Immediately relevant to the extensive linked list of Healing Modalities and Resources on IntegratingPresence.com I sit down with Shelly and Shawn White who, amongst many things, is a cancer conqueror, massage therapist, entrepreneur and spa founder/owner based in the greater St Louis, Missouri area.
Audio: Shawn White’s State Of The Massage Industry
Or listen via Insight Timer (app or website)
We mostly discuss the ups and downs of the massage and spa industry and Shawn’s methodology for transforming it. Amongst other topics we also touch on entrepreneurship, elevation and service to others. Detailed show notes as follows:
- Shawn’s vivid massage school experiences including:
- initial spark of interest
- interest in body mechanics aspect of massage
- physical environment of massage school
- teachers, students, foibles and politics
- styles and methods of teaching and learning
- testing standards
- learning massage in the midst of a cancer journey
- unlearning, restoring intuition and self-training
- licensing requirements, pass rates, provisional licensing, wash out, lack of history, dropouts, burnouts, retention rates, culture
- Entrepreneurship:
- mentorship
- experience
- challenges including:
- opening to criticism
- transformation
- resilience
- serving
- switching from business mode to excelling at client experience mode with dedication and giving 100%
- Reform and solutions:
- More quality, less quantity of therapists
- Supercharged dedication to serving others
- Intending to provide best massage experience of one’s life every time
- Certainty about one’s degree of client effectiveness upon review
- Humility to prevent god complex
- Empathy as tool to attune and adjust massage and keep intuition in check
- Creativity helps customize and tailor to momentary needs while adding variety with creative passion
- Inspiration, Encouragement, Empowerment and Elevation at the brink of death
- Turning hardships, darkness and horror into gifts and opportunities to help others
- False hope vs. true hope
- Role models
- Leaving the world better than we found it
- Excitement, intensity, passion, authenticity
- Transforming industry by:
- starting own spa
- creating opportunities to pursue dreams
- professionalism
- emphasis on education
- creating own massage school founded on humility, empathy, creativity and purity
- mentorship
- sharing techniques
- preventing hardship by sharing wisdom gained from hardships
- time as most valuable asset
- proactive regret prevention
- How being a facilitator and tool overwrites identifying as a healer
Be that person who remains an ally to the innocence in every heart with the intuitive discernment to know how to hold space for the healing of others without being a place for anyone’s unprocessed pain to hide.
Matt Kahn 10/10/21 newsletter
The raw unedited YouTube transcription of this podcast:
Introduction
easiest way
[Music]
this is josh deville from integratingpresence.com and today i’m with shelley and sean
white here and shawn is going to
and i sean and i are going to talk about the state of the massage industry and
spa industry i really am vastly ignorant when it
comes to spas when i was younger i saw and heard about these things
growing up in a small rural town and i thought well that’s for women and rich people and that’s not for
me and that’s indulgent and i don’t have any relations to that but then
as time went on and let’s just say diagnosis later and i was
looking into things like this and i i visited and looked at some of these and it was obviously not what i uh
had thought and like anything else there’s pros and cons
and so i met sean in a coffee shop and we just
started chatting about this and that and it turns out he is an owner operator of
a spa and so i thought it would be very interesting with the things on my site
especially the long list of healing modalities i have to just jump right in here and see what
this is all about and what’s going well with it and what’s not um sean why don’t you introduce yourself
with a brief bio and then say um how you got into this
all right so my name is sean white is this amazing gentleman just shared with you i um so i originally i’ve always had an
Who is Shawn White
interest in massage whenever i was a young man my mother actually uh
we would trade back and forth that would massage her back or her feet and she would do the same for me
and when i was a young man she went to school to be a massage therapist and that was in the 90s so that’s
pre-regulation and but she never got to actually practice because she had some serious health
issues and inevitably she couldn’t do it but um
you know i end up losing track that i wanted to do it and you get lost whenever you’re a young man
going into your 20s what do you do with your life and i finally started settling in on that i wanted to do it again
and then my siblings were like don’t do that that’s for girls and i’m like okay
i guess i can’t do that then but some time went by and i um uh i was like i ended up getting into
like art uh realizing that i had a natural aptitude for it and so
i ended up going to the art institute and i don’t know if you’ve ever heard of
that place i mean it’s the biggest scam the universe and we’re not talking about the kansas city art institute which is a reputable organization reputable school
but this is the you know the the career mill art institute and i went there for
a quarter and i realized it was a huge scam and so i opted out of that
but i was my mind was already open i was ready i needed to learn something
and i was ready to engage the system as it were because for the entirety of my existence
i have been disappointed with the education system i had taken classes at like community college or something but
i always audited it that way i wouldn’t have to be beholden to the opinions of the professor i would learn what i
