Massage Philosophy: Loving Time

I was teaching a massage business class about office design, time management, policies, procedures, etc. We had just touched upon the elegant Buddhist concept that 60 percent of healing is environment. Some spaces you just walk into and immediately feel better; some you walk into and just feel the energy sucked out – like where you go to renew your driver’s license. So the students and I discussed creating a healing space – how to create your therapy-space as one that you love, one that adds energy and joy to you and everyone who enters it.

Then we collectively came up with something new to all of us. We began to look at time. I said, “We can organize our time so that we could love it too.”

I asked the class, “How many of you LOVE the way you use time?”

Unsurprisingly, nobody’s hands went up. So many of us are quite bitter about time. People these days almost reflexively feel a victim relationship to time. We complain there’s not enough of it; that it’s hard to organize it well. And then there’s death – you know – shit happens then you die. Wow – talk about a crappy approach to time management! This brought us to a beautiful discussion about ways you could love your time. How can you organize your day so you love time as much as you can create a space you love to work in?

What I’ve found so far is that there is an “interior” decoration of time as well an “exterior.”

The interior is deeply appreciating that one is alive. Each present moment is unique and magical because it is the only moment in which we can act, the only moment in which we are alive! I must say that, since our discussion in class, most moments have felt more deeply exciting. The “exterior” decoration is one’s daily or weekly, etc. plan. How can you distribute the events throughout the day and the rhythm of them such that the day is more like a symphony with fast movements and slow; flute solos and giant orchestral jams? We are each the conductor of our particular symphony.

Loving time – it’s a beautiful thing.

One of the most often asked questions asked by future LMTs is, why should I choose Lauterstein-Conway Massage School for my massage education? Often times, we are told it’s our philosophies about wellness that set us apart in the minds of students – where else would you have a conversation like this one?