I have been a massage therapist for over thirty years, professionally since 1971. For a few more years till 1975 I had to supplement my income by doing odd jobs. The profession has changed a lot during this time. I was fortunate to have been in the middle of the Holistic Health movement in the sixties, living in Los Angeles. The mecca of the mind/body revolution. Not only where we a generation that was going through many mind, body, spiritual, philosophical and societal changes, we were in the middle of Viet Nam, sex, drugs and rock n  roll.

These where intense times and having been born in Mexico, growing up in the states I never quite fit in. I found myself starting out in my journey to self awerness through sports. Sports were my meditation, it was what inspired me to greatter heights. Running was my way of releasing my stress, even though I didn't know I had any. When I was young, I would run in the desert of Mexico just for fun. Sometimes I would just cry like a baby when I was running, or have vivid dreams or visions. I didn t know then what it all meant and I didn t know what to do with it. I didn t even realize until later, that my ancestors where great runners, the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico. They are known for their running abilities. I also realize now what the whole running revolution is about. "The natural High"

As I got into High School in Los Angeles, sports where my passion. I found out that I was just mediocre as far as the measuring stick was concerned. Well, I did have some records and success as a runner, but I felt a little out of place anyway. Looking at the two types of cultures gave me a kind of insight to the human mind and behavior. There where things I didn t understand, cultural, economic and some social differences in people. I had never felt that in Mexico, I thought that all people where the same. Even though Mexico is a very cast, system, socioeconomic differences are a big problem. I never noticed it that much. There where things and habits from both cultures that I didn't like. So what I deiced to do was get rid of the things from both cultures that I didn t like and adopt the things that were good from both. I had the best of both worlds. Well now I really didn t fit in. I was neither a traditional typical Mexican, nor was I an American. We draw these lines in between people. I guess that is our greatest lesson to learn on this planet. My interests went into Psychology not in school, for I was studying Architecture, something I really liked too. But I started reading books and got the subscription of Physiology Today, in High School for several years.

That got me into reading about other religions, like Zen and studying Allan Watts, Carl Jung, Kahil Gabran  s work, Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, the Bahavad Gita, The Upanishads,the bible and so on. Before I knew it, I was taking Zen Meditation and doing yoga.

Soon after getting into yoga, I was looking at a hamburger and thinking how gross, this food was. That was my start into nutrition, reading Ann Wigmore, diet for a small planet the Muclessles Diet etc. During those years we started experimenting with pot and other medicines like Peyote and mushrooms, used for religious purposes by native American cultures for centuries. To me it was part of nature and needed to be used properly. I felt they were very healing remedies for many people. Part of me is an Indian medicine man, part of me was a spiritual seeker and yet another part of me was a scientist. I knew that most of my friends thought I was a bit odd anyway. I also was aware that most of my friends did drugs for totally the wrong reasons, such as escaping, dealing with stress, or their favorite reason was Let s get Fucked UP . I use to say, You re already fucked up, let s get awake, or enlightened . Weird I know, but that is how I really felt.

So then you could say my journey into healing came from; Sports, to Psychology, Meditation, Religions, Yoga, Nutrition and then I started studying different healing systems; acupressure massage, polarity, reflexology, iridology, kinesiology, exercise physiology, all the ologies. It became an obsession of study. By the time I moved to Guadalajara and transferred to the University it was 1969 and I had been studying healing for four years. I didn't know anything, I thought I knew a lot. This was all reinforced when I met my first teacher Evaristo Madero a Yaqui Indian medicine man in 1969.

