A step towards the dream
Last night I achieved a step closer to my end goal of being a holistic wellness coach of a professional sports team when I went with my bf (thank you to my wonderful bf) to massage a professional rugby league team.
The opportunity came up pretty randomly. My bf currently massages for this team casually as part of one his many jobs and the team is my bf's favorite team. His boss is actually my friend - a woman that I met last year when I was doing my first craniosacral therapy course. She's got a brilliant and kind soul - a real affable person who is business oriented but you can see she also cares a lot - not only about her staff members but also about the players and actually, just everyone in general. She does A LOT and she's 8 months pregnant! Last night she was still massaging players and standing on the massage table and stuff like that! She's definitely an inspiration for me!
But sorry I digress - so my bf asked me if I was interested to come and massage as the team were out closer to my area (he lives a bit over an hours drive away from me) and they were desperate for massage therapists. Rugby league isn't a sport that I usually follow (and I like a LOT of sports), but I thought hey why not, I'm sure the experience would be great and at least it'll let me know what happens in the sports world.
Leading up to it my bf and I were discussing techniques on how we were going to massage the players. I had never done something like this before, so I was researching and thought "Well their game is tomorrow so surely they wouldn't want a deep massage the day before", etc. I wasn't feeling that apprehensive or nervous in the days leading up to the massage - I actually thought I was quite calm, but as my bf pulled up into the carpark of the hotel we would be working at, all of a sudden I was struck with a claustrophobic feeling... a feeling that I couldn't breathe, and then dizziness/light headedness and feeling sick and I was confused. Why was I feeling like that? My brain was telling me I wasn't nervous so I didn't know why all of a sudden I was feeling like that. In addition, usually when I get nervous (like I do when I'm about to lecture in front of 30 people or so), I get the butterflies in the stomach and slightly feel a bit sick but never a feeling of being out of breath or dizziness. In that carpark I got out of the car and basically keeled over trying to figure out what the issue was.
Whilst I was keeling over, I was asking my body why I was feeling like that. I only got one word back - apprehension. It still wasn't computing to me that this was my "nervous" feeling before doing something completely new, but my bf started laughing (not a laugh at me but it was more of a compassionate laugh) because he knew exactly what I was going through. So it was good that he was just calming me down over dinner beforehand and giving me encouragement.
The rest of the night seemed to go well - I think? I massaged 3 of the players and they all seemed to be really nice and said I gave a good massage and stuff but there were a number of learnings from that night for me:
The opportunity came up pretty randomly. My bf currently massages for this team casually as part of one his many jobs and the team is my bf's favorite team. His boss is actually my friend - a woman that I met last year when I was doing my first craniosacral therapy course. She's got a brilliant and kind soul - a real affable person who is business oriented but you can see she also cares a lot - not only about her staff members but also about the players and actually, just everyone in general. She does A LOT and she's 8 months pregnant! Last night she was still massaging players and standing on the massage table and stuff like that! She's definitely an inspiration for me!
But sorry I digress - so my bf asked me if I was interested to come and massage as the team were out closer to my area (he lives a bit over an hours drive away from me) and they were desperate for massage therapists. Rugby league isn't a sport that I usually follow (and I like a LOT of sports), but I thought hey why not, I'm sure the experience would be great and at least it'll let me know what happens in the sports world.
Leading up to it my bf and I were discussing techniques on how we were going to massage the players. I had never done something like this before, so I was researching and thought "Well their game is tomorrow so surely they wouldn't want a deep massage the day before", etc. I wasn't feeling that apprehensive or nervous in the days leading up to the massage - I actually thought I was quite calm, but as my bf pulled up into the carpark of the hotel we would be working at, all of a sudden I was struck with a claustrophobic feeling... a feeling that I couldn't breathe, and then dizziness/light headedness and feeling sick and I was confused. Why was I feeling like that? My brain was telling me I wasn't nervous so I didn't know why all of a sudden I was feeling like that. In addition, usually when I get nervous (like I do when I'm about to lecture in front of 30 people or so), I get the butterflies in the stomach and slightly feel a bit sick but never a feeling of being out of breath or dizziness. In that carpark I got out of the car and basically keeled over trying to figure out what the issue was.
Whilst I was keeling over, I was asking my body why I was feeling like that. I only got one word back - apprehension. It still wasn't computing to me that this was my "nervous" feeling before doing something completely new, but my bf started laughing (not a laugh at me but it was more of a compassionate laugh) because he knew exactly what I was going through. So it was good that he was just calming me down over dinner beforehand and giving me encouragement.
The rest of the night seemed to go well - I think? I massaged 3 of the players and they all seemed to be really nice and said I gave a good massage and stuff but there were a number of learnings from that night for me:
- I still need to learn - the more massage techniques the better. These boys are BIG and I need to learn a lot of techniques to make it easy for me to "get into them" so to speak. For me I want to know more techniques to release the psoas, TFL and the adductors.
- I have changed. The usual feeling of "nerves" that I would get before embarking on something knew has completely changed. Now I have a better sense of what I am feeling and instead of bottling it up or pushing it away, I make the conscious choice to ride through the feelings and try to figure out the underlying cause of it by asking myself "why do I feel like this"?
- My biased judgement and stereotype of rugby league players has changed. I was surprised at how genuine and nice they were and reminded that they're just like us. As we walked into the room, the thing that struck me as a surprise were the guys huddled around a TV playing a basketball game on the playstation (and having a lot of fun) and also playing table tennis and laughing a lot. They also greeted us and at the end one of them was offering us bottles of water and stuff. So the lesson is to throw away my judgments and just let things happen naturally.
I'm really grateful for having had the opportunity to do this. Whether I will have another opportunity to massage this team again in the future who knows. It would be nice but again I believe that this was given to me as an experience and as a way to start to learn how things work within the industry that ultimately I would like to work in (professional sports - not necessarily rugby league).
It seems that the Universe is ramping up things for me in terms of my healing transition. Next week I have 4 clients which is a record for me (hooray)!! I'm intrigued to see how my path is laid out to achieve the big dream. Go Universe!