Origin Story
I went to California for a while in my early 20’s. I had terrible culture shock. I didn’t like the amount of driving. I couldn’t distinguish between California friendliness and real interest in me. In Boston, Paris and London, if people like you they are nice to you, and otherwise you get the message that they are tolerantly polite. It was confusing for me!
I had a job with some friends in a whacko venture that hoped to import llamas as pets from Chile, and I pissed off my friend’s boyfriend and he fired me, so she sent me to work as a girl-friday (that is, errand runner, assistant - not a sexual service!) for an old boyfriend of hers. He was a generation older, and made large scale steel sculptures. He had a very cool property in the Sonoma mountains, with an industrial building with living quarters above it. There were a lot of vehicles, and I was a new driver. One of my duties was running errands, so I was sent into Santa Rosa with the Chevy pickup to buy a few things, including a few bags of cement in late October, 1986, days before my 23rd birthday.
I was warned that the beautiful, ‘55 cherry red pickup, with it’s chrome grill, banquette seat and large rear view mirrors had a quirk associated with the steering, where it would turn to the right sometimes, and I was advised to compensate. However, while on the highway, the several hundred pounds of cement behind the right tire influenced that compensation rather dramatically, and because I was a new driver I didn’t automatically decelerate with the swerving truck fishtailing on the highway, until I smashed into the central barrier, turning as hard as I could.
I was stunned, devastated, afraid of the consequences of having smashed my new employer’s truck. I staggered out of the vehicle in my 80’s regalia - I was recently returned from Paris, I wore leopard skin leggings, pink pumps and my hair was bleached blonde. My necklace flew off my head and ended up around that oversized rear-view mirror, so my first action was to stagger from the truck and put it back around my neck. That memory grounds the trajectory of my whip (toward the mirror smashing my arm and sternum into the steering wheel) and the lash as my tiny body flew across the seat in the opposite direction, similar to a T-bone strike. I don’t remember wearing a seatbelt; if I had it would have been a lap belt; perhaps I was wearing it, which would have anchored my waist to lash to the right.
The fuel pump was broken, and a source of flammable material. There was a tank of acetylene for welding in the back of the truck which was thrown and cracked nearby. However, there was no spark, there was no flame, and I was not burned alive. There is a break in my lifeline on my right hand. I believe it represents this incident.
Many years later, last year in fact, 2022 almost 36 years after the incident, a colleague informed me that I had chronic scarring on my splenic artery, commonly associated with whiplash, and that I had narrowly avoided bursting my spleen. The spleen is required for fat digestion, and the poorly functioning spleen may explain the terrible digestive problems I experienced most of my adult life, belching and farting and having stomache pains and loose stools, particularly since those symptoms abated since the treatment to the artery since then. These symptoms were chronic but not severe enough to merit medical attention for all those years.
After the accident, the vehicle towed, I was returned to the mountaintop compound, and seemed well enough, rattled, no serious injury and no medical attention. It was a Friday, and everyone was planning to go to San Francisco for the weekend, and they did, leaving me behind by myself with a couple of quaaludes for comfort. It was my only experience with qualudes, and they were no fun! I could barely move. I was young and inexperienced, I tried to rest. I thought a jacuzzi would help me out, but I’d never used one before, and I put bubble bath in thinking that would be pleasant. The bubbles mounted around me in the black marble bathroom, I could barely move, it was not a soothing experience!
I seemed well enough, and other dramatic events transpired leading me to return to Boston and resume my education at Tufts University, and life went on. I didn’t graduate, but almost, and I got a job in the insurance industry leading to a 15 year career in Corporate Owned Life Insurance and Executive Benefit Plan Design. It was intellectually engaging, I built enormous spreadsheets, and prepared presentations for Board meetings. I belched and farted and ground my teeth and cracked my neck, accordion style, as often as every hour hunched over my hot spreadsheets. Everyone cringed, but I had to do it, I couldn’t tolerate not cracking my neck.
One day, a colleague of mine was showing off the bruises she got from her massage therapist, a man named Eric Beutner. I wanted to see him! I thought he might be able to help, and indeed I hired him to perform the 10 session Structural Integration series, and it was very helpful. I saw Eric every week for years, and we became friends.
During this same period, I had an abusive relationship with the emotionally unstable woman I worked for, and she made me cry every day for months. It was awful. She rewrote everything I did, and we falsified our billable hours every month. Her ethics were very porous. When she travelled, I would actually do some work providing consulting advice to our clients, and sending emails as one does. I went to HR and asked for help because I was being scape-goated in my small niche unit, and the only advice I got was to seek a lateral transfer. However, I didn’t want to stay in that corrupt industry, where we were actively engaged in promoting wealth inequality which became more and more ethically challenging to me, while I was also financially dependent on my salary.
I asked Eric about his thoughts on my pursuing massage training, and he was enthusiastic and sent me to an introductory workshop at the Muscular Therapy Institute. I remember considering going part time, and how would I do that, but as fate would have it, the following Monday my boss called me into a meeting with that same HR lady, and offered me “one last chance” to reverse my “insubordination”. I declined. I was escorted to my desk, forced to write a one-line resignation email, observed while I packed up my personal belongings, and walked out of the building never to return. That resignation email deterred me from applying for unemployment benefits, which I did eventually request, and had to defend. Happily, they found in my favor despite the resignation email I was forced to write.
I took the summer off, and studied massage full time from September 2005 until February the following year, graduating with the WFEB06 group. I opened my private practice immediately, and have been engaged in that work since. I was fortunate enough to attend the very first International Association of Structural Integrationist (IASI) meeting that took place in Boston in 2006, in association with the very first Fascial Congress, which I didn’t attend as the hard science seemed above my pay grade. I’ll never forget wandering the halls of that meeting as happy colleagues greeted one another and bantered about the excellence of one session over the other, a secret code that I didn’t grasp at the time, but looked forward to understanding.
I became a massage therapist with a clear intention of continuing my training in Structural Integration, and I expected to go to Maine to study with Tom Myers. He is a famous teacher of Structural Integration and published a book called Anatomy Trains. He has trained a lot of people, but I’m happy I’m not one of them. Because I attended the IASI meeting, I found out about the CORE training that was 3 1/2 days a month over ten months locally, so that was how I became a Structural Integrationist.
Now, I’ve been practicing with clients for 17 years, and it’s been my pleasure to do so. Many thanks to all those who have helped me learn to help them over the years. It’s a great life.