Evaristo Madero was a Yaqui Curandero (Medicine man Herbalist). We started my six month apprentice program in Guadalajara. I could only watch for the first month as he worked with his patients. He would give them peyote tea to drink and then would get them into an altered state, speaking to them very soft and with a deep voice (hypnosis). He would tell them things like this tea will heal you and make you better (NLP). I will work with your spirit and mind, the tea and herbs will balance your body and nourish your weak organs . He was a holistic practitioner, the word Holistic didn't even exist then, or at least I didn t know about it. He would do some very deep massage therapy, sometimes even pop their bones (adjustments). It was sometimes quite brutal (rolfing, shiatsu). Other times he would just work with their minds (imagery). He would almost always give them some peyote tea and herbs of some sort. We spent many nights by the fire, him talking about healing and ways of the spirit-mind. How we create illness and how we die in the digestion and elimination systems. He felt if you can t digest or eliminate properly, you suffer nutritional deficiencies or get filled with toxins. He also said the mind is the part responsible for everything. He said you can think yourself sick, just as you can think yourself well. I never knew till many years latter the extent and the power of those statements. By 1971 I had been doing some massage, studying yoga and meditation for about four years. I still knew nothing, yet I thought I knew a lot about healing.

Following my return to the states, I started to study and take workshops. With all the hot new therapies and nutritional information pouring into the world, I immersed myself in the Holistic Movement. Those where great times and we where fortunate to have Easalen, Rancho la Puerta, the Golden Door, the Vitoras Institute and many health centers as well as great healers to study with.

I was fortunate to have met and studied with some of the greatest healers and teachers of our time. Such as the master Buckminister Fuller, Dr. Christopher, Bernard Jensen D.O., Evarts Loomis MD., Dr. John Thie, Dr. Lerroy Perry, Ram Dass, Irvin Oyle D.O., Swami Satchidananda, Ken Dychtwald, Elizabeth Kubler Ross, Rolling Thunder, Fritz Pearls, my good friend Emmett Miller MD., Tony Robins and Marshall Thurber, to name a few. Many of you young ones may not have heard of them, many of my contemporaries haven t either so don t worry. Workshops in Yoga, Nutrition, spiritual evolution to the Zen of Tennis where exploding on the scene. Having read hundreds of books and looking at my work over the last ten years I thought that I knew a lot. I still knew nothing.

It was in the middle seventies when I worked in a clinic and education foundation known as Touch for Health, during which I was seeing many patients and doing lots of lectures and workshops that I started to grow in my profession. Still massage was just a tool for facilitation of healing at many levels and I had still very little control of results.

Let s break it down; massage as we know it, is generally accepted fact that it increases circulation, of blood and lymph flow through the body. It has a soothing and calming affect and that it s good for stress reduction and general well being. Touch is the most human action, just the touch on someone's shoulder is reassuring, our mothers stroking our foreheads and holding us is the most human need and very healing. Touching is very natural to some, yet it could be uncomfortable to others.

Now we also can look at massage from a preventative measure, it can prevent injuries, as in sports massage. It can also accelerate healing of an injury, sports massage, physical therapy, Osteopathy, Chiropractic, acupuncture, rolfing etc. What about getting your endorphins going, massage can sure do that, assisting your brain and glans to secrete chemicals though the body, is still not fully understood. What effects does that have on healing?

Well let s take it a step further, laying on of hands, spiritual healing, how about guided imagery. We are at a cross roads in health and healing. We see that the mind can heal things we thought where out of it s control, or just physical problems (See Dr. Andrew Weil's book Spontaneous Healing ). The boundaries that we have set up are starting to break down around us.

The AMA has acknowledged and sanctioned acupuncture now because we have proved it with science. I find that funny, modern science or modern medicine as we know it is only a few hundred years old, if we start from the time doctors stopped bleeding people. Well, before that we had herbalists, midwifes and other healers burned at the stake for being witches. That wasn't too long ago. Herbs go back 10,000 years, Ayurveda medicine and acupuncture are both over 5,000 years. I just think that there is something we could learn from these traditional healing systems. We are all on the same team, I'm glad all the natural remedies, nutrition, yoga and oriental medicine are now mainstream. We all can benefit from the different therapies available to us. Every type of tool, or system has a specific healing effect on a specific problem, there is overlap of course but basically everything has a purpose and serves an important need. We need all branches of health professionals. W need to work together to increase our knowledge and ability to help our people.

We are fortunate to be living at this time and in the era of self-awareness, planetary awareness, body and mind awareness. It can only lead us to greater health, peace and happiness.

