I went to my first massage therapy conference this year! Massage Therapy Media organizes and presents the Canadian Massage Conference circuit, and this year they presented in Halifax. Two of the organizers had come to ICT Northumberland College for an info session in the fall of last year, and several of the students and I had signed up on the spot. Early bird discounts are the best.
When I arrived at the conference, there was a delightful gauntlet of exhibitors lining the hallway between conference rooms. Samples, stickers, information, vendors of massage oils and cupping sets, massage table manufacturers, massage therapy associations, all in a friendly half-circle around the classrooms.
The workshops were long–four hours each–but I love info-dumps, so I knew I was going to have a great time. The first workshop on my schedule was ‘Evidence Informed Clinical Cupping: The Basics’ with Paul Kohlmeier, a fellow Winnipegger. The second half of my first day was spent in a cranial sacral class for head, neck, and jaw, taught by Sean-Michale Latimour. Day two also started with Sean-Michael, this time on full body fascial release. And my last workshop of the conference was Assessment and Treatment for Hypermobility with Terra Nicolle.
EVIDENCE INFORMED CLINICAL CUPPING
There is so much more to do with cupping than just sticking them on someone and leaving them. After I found that I could still feel fascia ‘telling’ me where to move THROUGH THE CUPS, I was in. Fast cupping can act like manual lymph drainage? Tell me more. Learning that there are silicone cups that stick around corners blew my tiny mind, and I bought a set of negative ion ‘around the corner’ cups. They each have six very tiny tourmaline beads embedded in the rims, so that felt proper witchy and whatnot.
CRANIAL SACRAL FOR HEAD, NECK, AND JAW
Sean-Michael Latimour lead an oddly rapid-fire practical class on palpation and manipulation of the bones of the skull. Yes, the different parts of your skull do move, a lot like tectonic plates, despite most people learning in school that they are fused and static once a human becomes an adult. They move in and out, up and down, side to side to pump your cerebrospinal fluid so it flows around your brain and down and up your spinal column; this fluid movement is your craniosacral rhythm. And if the bones in your skull aren’t moving the way they are supposed to, headaches and jaw problems can show up, along with issues in other parts of your body. Cranial sacral therapy is a very gentle practice of coaxing your skull bones to behave as they were meant to.
FULL BODY FASCIAL RELEASE
Full body fascial release turned out to be an entire practical course on things I already know and practice, so I mostly let the massage therapist I was paired with try the techniques on me. It was a class about fascial chains and how to address them as a whole rather than just isolated parts.
ASSESSMENT AND TREATMENT FOR HYPERMOBILITY
Probably the most fascinating and useful workshop to me personally was Terra Nicolle’s class on assessing and treating hypermobile clients. I am hypermobile, with undiagnosed hEDS, and many of my clients are also zebras, so I got a lot of fantastic new ideas from this course. It is more useful for hypermobile people to strengthen a little rather than stretch at all, which… seems obvious and logical, but has managed to escape me until now. And while peripheral joint mobilization should not be done to a hypermobile client, joint approximation is super effective! Stretchy people’s joints don’t have the proper proprioception, and bringing the articulating surfaces together helps the joints figure out where they are in space so the muscles can relax their deathgrip. I am rabid for more information on this, and not a lot of people seem to be studying hypermobility for body workers.
Registered Massage Therapists in Nova Scotia are required to do a certain number of hours worth of continuing education in order to keep up our registration. Sometimes that continuing education can be a slog, but the CMC put the spark back in my ‘student brain’. Now I just need the proper hydrogen peroxide to clean those negative ion cups…