wanted to learn and i could disagree without without suffering the consequence of a bad grade
Choosing a school
so that’s what i always did in my 20s and so whenever i finally chose to be a
massage therapist i looked at the different schools and i said uh i was like all right what do i want well there
was one school that i looked at and it’s more aligned with the spiritual side and
i didn’t want that and the reason i didn’t want that was because i already had spirituality and i felt that i didn’t need to be taught it so i wanted
to go to a place that would focus more on the you know the anatomy and physiology side
and the side that focus more specifically on the mechanical benefits of massage and so i selected my school
now for just for the sake of respect and being
just a good dude i won’t say their name and uh the reason is because in totality
i would give the school that i want to a d-minus if i’m being nice so if we don’t have anything nice to say i would just
prefer not to drag their name out into the street and you know make their lot even worse
The first day
so uh i went to that school and um i was quite hopeful and i
remember even the first day that i went there i was uh you know i drove there in my uh i believe at that time i had um what
was i driving i think i was driving a lincoln town car that day but like the suspension was all messed up so whenever
i would drive down the road you could go on like going here or is there one over everything and the um the ac unit was
all messed up so it would kick out this maple syrup smelling air and it would cake the inside of the
windshield and uh and it wasn’t cold it was always warm and sometimes it wouldn’t turn off
so i would just pretty much keep it off all the time and so i pulled into the lot of this school
and i got out and i walked up and i saw the administration smoking outside of the
front door and i said hello how are you and they just like stared at me like i was not a human being at all and it was
like okay well maybe they didn’t hear me but okay so i go inside and inside of this place it um it looks
like a little you know like a bush and tree garden and so it’s really pretty on the paseo it
was probably really pretty about 20 or 30 years ago but since that time they’ve let it worn
they let it fall to its own devices you know dust is over every rock and you can see all the grime between every stone
and everything has this like boring feel to it like whoever was in charge of it was eternally bored and they didn’t want
to invest a dime of energy or money to upkeep it and as we all know when that
happens you know the world begins to fall apart when you refuse to maintain it and i was there a little bit early
Before school
before school so i wanted to check out the place and i’ve already been here before you
know you have like your orientation to be a massage therapist but i hadn’t really poked around so i
walked around the paseo and all their little trees and their stone rock gardens and i smelled like some butter
it’s a buttery popcorn smell and i heard like popping noise and i peeked my head in and there was like a popcorn maker
and it was popping popcorn in the administration’s office i didn’t paid any interest i just noted
it and then i’m like well i’ll use a restroom before i go to school so i go into the the men’s restroom and um it
smells not so great in there but that’s a bathroom it’s the expectation you know when i walk up to the urinal and
suddenly you know you hear like you know you’re stepping in mystery puddles of whatever and i’m like what is
with this and so i do my stuff i turn back around i walk try to wash my hands and it’s only cold water
no hot water in the place and i was like this doesn’t this is you know and then i try to wash my hands and there’s no soap
and i’m like this is you know again once again there’s like red flag after red flag and then there’s no
um there’s no paper towels in order to dry my hands and so you know you just kind of air dry your
hand and hope for the best and then i walk into the the classroom and um i use a leave the restroom welcome to
the classroom that’s whenever i meet uh this this other gentleman who’s starting on his first day
and we chatted up and i learned that he’s a carpenter and he’s trying to get into the massage industry because
you know his job is pretty brutal and uh he wants to be a part of something that’s more meaningful than what his job
is now and so we sit and we chat and then like another student comes and we chat a little bit more
and we keep talking and eventually uh you know it’s time for class to start but there’s no instructor
Mr Lowndes
and a little bit more time goes by and he finally he finally shows up he looks disheveled the dude looks like he just
got out of bed and ran into work and uh you know he walks up and
introduces himself now in the context of this i’ll call him mr lowndes instead of
his real name and the from the very beginning
mr lowndes set a terrible example for what massage is supposed to be
and in this example this is a man who day one eight o’clock
showed to the class that he was unwilling to answer questions or engage with the students
so he assumed that everyone knew everything that they needed to know and that they had read the chapter on
the first day and so uh in the in the very beginning of the course we were in
the nervous system and there was a student there who didn’t know what a cell was
and so when we started talking about what neurons are she didn’t know what that meant so she raises her hand and she says
What is a neuron
what’s a neuron and he’s like it’s a cell and then he continues to talk and she’s like i don’t know what that is
and she raises her hand again she’s like so what is a neuron he’s like did you read the book and he’s like she’s like