Ok, so now what do we do? Learn more right! Like Bucky Fuller said You can t learn less 

This article is to give you the background that has lead me to the culmination of my years of doing and teaching massage therapies. Working in my own practice, being a personal trainer and working in a physical therapy clinic, has given me training in the trenches. Many of my clients where athletes wanting to be better, some got hurt and later many of my clients had real problems with their bodies. Such as ruptured disks, chronic back or neck problems, torn muscles, sprains, cancer, yes and even paraplegic's, scoliosis and multiple sclerosis where problems many of my clients had.

During the late eighties when I was a therapist in Portners Physical Therapy Clinic, I was frustrated in not being able to get the results I wanted with many chronic and injured people. I said to myself, that I needed to learn more to help these people. I had been doing massage therapy for close to twenty years. I felt I knew a lot, yet it was not enough. The more I learned about the body-mind the more I felt there was to learn.

I was teaching anatomy, Massage and Kinesiology at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, for seven years. I had a massage school and trained hundreds if not a thousand or so students in those seventeen years in Honolulu. I was looking for more, I wanted more out of my therapy.

It was this drive that led me to really look at the body and what I was trying to achieve with my work. Let s face it, you cannot diagnose and prescribe with a massage license. Yet we are constantly confronted with the task of helping our patients and clients to improve and get better from pain and injury.

To really help someone with a muscle problem you need to know anatomy. We have to be able to know the mechanics of the body to determine the problem (Kinesiology). I have also heard the opposite, actual therapists that have told me they don t want to study anatomy, they want to work intuitively (Can you imagine)

Well sure I believe that we can heal with faith and prayer. There is enough scientific proof that prayer does wonders, even in hospitals we have the power of prayer being used now. As I said before there are many ways to aid in healing. Ultimately it s up to the individual receiving the healing that is responsible for his or her healing. We are only facilitators of that energy. The subconscious mind of the receiving person will determine if they get healed. In other words it s our belief structure that allows us the healing, wheather it s prayer, Indian medicine, acupuncture or just basic mind power. This is what I realized after all these years and all the techniques. Use whatever works. If you don t know how to help them, pass them on to someone else. You both may do the exact same work and still get totally different results. Diversity is the beauty of life, just don t limit yourself with any mind set. Knowledge is worthless if you don t share it, and if you can t apply it it s of no real value.

We can assist the healing by working on the body, the mind, nutrition, the structure, inside out or outside in. In fact, I do believe we can heal instantly, but until I have control of that approach or can facilitate that for my patients, I have to use the tools I am trained in that work for my patients. It seems that I have helped many people with pain and problems originating from body and structural imbalances. It's very gratifying and is the reason I got into this profession, to help people.

I have put together a system that works to balance the body, structurally. This seems to help people with the basics of dealing with gravity and the imbalances that occur in our bodies due to posture, injuries, or whatever causes our bodies to be out of alignment.

To keep it simple is the hardest way to present this work, but I will make an attempt to share my discoveries of the last thirty years. As much as I have studied the muscles and that massage is primarily concerned with the muscles and soft tissue. Muscles don t seem the avenue by which to achieve balance or correct structure in the body. At least not the only reason. We have all heard how the muscles pull the body out of balance. Yet the more I look at that, having studied kinesiology, the less I see they are the main problem. Working with the theory that the opposing muscle is the problem (George Goodheart, or Walters Kinesiology) we would go around and around the body chasing the problem. At times the more we massaged the muscles the more they just come back and got tense again. When a muscle is out of balance or stressed the brain shuts it down, so it will not injure itself further. Our brain controls all these functions, through the propreoceptive nerve reflexes, that s a whole other interesting area of study. Are the muscles the cause or the symptom?

This led me to look at the body with different eyes. If we want to change the structure to create balance, because the hips are rotated or the body has a short leg, or worse, a disk injury or neck is twisted. What can we do to change that? Massage, Chiropractic, Osteopathy, whatever works is how we have approached it so far. I m sorry I have seen and worked with some of the best Chiropractors in the country and what I saw was that it works great for some acute conditions, some locked facette conditions, but not so good to correct many chronic conditions. We would adjust many patients and before they were out the door they would be back out. If the body has been out for many years, the quick chiropractic move does not generally produce long lasting effects, nor does it keep the vertebras or bones in place.

