Sheffield Centre for Massage Training

16/12/2025

Hamstrings. Anyone know why these 3 separate muscles are called this?

15/12/2025

My latest blog, please share…

Touch Without Crossing Boundaries From time to time I’m reminded that massage sits uncomfortably close to a world it does not belong to. Popular culture, whispered myths, and the tired trope of the …

15/12/2025

Ageeed!

14/12/2025

Love this. Send the clients to jail for any of these comments.

07/12/2025

I’m so proud of this place. Eva is a superb practitioner and manager and runs this wonderful sanctuary. If you have a tired out, aching body this is the place to go!

04/12/2025

All the therapists who have chosen Therapy Room S7 as their workplace are originally Level 4 trained from the Sheffield Centre of Massage Training. How lovely is that :-)

To receive £10 off any treatment Tuesdays to Saturdays in December text "FB10" and your name to 07749224262. You can also win a 90min massage, see below how!

14/11/2025

We’ve known this all along but it’s heartening to see the benefits of massage being featured in the guardian newspaper.

While they can be seen as a luxury, massages are often part of healthcare – here’s how they affect physical and mental health

13/11/2025

I couldn’t have put it better myself!

What's missing from "The Body Keeps the Score?" From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, Bessel Van der Kolk's book
largely overlooks the relational and systemic context in which trauma exists and persists. He touches on relationships and collective trauma, but the framework focuses on the individual body and brain.

IPNB shows that the nervous system’s regulation depends on ongoing safety in relationships, communities, and environments. Hierarchies, abusive institutions, and chronic social stress keep survival adaptations active, no matter how many therapies are applied.

Recovery isn’t just a matter of retraining the brain or soothing the body. It requires safe, attuned relationships and social environments that allow the nervous system to downshift from survival mode. Without addressing these systemic and relational factors, the body remains on alert, the nervous system remains dysregulated, and healing is partial.

Van der Kolk opens the door to relational and somatic healing, but IPNB emphasizes that trauma is as much about the social world as it is about the individual body. The full path to recovery must attend to both: the body’s physiology and the relational, institutional, and cultural contexts that sustain safety, or keep systems trapped in threat.

NOTE : this is not to dismiss or degrade Bessel Van der Kolk's work or his book. Just a note about what's missing, and filling in the gaps so people can gain that understanding.

27/10/2025

Has anyone tried this?

25/10/2025

True that!

15/09/2025

I’m always looking for novel ways to teach touch anatomy.

The Opera of Touch: Meet Ruffini, Pacini, Meissner and the Merkel Twins When we teach anatomy, receptor names like Ruffini endings, Pacinian corpuscles, Meissner’s corpuscles, and Merkel cells can …

08/09/2025

Anatomical Prayer

Skin stretches—
dermis, epidermis,
each pore a gate of light.
Fascia glides,
layers sliding,
fibres yielding to direction.

Ulna leans in,
edge of bone meeting
intercostal space.
Rib cage lifts,
sternum arcs,
diaphragm softens
into the waiting hand.

Elbow becomes eye—
scanning, sensing,
palpating the secret map
beneath the surface.
Channels open like rivers,
blood quickens,
lymph stirs in hidden tributaries.

Flesh draws away from bone,
creating breath-room.
Vertebrae unstack,
pelvis tilts,
sacrum drops into earth.

No separation—
nerve sings to nerve,
muscle to tendon,
tissue to tissue.
Boundaries blur,
yet edges remain,
holding the dance in form.

To touch is to listen:
to contraction,
to release,
to the synapse sparking,
to the heart pushing
its crimson tide.

Wise hands know
which fibres to lengthen,
which to invite,
which armour to cast down
like a sheath of rusted plates.

Beneath the surface—
hidden self,
waiting.
I enter through anatomy,
and meet you there,
in the marrow,
where we are
already one.