no well you were supposed to read the book she’s like what’s my first day how was i supposed to read the book he’s like
well wait until the end and i’ll explain it to you she’s like and so it goes a little further and we’re getting more complicated and she’s like raises her
hands like i’m lost can you help me understand and so i turn back around and i go well you earlier you said you were
a baker right and she’s like yeah baker well every as i as i’m talking suddenly he
goes shawn he goes he goes what’s your name and i go sean and he goes well sean i’m the teacher here i answer
the questions and and so i’m like okay and then she asks a
question again he’s like well talk to me after class and so you know
then we go into in interacting she never got her answer her question answered
he would always any time that we would ask questions he’d say are you reading your book and then we’d say yes we read the book and he’s like well if you read
your book you wouldn’t have to ask questions and then you break it down into this crazy data mining thing where he’s re-teaching us how to study
um and um now another key detail about like my first day of massage school was you
know this teacher mr lowens was like we had uh we’re getting ready to go do
hands-on for the first time and he’s like he looks over at the male student who i was talking to and he’s a pretty muscular guy he goes you you would be a
perfect candidate to be here to see how massage is done and so he’s like all right so step
around the curtain you know you know be behind the privacy curtain
and undrask it onto the table and so he gets onto the table and uh he pulls you know we once he’s on the table and
secure underneath the sheets and stuff you know mr lowndes is like oh look at how sexy these muscles are oh
Lowndes
these are so and you could he like he’s sweating on his you can see little droplets of sweat on his face and you know he’s just
breathing really low and i’m like this is creepy and like that should not be that should
not be you know i’m thinking to myself there’s something seriously wrong here this is not like i’m not a massage
therapist and i know the nuances of like how this person shouldn’t be teaching what they should be doing
and um so this guy uh it was my introduction to massage school was brutal every single
day uh the guy was creepy every single day sometimes you would have um students
like um one of the one story had like a and maybe i’m going in too much depth here do you mean well i think this
illustrates um kind of what the the cons are the the industry and you know it all
starts with education right so i think it’s foundational so yeah so
the uh like another example of how he would treat the the um treat the students there was a girl one
day she was like i feel sick i don’t want to do hands-on massage he’s like well are you pregnant and
she’s like what are you pregnant she’s like i just feel like i’m sick because if you’re pregnant
you have to tell me and she’s like uh she didn’t want to answer and he’s like now you guys know that if you get
pregnant you have to tell me right you know you have to tell me right and like i’m thinking himself what is it in your
business and then she end up crying and leaving you know leaving the room because he wouldn’t stop pressing wouldn’t stop pressing
um and so there was like he would never answer
How it began
questions um he would like tell us that our work was you know massage school was
super easy and it didn’t compare to his training because he’s going to school to be a chiropractor and that you know we
have it we have it lucky and he would argue with us about how easy we had it and never answer a question
and it’s you know that’s how it began until eventually um
uh we had this point where i said to him as i look man the way that you’re
teaching class isn’t working for me i hate coming into class i know the
other students don’t like it but i can’t speak for them this is what is hurting me
can you stop doing this this is some other things that you could do and you know i’m doing this in private
because i don’t want to i don’t want to embarrass the guy i don’t want to disrespect them because and so
he’s like he ignores me and then it just keeps going so eventually i write this email and i send it to him and i say i
break it down piece by piece of everything that he’s doing and um like the guy did all sorts i
would you know written it into in my book about like what if i put the email right in there and like you know so the
the next day coming to class and he printed off my email and he says read this out loud to the class i said are
you sure you want me to do this he’s like read it out loud to the class so i do
and you know the students are losing their mind because they’re now having to relive every single horrific thing that he’s
done to them and you know we get to this one point where i talk about how he
before class one day was talking about how um the you know the the girls don’t come
you know into uh into like one of the times he had said is that you know where sims likes sitting in class and he says
you know why the girls don’t come into class sometimes right i go i ignore him and he’s like do you know why he’s like
do you think they’re going to be here today sean and i’m like i don’t know it’s not my business and he’s like what is your business
because when they don’t come into school it hurts you i’m like i don’t see how it hurts me he’s like well you know why they don’t come into school i’m like i
don’t care and he’s like it’s because they’re on their period girls don’t like to come into class when they’re on their period
and i look up and i’m like how do you know that and who who would tell you of all people
and i’m like yeah this you know this kind of go back to my to my work another time like we had you know of
course they weren’t happy about that and then we have this other point where he’s like before class he was trying to uh
