The Pushy Goat

Spooky season seemed like a good time to talk about the things that ACTUALLY scare your massage therapist. 👻

“I woke up with a fever/I’ve been sick all week, but I didn’t want to cancel.”
Please cancel. Truly. I would much rather rearrange my schedule than spend the next several days wondering which symptom is going to show up first.

“I know my appointment started 15 minutes ago, but I’m on my way!”
This one makes my eye twitch because there is, unfortunately, no secret stash of extra minutes hiding somewhere between appointments.

“You can go as deep as you can. I can take A LOT of pressure.”
Massage is not an endurance event. You do not get a medal for surviving me. More pressure also isn’t automatically better work.

Requesting a full-body therapeutic massage in 60 minutes.
I love ambition. I really do. But sometimes there simply is not enough TIME. 👻

“My last massage therapist did my massage like this…”
Totally fine to tell me what you liked! But every therapist works differently, and I’m probably going to approach your body like… me.

“Do you do couples massages?”
Nope. Still nope. 😂 We also still don’t sell gift certificates 😉

Asking what “types of bodies” we work on.
Bodies. We work on bodies. I’m not worried about your size, shape, hair, cellulite, scars, stretch marks or whatever else you’ve decided needs apologizing for.

“Has anybody ever asked you for…?”
If you know, you know. Enough said. DO NOT EVEN ASK. 😬

And finally…

A no-call/no-show followed by a card that declines or can’t be processed.
This one isn’t really funny. Service providers set aside that time specifically for you. Leaving someone without the appointment and without payment is just deeply uncool.

So yes — there are things that scare your massage therapist.

But your hairy legs still aren’t one of them. 🎃

Happy from The Pushy Goat.

Just in case you’ve ever wondered what I’m thinking while you’re on my table…

I promise I’m not keeping tabs on whether you shaved, what your feet look like, whether your stomach growled, or what your body looks like.

My brain is usually somewhere around: Did her breathing just change? Why is this moving
differently on this side? Is she cold? What happens if I change this position? And don’t forget to come back to that spot.

You’re allowed to just have a body here.

I’ll be over here being curious about what it’s telling me.

I’ve been trying to build a small ritual into my workdays lately.

I get to the office, set up my room, make sure everything is ready for my first client—and then, before anyone walks through the door, I meditate.

I use the Calm app, and I swear there are mornings when I open the Daily Calm and wonder how it knew what I needed to hear that day.

Today was about worry.

About noticing when it shows up, grounding yourself, and actually checking in with what’s happening in your body.

What does this feel like?

Is this anxiety? Fear? Uncertainty?

And one thing that really stuck with me: worry can become a habit.

Our brains can get so practiced at anticipating what might go wrong that negative thinking starts to feel like the natural place to go.

Which got me thinking about something I talk about all the time in a completely different context:

The mind and body are not separate systems.

Thoughts have physical experiences attached to them.

Worry can change your breathing. Fear can change how you hold yourself. Stress can show up in your jaw, your shoulders, your stomach, your sleep.

And sometimes simply noticing what’s happening—without immediately trying to fix it—is a way of interrupting the pattern.

The timing felt especially impeccable today.

I’ve had plenty on my mind lately, and apparently I needed the reminder that worrying about what might happen isn’t the same thing as preparing for what does.

It also made me think of my friend Lauren mindofherowntherapy , who is a hypnotherapist and does a lot of work around these patterns—how our brains learn them, how our bodies participate in them, and how we can begin creating different ones.

I spend so much of my work paying attention to bodies.

I’m trying to get better at paying attention to my own mind, too.

Turns out they’ve been talking to each other the whole time.

BODIES IN CONTEXT: THE MASSAGE THERAPIST
You might think you know something about her body from her job.

She’s been a massage therapist for more than twenty years. She works with her hands. Stands for hours. Bends, reaches, lifts. Some days she climbs onto the table and uses her feet. And then she does it again. And again. So yes, the work is physical.

But ask what has been hardest over the years and she won’t tell you about her shoulders. She’ll tell you about learning boundaries. About wanting people to feel heard and cared for without becoming responsible for everything they carry into the room.

About listening to stories of marriages, grief, work, families and fear. Working with people in pain and caring whether they get better. Learning to be present with another person without giving all of herself away.

Because a career doesn’t only ask something of a body. Sometimes it asks something of a person.

And “massage therapist” still doesn’t tell you very much about this one.

Her hobby, she says, is having hobbies.

Pottery. Language courses. Books. Travel. Working on a vintage motorcycle. Ballroom dancing—and even competing. Now she lifts weights.

Her body has also stood behind a bar. Worked on cruise ships. Walked for miles with a dog. Lived in a car.

