Why Teach at Massage School?
Why Teach at Massage School
There are so many reasons to teach at massage school, and we all move from our own personal propulsion. One thing ASIS Massage emphasizes is that throughout the years we’ve been involved in adult education, we have learned that not all massage students have had a positive past experience with school and education.
Massage school offers us a unique opportunity to help students re-write their personal script on how they view themselves, in their body’s and in their hearts. And this is our wish for ASIS Massage Education!
Teaching at Massage School can inspire students to learn to live an inspired life?
ASIS MASSAGE MISSION STATEMENT:
“The aspiration that guides the Arizona School of Integrative Studies is to create a safe, supportive, and evocative learning environment, while celebrating the diversity, uniqueness, and beauty of each individual being’s body, mind, and soul.”
It is the belief at ASIS Massage that we can help with fears, anxiety, and learned neurological behaviors. As Candace Perth states: “each thought has up to 2000 secretions” so how can we help with these set patterns?
REASON FOR THE COMMUNICATIONS CLASS
We have collaborated with the ASIS staff and merged the ethics of massage therapy with healthy practices for health professionals. The intent is to create ethical therapists by assisting them in not only learning concrete communication skills to deal with their clients, but to guide them in personal growth and development. It has been our experience that our interpersonal issues have a great deal of impact on our ability to confront biases, projections, transference and other blocks to becoming a skilled therapist. The exercises are designed to encourage each student to take personal responsibility by evoking self-awareness and increasing personal relationship skills. We are dedicated to the path of world peace, compassion to all living beings, and to honesty. We believe that it is essential that our work be nonviolent in nature, and that the goals of learning and therapy be those of the student rather than the teacher. In keeping with this belief, it is the school’s philosophy that there is a direct correlation between how we view ourselves and how we view others. So as we increase the awareness and kindness with which we meet ourselves, physically and psychologically, we enhance the sensitivity and kindness with which we meet our families, our communities, and our clients.
The methods we use are: guided imagery, poetry, artwork, music, journaling etc., all are designed to increase awareness, still the mind, create insight to patterns, and behavioral change. It is all educational in nature and offers choices of language, metaphor and personal guidance. We are very intentional about this being part of our strong curriculum that deepens the student’s educational experience. Teachers in the program bring decades of experience in both bodywork and facilitation to their students, and every effort is made on the part of the faculty to provide students with a rich and diverse learning environment. It is our belief that when various dimensions of personal experience are allowed expression, personal and collective development are enhanced. So, we are all each other’s teachers and students. This intentional approach to communications and ethics is one part of our multi-faceted curriculum that sets ASIS apart from other massage schools.
We also hold teacher’s to the same standard because we cannot give away something we do not have. So, teachers modeling this educational experience is another feature that contributes to a more well-rounded, empowering experience for our massage students. We are collaborating with students to create more health in health care providers. When we do this, we feel that we are accomplishing the ASIS Massage Education mission which is “to create peace one body at a time.”
Living our Teaching
When issues fester or poor feelings are aloud to continue with in a group, it usually ends up affecting the system as a whole.
Part of the ASIS philosophy includes the idea that we are all participating through our small actions in the larger world’s problems or solutions, depending on what we are doing. When we have a problem with a peer, colleague, friend, family member, etc, and we choose to talk about them in a negative way to a third party, We are triangulating. Usually, whether we like to admit it or not, we want that third party to take sides with us, thereby excluding and even condemning the person we are in conflict with. We all know what it feels like to be excluded and or condemned.
So what about diplomacy? What about the idea that if you are having a difficulty with an individual ( or with a system), you talk directly to that person. Or, if that’s too scary, ask someone in the spirit of peacefulness, to mediate, or help you find the courage and skill to communicate how you are feeling, and how this other person effects you. We at ASIS Massage call this world peace work. We need to stop making others evil and wrong, as we try to navigate our own lives. In truth, we’re all just trying to keep our heads above water, and a big dose of honesty, compassion, and tolerence is good medicine for all involved.
Like children, students learn more from what is exemplified than from what is said. So we can talk peace all we want, but if we are not actually participating in peace, what we are modeling is not then congruent with the mission of this massage school.
Peace to us all.
Massage School - A Life's Journey