explain his definition of different racial slurs before class and um
you know the students did not like that he somehow felt that he was he’s like well it’s not like a he went into this
i’m not going to go into it but it was just insane and um you know eventually got to this point where i’m going
through these things and he’s trying to get the students to go against me trying to blame me for all the hardships in the classroom so trump’s trying to get you
to pit pay you guys against me sean’s the problem in the room sean’s one who creates all these issues if you want to
hate anyone hate sean and he reaches this point where he threatens me and he says he’s like i’m going to
make sure that you never get your massage license and uh you know in a wrap out that’s time everyone stormed
out of the room now i could have probably let it go i could have let it go
with just like it being all crazy in a heated emotional response but once he threatened me he turned on my uh
you know he flipped the switch that this is go time and so i compiled all the stuff that i had been writing because i
journaled every single day and all the crazy stuff that happened in the classroom i wrote it down and then i
went to the administration and i presented it to them and made my case and the next day we come and
come into school and this the administration interrogates us um you know individually they spent
about like 20 minutes with all the other students but i was in the room for like probably an hour and 20 minutes with me and talking to three different people
asking the same question over and over because they’re trying to get me to trip up but i don’t and at the end they say well mr white
what do you see what do you see happening with mr lounge i say what do you mean happening what
kind of disciplinary action are you looking for the disciplinary action yeah what do you want to see happen from this
i go well nothing short of his resignation or termination like okay and then three
days later he resigned so um you would expect and that was a win
The sleepy teacher
that was a big win and you would expect things to turn around that school would hire some teachers who actually cared
but they didn’t one teacher that they replaced i call him like the sleepy teacher and he would
come into class and he would sleep he would sleep during class and he wouldn’t do you wouldn’t
teach any body mechanics he wouldn’t teach any hands-on stuff it was just all academic and in that in the course of
the class um like it was um like he would ask some crazy
questions sometimes and um he was just not a good mentor he wasn’t a good teacher he was probably
one of the laziest teachers i’ve ever had there was another teacher who was an anp teacher and he was pretty good he was
just never there he was like there once a week so when you have a five day a week class and for those days is a
teacher is not invested and doesn’t care isn’t spending any quality time teaching
massage therapists how to do massage i mean that’s that’s a pretty big deal and another big problem of my school
was um you know it was clear you’re guaranteed to graduate you’re guaranteed to make it
through the program and cheating was rampant and i reached this point where you know
uh you know what do you do i mean i already went to war with this other dude and it lead to this
and during this time there’s another detail that’s going on is i don’t know it but i’m dying of cancer
and like i feel like i’m i’m having tremendous amounts of pain
and um it’s manifest as like anxiety and so i think i’m just having to prone like depressed or i have anxiety or something
during that time and i’m like you know i mean this is crazy level of pain that i’m feeling every day and i’m trying to
go to school and i’m trying to navigate like what am i supposed to do and i’m working at the same time
and i i reach um you know this point where i’m having to reflect on what do i do
well giving an idea of like what i mean by cheating is rampant is
let’s say that you take a test and you fail that test they’ll let you retake the test but the next time you
take it it will be open book and when you fail it again they’ll put the answer key at the end of
your desk so um yeah so how do you fail how do you fail
this scenario and what am i to do uh how do i fight back against that i i’m not the administration
it’s not my job to keep trying to fix things in the school that i am paying for to go to
and i end up just being like look i can’t do anything about them ultimately i don’t care about my grade i
went to school to be the best i went to school to achieve my dreams and discover my purpose and ultimately whenever i
graduate it was to help people live the highest quality life they could so i just chose to you know compete against
me because that was the only way it was going to be fair and and i know life’s not fair but in
the context of a learning environment there should be value to the course work
that you do you know when you know that someone has failed the same test three times and but their gpa is higher than
you um it you know if you get pulled into that your heart will break and you’ll just
wash out and i i didn’t want that so um yeah this this paints a very vivid
The most foundational point
picture of i guess the most foundational starting point for all this would be schooling
right to absolutely to get a license right and
so that’s where it all starts and becoming disillusioned with this and see what’s really going on and how it is and
um and it just seems like it’s almost like a mill to churn out license
mainly corporations right that would you say most of the massage therapists are going into corporate massage
i’m not really not really breaking down the numbers sure and before we go into that um just
do you guys get to know the depth of sean’s cancer journey he he goes into details on podcasts on
