Thirty-three states have state licensing, and California finally is one of them. State licensing is a way of ensuring the quality of practitioners, which will (soon, we hope) encourage health insurance companies to reimburse for massage treatments. But we still haven’t fully embraced the field of bodywork. Why is there still a shroud of mystery around it and a distrust of the massage therapy profession? One reason is that the boundary between therapeutic massage and sensual o

Summer into Fall The Art of Centering in Yoga and Massage In 1970, when I took a ceramics class at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I quickly discovered that I could not center clay on the pottery wheel. Over the next few years I was also studying tai chi and ten years later my studies took me into the heart of Kenpo Karate and White Crane Kung Fu. It was those movement systems that taught me about finding one’s center, also called hara or tan tien. The hara, al

I surprised myself when I called nearby Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, California for information about therapeutic programs and modalities for returning veterans. As I was waiting on hold, I found myself struggling with thoughts such as, do I really want to hear how veterans have suffered and are continuing to suffer? Do I really want to know the situation? It felt very charged to me, and then I realized one of the reasons. When I was the age of many of our veterans my fath