In the work of Dr. James Cyriax, he postulates that if you have to adjust an area more than ten times that s not the problem nor the solution. I have also seen patients that where over adjusted, they would not stay in, their ligaments over stretched. Sometimes in our P.T. clinic we would say we are not going to manipulate until we strengthen the weak muscles and ligaments. These patients did start to get better, it was a slower process, however I found that they stayed in longer with the slower work.

Let s look at the most underlying structure that we deal with when we look at the body. The bones, vertebras and ligaments. These tissues are not very flexible and if you have been out of balance for five or ten years, a hard adjustment may even hurt. I have seen and felt this pain with an adjustment. Now don t get me wrong, I have also had relief from an adjustment, many times in my life. I have seen many people get better with adjustments. I have also had patients tell me that they have been getting adjusted for ten years and still have a back problem.

If you get a quick adjustment, usually the body goes right back to where it was, if you even manage to move the bone, or vertebra at all.

The ligaments are holding the body out of alignment. The body thinks it lives there. We try to force it to move, it resists, or using a gentler approach we try to persuade it to move or loosen it to try and align it. Ligaments do not respond well to quick movements, they go right back to where they were. If we are out of balance we are constantly having what I call muscle tug of war . It s a vicious cycle, tension, tight muscles, pain, tension, tug of war and so on. How do we stop this cycle. One way I know is by balancing the body. It s a start at least working with the body structurally.

If the most deep level of structure are the bones and ligaments then that s a place where we can make some long lasting change. The muscles will follow the bones, as long as you also work on the actual adhesions in the muscle tissues as well. The way to stretch or change the ligaments is through corrective stretches and exercises. We have known in physical therapy that often strengthening the muscles, doing certain postural corrective exercises, can affect change in the body, many times giving relief to the pain. We also know in sports medicine that in training, laying a base is critical. We need to strengthen the muscles, the joints, ligaments and bones before we put excessive strain on them, or we can get injured.

It takes longer to strengthen ligaments, as well as stretch them because of their structure, lack of blood flow and rigid cell makeup. So it has to be slow and easy to stretch and move ligaments. Not only that, it takes consistency and accuracy in the knowledge of the structure that you are trying to make a change in, to get results. As I have said to many students, the level of knowledge and diagnostics ability, gives you the level of duplicatable results you can get. The more years you have seeing patients in a clinic day after day you start to learn a little about the body and it s ability to change or not change. Therapy to me, no matter what type it is, is still about 60% of the equation to helping people change and heal their bodies. The other 40% is doing corrective exercises to change the body from within.

The last ten years I have accomplished results in my therapy that I just touched on in the first twenty years. Many times I heard from patients that I really helped them, even in the early days. But I didn t know what part I did that worked and for many years I could not duplicate the same results over and over. I always knew that if I worked to balance the body at whatever skill level I had, that the symptoms or problems would go away or at least improve. It s still a good approach. The key is what techniques we have, also determines the level of success.

After thirty years of being a massage therapist and having worked my way up to working in a Physical Therapy Clinic, I have come to realize that massage, physical therapy, chiropractic and osteopathy are still lacking some very important facets to helping people with changing their bodies. Most of these therapies are still very helpful to helping people get well. They are exceptionally good for acute conditions. But in general I m afraid they don t help for chronic and old injuries. Oh, I have gotten all types of work in those thirty years and I have had some relief from most body work. You may have had massage and it feels great, but next day or next week all the tense muscles and pain are back.

Belive me I m not trying to put any body work down, and I am not a pessimist. I m just looking at being better at what I do. I have never been satisfied with just doing massage, my goal has always been to be the best and to do my best.

I would rather work on prevention of problems or injuries as well as with athletes and dancers that want to perform at a higher level. But let s face it; most patients come to get a massage or therapy because they have a problem or pain of some sort.

