Health and Harmony Integrative Bodywork

11/23/2025

From chronic pain to mental health issues, military veterans often face a host of health concerns upon returning from service. During , explore recent research on the many ways massage therapy supports the health and well-being of veterans: https://bit.ly/478uCWp

11/22/2025

The Fascia Speaks

As bodyworkers, we touch a system far more intelligent and responsive than most people realize. It is a living memory field, a sensory fabric that holds the echoes of every emotional contraction, every bracing pattern, and every unspoken moment the nervous system didn’t know how to resolve.

We explore these imprints every day. We feel the places where the tissue thickened in response to a moment of fear, the areas where breath stopped during heartbreak, or the subtle density of someone carrying a responsibility too heavy for their age. These are not just restrictions. They are records.

Science is beginning to describe what practitioners have long sensed with their hands. Fascia is densely woven with interoceptors, proprioceptors, mechanoreceptors, and nociceptors, creating one of the most information-rich sensory networks in the body. These receptors do not just relay physical sensations; they respond to emotional states, autonomic shifts, and subtle changes in internal chemistry. When someone is afraid, lonely, overworked, grieving, or carrying unresolved tension, fascia receives that information before the conscious mind can interpret it.

Over time, these repeated emotional signals alter the collagen matrix itself. The ground substance thickens. Elasticity decreases. Glide diminishes. The tissue becomes a physical representation of an emotional history. What began as a moment of bracing becomes a pattern. Eventually, the pattern becomes posture, and posture becomes identity. This is how fascia stores emotional imprints that influence how a person walks, rests, reacts, and protects themselves. What clients feel as stiffness is often the residue of old vigilance. What they call tightness is often the body’s attempt to hold a story that never had a chance to be expressed.

When we work with fascia, we are not simply lengthening tissue or improving mobility. We are entering the emotional architecture of a person’s life. Gentle compression rehydrates the ground substance and makes the dense places permeable again. Slow stretching reorganizes collagen fibers that have been shaped by years of guarding. Pacinian and Ruffini receptors detect the warmth of our touch and signal safety along the vagus nerve. Interoceptors begin to update the brain’s perception of the body, allowing long-muted emotional signals to come into conscious awareness. As the layers soften, the nervous system begins to trust, and trust is the first doorway to release.

This is why clients often experience tears, trembling, laughter, heat, or a sudden memory during a session. The fascia is not only releasing; it is reorganizing the information it once held tightly. Electrical coherence returns. Circulation improves. Sensory accuracy sharpens. The body stops running old protective commands and starts rewriting its operating system. What once felt like a lifelong pattern begins to dissolve in the warmth of contact and presence.

Fascia is a sensory intelligence that interprets experience. The mind does not lead this process. It follows it. The mind interprets what the fascia feels and explains it long after the body has already changed. When we help clients reconnect to their fascial landscape, we are guiding them back to the body’s original language, the language beneath thought, beneath story, beneath habit—the language of emotional truth.

We, the ones who listen in silence, can hear what the fascia has carried through lineage, memory, and time.

06/27/2025

03/25/2025

If the mountain before you feels too towering today,
If the weight of its peaks seems beyond your grasp,
Then let your heart find solace in a gentle hill instead,
A softer climb, a more tender path.
If the morning light creeps in like a shadow of sadness,
And the world seems too cold, too distant, too far—
It’s perfectly okay to stay wrapped in the warmth of your bed,
Let the quiet embrace you like a loved one,
Let the silence heal what words cannot repair.

If the day ahead feels like an unending storm,
And every step feels like walking on fragile glass,
If the weight of your plans seems like a burden too great to bear,
There is no shame in pausing—
In slowing down and rewriting the script.
It is not weakness to step back,
It is not failure to take a breath,
It is simply a kind and gentle choice to save yourself from a storm
You didn’t have to endure alone.

If the shower feels like needles against your skin,
And every drop of water stings like a thousand unspoken regrets,
And the bath, though warm, feels like sinking into a sea of doubt,
Remember, even the most radiant souls grow weary sometimes.
If you haven't touched your hair in days,
If the mirror shows a reflection you don’t recognize,
Don’t let the weight of this moment convince you to discard your crown—
Your beauty is not defined by the surface,
It lives in the depths of your heart,
Where resilience and love shine brighter than any outward adornment.

