities for reinvention. If each massage feels invigorating and satisfying, then the days, weeks, months, and years will continue to feel satisfying. You will continue to evolve as a therapist and continue to reinvent your career, regardless of the modality you use or what kinds of clients you see. 

Naming Your Success

There are so many ways our careers can go astray. So many ways we can get bored, injured, or just tired. Yet, we have the chance to avoid those pitfalls. Each of us has the ability to create a successful and satisfying career. You have the ability to give a great massage right now, and to continue giving great massages. I encourage you to embrace the power of repetition and find the possibilities for reinvention in every stroke. I look forward to what you create.