other podcasts that you can look up because it is a truly inspiring and stunning story um
and it’s not for the the weak of heart either or sometimes a weak stomach either some of the things that i’ve that
i’ve heard sean mentioned about that so okay then back to um yeah just the way
the industry works as far as and then once after school once once the school
uh churns out a a license right and then i guess um we’ll eventually go down the
road into you know what are some suggestions for um
improvements in the schooling system and then you know um you know and then people um i think um
yeah we’ll just we’ll just that’ll be good enough to get so i’ll i’ll do a final a bridge a
How it ends
bridge up the last part of that one so you can get the idea of how it ends instead of being this long crazy story
um you know i end up going to clinicals it doesn’t get better you know having a far worse teacher i start coughing up
blood um i uh you know and then or we can cover a little bit on another one if it
could make it that way but i end up coughing up blood the teacher won’t let me sit to do my massages i’m running out
of breath um the the the whole like clinical parts of the school thing is in all complete
disarray they’re not teaching draping they’re not teaching body mechanics there’s no you know massage therapists
or encouraged or the students are encouraged to do paper do um like book learning instead of doing hands-on in
trades in school uh so there’s you know at that very beginning the very
beginning of like my school there was i graduated with lower skills
as a massage therapist than i entered because what it did is it broke down my intuitive ability and replaced it with
nothing and so whenever i entered the workforce i had to retrain myself i taught myself
all my own body mechanics i taught myself all my own massage skills um and
most of the stuff that you that i was taught was wrong a lot of and that’s that’s a phase that you’ll enter as a
massage therapist when you leave the the industry there’s a point when you you you see the stuff that’s real and you
see the stuff that they taught you and once you reach that threshold you go through an identity crisis and it’s very
hard and a lot of people never navigate out of it because when i mean your your whole fabric of being is snapped and
you’re like whoa so all the stuff that i was taught was wrong and this is not applicable or i don’t have the skills to do this
so um now we go to the industry i don’t have all the statistics in front of me but i
do have them um there is a general okay this is one statistic i can say okay so there’s this
licensing exam that’s required in order to be a massage therapist all right um
the pass rate on that overall it’s overall of all of the um total
number of times people take it is 67 okay to me that’s terrible and you need this
Provisional License
to practice massage legally now that’s one problem but in the state of
missouri the really big problem is our provisional license a provisional
license will allow you to practice for up to one year after graduating from massage school without having to pass
that minimum state licensing exam now why is that a problem the problem is you’ve not shown that you’re actually
competent enough to perform a massage without that test that’s what the test is for
so you have these in these terrible schools not teaching their massage therapists enough to succeed and then
they fail okay because uh that means just out of like straight out of school you know this is
a would be an absolute concrete thing you have 33 percent of everyone who is in your class will not
uh become a massage therapist one year after graduating um now that number is higher it’s closer
to 50 because you have an additional percentage that’s going to hurt themselves or burn out because the
spiritual component of massage that that inner heart thing is essential and if you don’t know how to navigate it you
will be crushed now the schools i’m in the firm belief that schools want
you to fail and the reason they want you to fail or traditionally they’ve wanted you to fail is because
the companies need massage therapists and this is across the board right now everyone needs massage therapists
so um this the as the demand for massage increases
because it has continually increased over the last like 30 years as it continues to increase
the there’s not enough massage therapists who’s being produced and then there’s more people who wash out so
here’s a cool statistic for you um okay so in 2019
uh there was roughly 6500 massage therapists in the state of missouri in 2020 at the start of 2020 there was
roughly um 4 500 massage therapists and at the start of 2021 the last time that
i checked it was roughly like another drop by another 30 percent okay so
in last so in 2020 uh the number of graduates nationwide was roughly 20 000
massage therapists so if you looked at amongst 50 states if you’re if your industry is hemorrhaging over a thousand
people a year and you’re only getting 500 i mean you’re in dire straits at that point now another thing you got to
look at too is that um the massage schools are dying and they’re like i believe i can’t remember
i think in 2007 i think that it was 1600 schools i could be wrong it might have been 26 but it doesn’t matter even at
1600 now there’s roughly i think 960 schools that are in the united states
the highest point of graduate like the most number of graduates that graduated into the massage industry was in 2004
and i believe that was roughly 70 000 massage service students had entered and it’s been in a steady decline ever since
and you would say well what’s the problem okay well the problem is that the schools are terrible now there are a few schools
that are really good um there’s there’s one school i’m not going to say their name because they don’t say any school’s name but there is
