Adele Lafever, LMT

10/15/2025

Pete shares more about his upcoming class in Kennewick, and how previous students have responded. Reflecting on the nuances of palpation, it's easy to see how crucial pacing is. When practitioners slow down and allow individuals the space to move and provide feedback, something transformative happens. This approach not only enhances the practitioner's ability to feel joint capsules moving but also deepens the connection and understanding between practitioner and patient. The subtle skill of palpation develops over time, underscoring the importance of patience and presence in the healing process.

10/15/2025

Gathering up with the American Massage Therapy Association fam 💛💛💛💛

SAVE the date: our next meet-up for LMTs is in Tacoma!

drop a ✨✨ if you'd like to join!

10/05/2025

Some of the best advice I received early in my massage work: create a ritual to leave each session behind.

🕯 Something simple, but sensory.

Something that helps release the connection you've built with each client in each session, and opens you to the next connection.

🌸 A sound, a sight, a scent, that helps you and the client recognize the end point.

A gentle transition.

I've done almost the same exact ritual probably.... like... 2k times....?

it just gets more effective over the years.

What rituals and rhythms do you use in your practice to organize your energy and attention? 💭✨

10/03/2025

URGENT PSA: There’s no such thing as a masseuse anymore.

You might think it sounds fancy or European, but in the U.S., “masseuse” is a red flag.

The word has been co-opted by illicit businesses and the sex industry still tries to hijacks the term "massage" to this day.

Maintaining a distinction is vital for the people who need therapeutic massage, and for the bodyworkers deliver this service.

For reals :
✅ We are Licensed Massage Therapists
✅ We are trained in anatomy, physiology, and pathology, PLUS hands-on skills
✅ Massage is a regulated, protected profession in almost every state

So unless you’re referring to a bodyworker in another country (or one of the rare states without licensing laws) we don’t use that word anymore.

It’s not just a preference.
It’s a legal boundary.

09/19/2025

Choosing a space.

📚 After a year of training and studying, few of us enter the field with a lot of business capital to throw around.

And accumulating a clientele takes time- it's a scary risk to take on a large lease when cash flow is not assured.

So, it's pretty normal to tuck in to a empty room alongside another business. 🤝

I've shared space with a handful of other businesses.... and I was so relieved when I finally got to choose a space just for my own practice (and employees!) 🙌💆‍♀️

I've been through a lot of awkward transitions along the way, and I have some wild stories....

👀 Where did you first get started? What are your craziest tenant experiences? I want the gory details....

09/16/2025

We're always balancing the risk of burning out emotionally or physically 😮‍💨

The toll of constantly giving without proper self-care can really screw us up. And when you hit the wall of self-regulation, it feels like failing your mission. 💔

🌱 This is at the core of a lot of our early work in finding our rhythm, learning to regulate, and countering imposter syndrome.

Getting beyond self-doubt is really about building yourself and your systems to a level that has worked so many times, you can trust it will keep working. ✨

09/09/2025

We dream of connecting with other healers who understand our vision and struggles, creating a space for growth and mutual support.

How are you all plugging into communities that support you as a healer?

09/05/2025

💁🏻 Not all massage therapists end up doing clinical work. Do we really have to learn so much Anatomy?

Why is it so important for massage therapists to keep up our science and medical awareness?

Well, even for providers who serve spa clients, or even do med-spa type treatments like contouring: meeting clients where they are is absolutely key. ✨

We need a framework to organize what our clients tell us, and to transmit that for our use later.

💯 This helps so much in retaining clients, and getting the impact they came to us for.

I tell my students: we're gonna have to listen to the clients describe their problems and sort what they're revealing to us. They use vocabulary that ranges so widely, so we translate it into vocabulary that is chartable.

You might choose to set up a practice for yourself that is not super science heavy, if that's what you want to do.

🕯 You might work with clients who identify their problems more in spiritual terms.

Supporting them in their process, we match their language.

But as practitioners, we also need the vocabulary and the option to also approach it from a more scientific angle.

And what I really love doing is translating between the two, helping clients realize we can bring science, magic, and beauty together.

That's one of our awesome privileges as massage therapists! 💛
...........
2nd image: loosely mind mapping the ideas the students brought in about how massage therapy fits into the medical system, before we dove into big topics like cell biology and the body compass

08/31/2025

👇🏼 Here's how I help my students master them quickly (and you can easily refresh!):

This is how I had to learn it myself. I was in the early stages of recovering from Trigeminal Neuralgia when I started massage school.

I could only read for maybe 20 minutes before the eye strain and concentration made me nauseous. I was afraid of blacking out 😵

So I had to develop a system to absorb complex concepts from a relaxed, embodied state.

🧘🏻 Each class session opens and closes with short guided meditations, to get the somatic awareness flowing and make sure that we're not Straining to focus. Instead we want to adopt a relaxed attitude and let the brain process the new info with those creative flow-state alpha waves amplified.

Here's a short example of part of the hypnotic meditation from our last class session:

"Some of these words, you've already known since you were very small. You continue to learn ways to describe your body throughout your life. There may several that you learned in the last few months.

Now, your mind is just open and exploratory, inviting in this rich wisdom and knowledge... Acquiring vocabulary, learning terms, learning how to talk about the body, more and more specifically... This connects us with all of these practitioners, doctors, writers, and researchers that came before us, and helped build up this language that we are now learning,

and it is inevitable that you will become fluent in this language, just like you became fluent in English by practicing, by hearing, listening and speaking."

My students always emerge from the meditations looking relaxed and grounded. They say it helps them connect with the concepts in a way that stays with them longer than cerebral study. ✨✨✨

08/27/2025

o hey Massage Therapists! Are we up to the challenge of creating a new paradigm? 🌍✨

Seriously, we're in this together, right?

🤲 We're holding the torch of Touch, while the rest of the world is kinda spiralling into isolation, medicalization, surgicalization, and technology exploding the old model of medicine....

Still gon anchor our communities in personal wellness and connection, right?

⏳ Time is upon us.