A cheaper sacroiliac belt, working toward “the new normal”

I went to an informal gathering for Zero Balancing practitioners Thursday evening, and I was very fortunate in that the man I partnered with is an experienced Zero Balancer, massage therapist, and physical therapy assistant.

I received first on our trade. I told him I wanted to take off my sacroiliac belt  before getting on the table, which engendered him telling me what he uses to make SI belts for his clients.

He goes to a sporting goods store and gets a product sold as a waist cincher or a waist slimmer belt. It’s made of black neoprene with Velcro at one end, has anti-microbial properties, and is about 42 inches long and 8 inches wide.

He then takes a pair of scissors and cuts it in half lengthwise. The cut velcro can be sewn, glued down, or left as is. Continue reading

Update on using the sacroiliac belt

It’s been a week since I started self-treatment for SI joint pain. I’ve made some changes after talking with my teacher that I want to share, in case you’re doing this at home. (If you’re just tuning in, you may want to read my first post on this topic.)

First, I am wearing the sacroiliac belt at night while I sleep.

Since we spend about one-third of our life sleeping, and we’re unconscious while we sleep, sleep posture is extremely important when working on alignment issues like an SI joint that has been out of alignment for years.

I decided to sleep with the sacroiliac belt on 24/7 to prevent the alignment occurring during the daytime hours from being undone while I sleep. Of course I take it off to shower and swim.  Continue reading

When the healer needs healing: chronic pain in a sacroiliac joint

There’s an old saying that people go into healing professions to heal themselves.

I believe it’s true. I went to many healers seeking healing of my own body, mind, heart, and spirit. All of those healers helped me, and none hurt me.

Could I have saved myself pain, time, and money by knowing which kind of healer I needed most for what issue? Yes. I didn’t have a guide, just my own knowledge and intuition and willingness to see what worked.

For the longest time it never occurred to me that I could become a healer. I liked the people who worked on healing me. Their work seemed more interesting than my jobs in government and technology. They were obviously caring people who had honed various kinds of healing skills, and the healing work seemed to be an extension of who they were, not just a job they did.

When I finally began to think about what I wanted to do in “retirement,” healing came to mind…and here I am, in a new profession, offering massage therapy, bodywork, and changework.

November 2022: I’ve been re-reading some old posts on this blog and re-discovered that about the time I wrote this post, I received a reading from “Austin’s leading psychic,” who told me I’d been some kind of healer in many, many past lifetimes — doctors, midwives, etc. I had pretended I’d been a doctor in a previous life when I had to learn anatomy in massage school, so it was just review of something I already knew and not so intimidating. Wow. I don’t actually have any recall of previous lives, but hmmm!

For 19 years, since a car wreck on April 24, 1996, I have had semi-chronic pain in one of my sacroiliac joints. In the accident, my lap belt held, my shoulder belt didn’t, the air bag didn’t deploy, there were two head-banging impacts that bled or turned into a goose egg, I was knocked unconscious, and my sacroiliac joints took the brunt of the trauma when my upper body was pulled away from from my lower body.

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Last week I got the help I needed to know how to fix it.  Continue reading

Applying Cold and Heat Therapeutically

Healing an injury or treating a painful condition can be significantly impacted by the appropriate application of cold and/or heat. Both cold and heat relieve pain and help with tight muscles, but other considerations (especially inflammation and depth of injured tissue) apply.

COLD

Apply cold immediately following any muscle, joint, or bone injury to relieve swelling, reduce pain and inflammation, and decrease muscle soreness and tightness. You can use cold any time after that. Cold only penetrates about 1 cm below the surface, so it works best for initial swelling/inflammation and for superficial conditions.

Do NOT use cold on broken or irritated skin, on superficial nerves, or when circulation is impaired. Also avoid applying cold when these conditions are present: Raynaud’s disease, cold intolerance, cold allergy, any previous experience of frostbite, impaired mental ability or sensation.

How to apply: Wet a cloth in hot water, wring it to dampness, wrap it around the cold pack, and apply. Check the skin in 5 minutes. If it’s bright red or numb, add another layer of insulation. Leave cold pack in place until it warms to room temperature. Repeat if needed. Never apply a gel pack directly to skin. Continue reading

My version of bulletproof tea, an excellent morning drink

You may have heard of Bulletproof Coffee. It even has its own listing on Wikipedia: Bulletproof Coffee! It’s a brand created by the man who blogs at Bulletproof Exec, who adds a proprietary “brain octane” medium-chain triglyceride oil to it.

The term is also used generically to refer to high-quality coffee blended with high-quality butter or ghee. The inspiration is butter tea, a traditional energy-giving drink in the Himalayan region that uses black tea, yak butter, hot water, and salt (using those pink Himalayan salt crystals, methinks).

