Gift of Health Massage

05/20/2025

Taking some time off with my family, new booking website in comments 👇

04/12/2025

One of the biggest things I hear from people I work with and through my colleagues at the Pain Psycology Center is the worry about something being structurally ‘wrong’, like something they saw on an MRI or X-ray. And I get it, it’s natural to want to find a physical reason for our pain. But here’s the thing, and it’s super important: sometimes those things we see on scans, like a bulging disc or arthritis, they’re actually just there and not necessarily the cause of your pain. These can be incidental findings, not the main driver.

What we’re learning is that, especially with chronic pain, a lot of it is actually coming from how the brain interprets signals and threat levels, it’s like a “false alarm” of tissue damage. So, while those findings might seem scary, they are often not the thing you should be focusing on. Most adults have normal abnormalities in their body on imaging, but these findings do not necessarily correlate with having pain.

It’s like your brain is like a sensitive smoke alarm. It might go off even if there’s no fire, just because it’s overly sensitive. That’s what can happen with chronic pain. We often get caught up in thinking it’s all about what’s going on in your body’s tissues, but it’s really about how your brain is processing things. The good news is that your brain is plastic, meaning it’s always changing. So when we help you to shift how you think about the source of your pain, we help your brain to change, we change the pathways and reduce threat, fear and anxiety and therefore the pain experience also reduces. If the structural issue was the main problem, this kind of focus wouldn’t be as effective as it is.

04/10/2025

No.

03/13/2025

Opening Saturday 3/15 90 minute massage @ 12 pm

03/02/2025

Opening Monday 3/3
1 hour @ 10:45 am

02/03/2025

Thank your body 🙏

01/16/2025

Very good reminder

Don’t get me wrong, I love the pace of the modern world, it’s given us medical breakthroughs, international travel, and seventy-two different flavours of Oreos. But it’s also given us a level of stimulation that’s unheard of in the rest of the animal kingdom. We’re constantly bombarded with emails, texts, calls, meetings, articles, adverts and videos and they are massively overstimulating to a primitive brain only interested in safety or survival.

Whether due to fear, stress or simply overstimulation, when your brain is on high alert it’s far more sensitive to symptoms. This might seem like bad news, as we live in a world determined to keep us on high alert, but that is good news. By recognizing how you unintentionally put your brain on high alert can allow you to make simple adjustments that keep your brain in a calmer state and reduce your pain.

01/16/2025

Cold weather can be a pain 😩

It is so cold here right now, and the barometric pressure has been on a rollercoaster ride. I hate winter.