It has carried her through more than one chapter she wasn’t entirely sure how she’d get through.

Her body would probably tell you it has rarely been still.

Some of its strength was built intentionally. Some of the ways it learned to support her probably weren’t.

There would be evidence of repetition. Strength. Wear. Adaptation.

Probably some stubbornness.

But mostly, it would tell the story of someone who has spent a lot of her life doing.

Working. Learning. Touching. Making. Moving. Trying.

Someone with more fear and anxiety than people tend to assume—and who keeps reminding herself that bravery isn’t the absence of fear.

Sometimes it’s looking fear in the face and doing the thing anyway.

Maybe living isn’t about getting past fear. Maybe it’s learning how to move through it.

Her body hasn’t just carried her through her life. It’s been how she’s experienced it.

If I’d only told you she was a massage therapist, how much of her would you have missed?

Bodies have biographies.

My regular schedule is booked well in advance — and I’m incredibly grateful for that. But being booked months ahead has created a little bit of a problem: there hasn’t been much room for someone new to find their way onto my table.

So I’m trying something new.

At the beginning of each month, I’ll be opening a small number of additional appointments outside of my regular schedule.

These spaces are for new clients, referrals from the people I already work with, and occasionally a current client who needs a little extra care between their regularly scheduled appointments.

If you’re already a client, you may also start seeing little referral cards around the office. If there’s someone in your life you think would be a good fit for my work, take one. Put your name on it. Send them my way. 🤎

And if you’ve been following along for a while thinking, “I’d love to book with her, but she’s always full…” — this is your way in, too.

I’ll announce the number of openings at the beginning of each month and keep availability updated in my Stories.

September is the first round. 🐐

Check my Stories to see what I’ve made room for.

Schedule online via our new booking software here: www.thepushygoat.GlossGenius.com

Bodies have biographies.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since writing last week about the intersection between my anthropology background and my work as a massage therapist.

After more than 20 years of working with bodies, I’ve learned that the body on my table is never just a body.

It’s the music teacher who has spent decades demonstrating the same movements.

The gardener whose hands have worked in soil for years.

The hairstylist whose arms spend more time above shoulder height than most people’s ever will.

The parent who carries a toddler almost exclusively on one hip.

The person who spends eight hours analyzing data while barely moving at all.

The body that once played a sport.

The body that survived an injury.

The body that changed careers.

The body that has spent decades adapting to whatever life asked of it.

Because that’s what bodies do.

They adapt.

They find another way to move. They compensate. They get stronger where strength is needed. They protect. They accommodate. Sometimes those adaptations serve us beautifully for years — until something changes and they don’t anymore.

That’s what bodies are incredibly good at doing.

And when someone comes to see me because their shoulder hurts, their jaw won’t relax or their low back has been complaining for six months, I’m interested in what hurts — but I’m also interested in the life surrounding it.

What does your day look like?

What do you do over and over again?

What has changed?

What does your body have to be good at?

That’s context.

And increasingly, I think it’s one of the most interesting parts of the work I do.

Bodies have biographies. And I want to get better at listening to them.

I was already a massage therapist when I went back to college.

By then, I’d spent years working on cruise ships and in spas, working with bodies every day. Then I went back to school and earned a degree in biocultural anthropology — studying bodies from an entirely different perspective: evolution, adaptation, people, culture, history, environment, and the ways humans make sense of the world.

Somehow, I still put those things into separate boxes.

Massage was what I did.
Anthropology and biology were what I studied.

But walking through these landscapes and seeing the petroglyphs on this trip made me start questioning that separation.

I found myself looking at those ancient carvings and wondering about the people who made them. How they moved through their world. What their daily lives demanded of their bodies. What they experienced. What they carried.

And then, inevitably, I started thinking about the people who climb onto my table.

We don’t arrive as collections of muscles and joints.

We arrive as people who have spent years moving through a particular world.

Our work, our hobbies, our injuries, our stress, our habits, our histories — all of it leaves a little bit of a map on the body.

Maybe that’s where these seemingly separate pieces of my life meet.

Biology helps me understand the body.
Anthropology helps me stay curious about the person inside it.
Massage gives me a way to work with both.

And maybe those things were never sitting in separate boxes after all.

I’m starting to wonder how much going back to school changed the way I see the work I was already doing — without me fully realizing it at the time.

I think there’s something there worth exploring.

One of the unexpected things this trip gave me wasn’t rest.

It was perspective.

Standing beneath landscapes shaped over millions of years—and beside stories carved into stone a thousand years ago—made me think differently about the human body.

Every body that ends up on my table carries a story. Some are recent. Some have been carried for years.

Massage can’t erase a story.

But it can create space for the next chapter.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot this week.