I realized a few years ago that – after drinking coffee for my whole adult life – that I didn’t even enjoy the taste, always doctoring it with cream and sugar (waaaaay back before I went dairy- and sugar-free). I started drinking it for the stimulation of the caffeine when I was a young college student, and it became a habit.

Even freshly ground, organic coffee beans just didn’t and still don’t taste good to me. Too acidic and too much caffeine. Smells good, though.

Then I discovered green tea. I enjoy the taste, the lower level of caffeine, the health benefits, and the way my stomach feels. So it was natural to experiment and come up with my own version of “bulletproof tea”.

Screen Shot 2015-06-10 at 10.43.04 AMEquipment:
Have a mug with lid and a built-in infuser ready (or mug plus strainer, whatever you’ve got).

Ingredients:
green tea
pu-erh tea
yerba maté
coconut oil or grass-fed ghee
very hot water
lemon juice
stevia to taste (optional)
salt to taste (optional) Continue reading

Beet kvass: The easiest, quickest, cheapest fermented drink you can make

I just made beet kvass for the first time, and I want to share how easy it is! I found it full of umami flavor – earthy, salty, and tangy.

Everyone is learning how good fermented foods are — a way to get probiotics into your belly without expensive supplements that may or may not actually get those probiotics to just the right place in your digestive tract to be effective.

Beet kvass is something you can easily make at home that is ready to consume in as little as two days! And…it’s a time-tested traditional food known to have profound health-giving qualities.

beet kvass, The Well

My First Batch

Continue reading

Check out my new massage therapy website!

Here’s the link: http://http://thewell.massagetherapy.com/home. And if you don’t mind, while you’re there, please click a “share” button on the left or a “follow” button at top right. It helps with search engine rankings.

The Well website

This is just a screenshot! Click the link to view the actual website!

It’s a work in progress, but it is complete enough at present to go public with it. I’ll be adding images, videos, and more as I have time.  Continue reading

The best chicken liver paté recipe ever

I eat a Paleo diet, and right now I’m being rather strict about it: no grains, no dairy, no sugar, and lots of healthy meat and veggies. My energy levels are good!

My nutritionist, Olivia Honeycutt, tells me how good it is to eat liver. I’m pretty sure it was not one of my favorite childhood flavors (actually, my dad didn’t like it so my mom didn’t cook it, but she — having grown up on a ranch where they raised a lot of their own food — liked it).

As an adult I tried liver and onions and came to like it enough to eat occasionally, but not very often.

Liver is loaded with nutrients. One ounce (28 grams, or about 2 tablespoons) contains the following: Continue reading

Tight shoulders? You gotta try this Pressure Point Massager aka Spiky Roller Ball gadget!

As a massage therapist, I do lots of chair massage, and this tool, the Gaiam Pressure Point Massager (aka the spiky roller ball gadget), is so amazing, I must write a blog post about it!

Screen Shot 2015-05-05 at 10.02.31 PMI first discovered it when my trainer, Matt Fuhrmann at Tao Health & Fitness, bought one at a local store and brought it into the school. I tried it on myself and was impressed. Those little spiky points seem to activate the sensory nerves in a way that is pleasurable, and almost as a side effect, the muscles it rolls over release tension.

I used it lightly on myself and my chair massage clients until the day after a workout that I handed it to Matt to roll my tight, sore shoulders for me. He used a lot of pressure on my upper traps, shoulders, and upper back, more than I’d ever used on myself or anyone else. The sensations were intense, with that exquisite “hurts-so-good” feeling, and so was the tension release. I felt rushes up and down my whole body!

After that, I started checking in with my chair massage clients about how much pressure felt good to them. I use less pressure on bare skin than I do over clothing, and of course, every body is different, so checking in is critically important to avoid hurting them (in a hurts-so-bad way). Continue reading

Floss regularly for longevity, plus floss recommendations

Not kidding! Flossing regularly is an indicator of longevity. Of course it’s not a guarantee. It’s just that people who are knowledgeable about the benefits of flossing and who are motivated to get/keep their mouth in great shape floss — and are more likely to take care of their health in other ways.

Plus, flossing has been found to prevent heart disease.

Face it, flossing isn’t very much fun. About the most I’ve been able to get out of it is (1) being mindful about doing it daily and seeing improvements in gum health (no tenderness and bleeding is the goal), and (2) going to the dental hygienist and her barely needing to do any scraping. In fact, last time I went, I got to skip a scaling procedure, which would have been unpleasant. It also saved me $60. Continue reading