The way I work on the body is with deep massage (for adhesions), DTF (deep transverse friction), trigger points, for increased flexibility, tone and relief. Then I use positional release techniques holding the area in a stretch, mobilization, either with a torque on the whole spine, neck or any joint that I want to work on relaxing. It s a modified version of Orthobionomy that works on the release of the propreoceptive nerve reflexes. This allows the body to release and self align. The body has a memory, sometimes using Feldenkris, Polarity or Traggering can break up some of the holding patterns in the nerology but my experience doesn t show that they are long lasting corrections of the body structure.

Lets start with the neck, most people have some type of trouble with the neck. Many have been in car accidents, many sleep with large pillows and both end up with an improper curve in the neck. Many can get this by weak neck flexors as well, regardless of how someone ends up with a poor curve or a twist in the neck the therapist can palpate this condition. Traditional massage helps, chiropractic helps in the acute state, and many times in the chronic state it gives relief. The point is even aspirin will help with neck pain that can turn into headaches. To correct the cause means we have to align the neck, as well as remove any adheasions in the muscles that have been created by the trauma.

By creating a torque in the neck or spine for instance, we are persuading the vertebrae and muscles to want to work as a team or as a unit. If we have one vertebra or muscle that is not cooperating or out of alignment, then by using a directed force put on the area of resistance we can achieve great results in mobilizing the area.

I put direct pressure towards the direction it s being pulled and then after the body relaxes, I gently move it in the direction it should be for proper alignment. Holding for a few minutes and having the patient breathing deeply allows the body to re align itself, with gentle help.

With deep breathing we use the mechanism of breath, moving the ribs, undulation of the spine, movement in the pelvis and the sacrum. These movements are microscopic, yet they do create movement in the ligaments and joints. Using all of these factors you can stretch the specific ligament tissue very slowly and gently to achieve restoration and alignment in any joint or vertebra. We are still working with soft tissue, we are not adjusting the bones. It s all very slow, precise and deliberate movement.

I have found that by using this system I am able to help people with pain in hip, low back or neck problems. This system of massage is all within our license. I am not talking about doing any type of adjustment, nor am I suggesting that we are working with the bones. We are working with soft tissue and using manipulations and stretches all at very low level force. By giving the clients stretches that help relieve tension and work towards self alignment we get the body to change.

The most important part for proper function and alignment is the pelvis. The pelvis is the foundation of the body and if not balanced, everything get s thrown out, the legs the spine and the neck. With most people working at desks or computers all day, they are prime candidates for neck, low back and shoulder tension. Let s look at what a rotation does for instance. Most people have this twist to their hips, in fact it can shorten a leg. So much so that in the old days we use to give shoe lifts to these people. Talk about not addressing the cause.

To ease the pull, I take the muscles and massage them first, (Prone) working with the leg in a rotation to find the tension in the gluteous muscles. Then I stretch the hips in the direction it wants to twist in (by lifting the hips, supine), go with it first, this turns off the receptors. Then I bring the hip back (in the direction it should be) and hold it in a stretch to get the ligaments and muscles that are tight to allow it to relax back into place. Using this positional release and deep breathing, I have helped people correct the misaligned muscles and reduce the tension considerably. Then by using my towel techniques I show them how to stretch their own back or neck with various exercises.

Since I started applying these techniques, I have been able to help people that had pain, in neck, hips or low back in three to four sessions. Some of these people had been everywhere and had tried lot s of therapies as well as chiropractic and were loosing hope.

They felt frustrated and were ready for something new. The ones getting the best results where of course doing the exercises regularly at least twice a day. I saw people change to the level that their hips where now staying in alignment after a four or five sessions, the leg length was staying even and most important a reduction in pain. Now they had something that they could do for themselves, the therapy is part of it. More important however for long lasting results are the exercises to balance and strengthen the body.

I am teaching these systems in Hawaii and welcome researchers and therapists interested in exploring my work. In fact, if you want to poke holes in my theory, I welcome it. It can only help me learn more and improve my work.

For information call:
Othon Molina, Ph.d.c, LMT
P.O. Box 1231 Kamuela, HI 96743
Cell: (808) 895-2688



www.molinamassage.com