A day of rest is not defeat, my love,
It is simply a sacred pause,
A moment to listen to your soul’s whispers,
To honor the quiet that calls your name.
A day is not a lifetime,
And a breath is not a failure—
It is a soft and loving retreat
Into the arms of your own compassion.

It is okay, it is more than okay, to take a moment,
To gather the pieces of your fractured mind,
To let the world spin on without your constant toil,
While you find the courage to realign.
The earth will keep turning,
The stars will keep shining,
While you rest in the softness of your own embrace.

The mountain will still rise, grand and unyielding,
When your spirit is ready to meet it again.
You will climb it in your own time,
At your own pace,
With all the love and strength you’ve nurtured in silence.
You don’t need to rush—
Take all the time you need.

For now, just hold yourself close,
Wrap yourself in your own warmth,
And love yourself fiercely—
Until that moment when you’re ready
To climb that mountain once more.
Let your heart guide you—
And know, always, that you are enough
Exactly as you are.

12/09/2024

Start your week off with a massage, bodywork, dry needling, OR ALL OF IT!!!

Schedule online: 3113.GlossGenius.con

08/10/2024

2 opening Tuesdsy Aug 13th. 1 and 2 30 both 60 minutes.

08/08/2024

Check out Angela Qualls, LMT, CTM, CCT pricing list. Both the 90 and 60 minute sessions will be geared to what you, as the client, and Angela feel your body needs to heal from chronic pain, stress, or trauma you might be experiencing.

08/05/2024

𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 #2: we are excited to announce that Angela Qualls LMT, CTM, CCT with Health & Harmony Integrative Bodywork will now be located within 31:13 Medical Massage Therapy on Tuesdays 11:00-6:00 (appointment only) starting August 13, 2024.

To schedule with Angela please contact her at 615-943-2553 or visit her website at healthandharmonybodyworker.com.

“Healing from the inside out.”

My personal experiences have served as my greatest teacher. I lived in chronic pain for over 20 years, before I found help through integrative bodywork. I am so grateful to have my life back. My experiences have sent me on a new path of self-awareness and healing.

I am passionate about bodywork, and I am excited to offer a variety of options to individuals who suffer from chronic pain, stress and trauma related issues.

My mission is to provide a safe and healing environment from which to engage clients in the awareness of their physical body, to be present and aware of the client’s needs, and to encourage and help facilitate healing.

-Angela

07/28/2024

Two availability on Tuesday July 30th. 3 30 and 5

07/14/2024

BAYLOR UNIVERSITY PUBLISHES LARGEST STUDY EVER ON MASSAGE THERAPY USE

July 2024

"Many people receive massage therapy and for many reasons. But according to a new study – the largest and most comprehensive ever conducted on the subject – the prevalence of visits to massage therapists is higher than one might have imagined and the reasons may be surprising."

“What our study shows is that it’s probably not helpful any longer to label massage as an ‘alternative’ therapy, with all of the marginality that the term conveys.”

“Licensed massage therapists ought to be respected as mainstream practitioners, whose profession provides a therapeutic approach not just to address pain and functional challenges but to foster wellness and overall well-being, physical and emotional.

Everyone can benefit from working with a skilled massage therapist. They’re the hidden gems in the healthcare system.” - Jeff Levin, Ph.D., M.P.H., University Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health. (Robert Rogers/Baylor University)

Study Link: Journal of Science & Healing
Prevalence & Determinants of Massage Therapy Use in the US
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1550830724000958

02/19/2024

🔖
RISE AGAIN
(MY WORDS, MY HOME)

My words are the only home I know. I've told myself to be careful not to get lost inside of them forever, to keep connected to the human world. Sometimes, my words feel like the most human thing there is. They cover me, like wild sheets of oceanic dreaming. They carry me into a million sun-kissed wishes. They unlock doors and open windows. They are my lungs when I can't breathe.

Life gets in the way; I crash, I burn, I fall down. I rise up, with my words. Through them, I define who I am and where I am going. I decide if I live or I die and how I will create this mosaic. No matter what people put me through, I find comfort here. And through this comfort, anything is possible...

I've lived, I've dreamed, I’ve died, I've fallen down, I've gotten back up, and I've ridden a chariot of dreams into the cosmos. In the beginning, there were only words that spelled the world into existence.

I've been broken for a while and fighting for my life. My words are my home, my anchors and the only hope when nothing else helps.

And I will rise again.

02/19/2024

I have an availability tomorrow Feb 20th at 1 30.