one school in st louis that is really good um the rest of them are really bad
and when you only have one one you know one school that’s generating uh decent
or great massage service that’s that’s not a good scenario um
but uh so it is in the schools this the students are not prepared for how to
Schools
professionally navigate their career they’re not taught how to last more than a year
they over place over emphasis on the imblex which is that state licensing exam
which is pretty worthless um truly it does not reflect anything that you need to know and to
practice as a massage therapist i know if you’re a massage therapist or if you’re on the board or on one of the other professional associations you’ll
probably hate me for saying that but it’s true it doesn’t reflect what a massage therapist needs a hundred question exam can’t do that
especially one that doesn’t have history on it oh my god you don’t have history built into the culture like into your
profession if you don’t know what’s happened in the last like 20 years let alone this last 200 years you have no
influence in controlling what’s going to happen next and you say what’s going to happen next sean well what’s going to
happen in my opinion you can say wrong and i hope that i’m wrong i i pray that i’m wrong but like the
industry is going to die it’s going to die brutally and a lot of hearts are going to be broken in the
process and it’s all because the root of our industry is that the schools are a
cancer too many people look at the mega chains and blame them they’re just a necrotic
waste to what the cancer is they’re a byproduct of the ineffectiveness of the school system because if those students
were taught culture if they were taught how to navigate their own life how to take charge and how to be good at
employees they understood and had like at least a modicum of business
acumen they could survive but instead you have these students who graduate and instantly want to have their own
business and i tell you what as an entrepreneur that is the worst choice you can make if you want to start your
own wait get yourself some actual education find a mentor you know dab create a business
plan and really you should do it at least seven times you should spend at least 12 months brainstorming your business plan at least and you need to
Do you like yourself
put it before people who will tear you to pieces because whenever you start your own business you will face
like unlimited unknown unknowns and they will tear you to pieces and another big thing that i
say is this do you like yourself this is about the entrepreneurship do you like yourself
and you’ll probably say well you know there’s things about me i could change okay so yeah you like yourself don’t be
an entrepreneur like why okay well because the reason is when you run a business
either either you bend or your business breaks so one year in you know it might not be
unethical you might not be immoral but you won’t be the same person anymore and if you’re not okay with the the
the foundational building blocks of your soul becoming something else then you don’t need to do it and it’s massage
therapists we’re here to be servants you will be the ultimate servant whenever you’re the entrepreneur but it’s going
to steal you away from all those golden gooey beautiful parts of your soul where
you get that instant gratification of helping someone through their hard times because the more that you get sucked
into that business angle the more difficult it is to transition from the cerebral into that intuitive state that
you need in order to provide the best massage experience of your client’s life every time and if your goal is anything
less than that you need to get out of the industry because we live as a massage therapist to help
you feel at your best to serve as your guide so that you can help yourself feel amazing
and if and if i’m giving you anything less than a hundred percent every second of your session and i’m not there for
the right reason sean you couldn’t have said it better you know
wow there’s just there’s so many things um going on so many
areas for improvement with the whole industry and yeah i couldn’t agree more with the
entrepreneur advice and some of the things i’ve heard is like if a lot of people say it’s really challenging to
get into business with something you actually love doing that can be even more challenging because then they say
if you have to do it all day long well then you kind of lose interest in it but then again then there’s other
people who they’re just they know their path immediately and they’re just that’s all they live and breathe and they’re
dedicated for it um so you mentioned some of the solutions to this i mean what would be some of
your recommendations starting at the schooling i mean uh
like scrapping the whole thing should we you do more online courses um i mean should
the teachers be screened better um you know uh and then it seems like the
whole industry isn’t really i don’t really i’m not fond of this word sustainable but it just doesn’t the the
picture you painted with the statistics it doesn’t seem sustainable the way it’s going now and i would say
uh it’s like that for a reason right um i would say so so okay this is the first one i’ll say um
i don’t think there should be a hundred thousand massage therapists in the united states i don’t think there should be eighty thousand i don’t think that
there’s fifty thousand i think the number across the united states is probably around the thirty five to forty
thousand there was never meant to be three hundred 000 massage therapists i’m going to tell you what like
the skill that it requires to be a massage therapist is a diamond in the rough and there’s so much that goes into
it you just it’s more than just poking and prodding and squeezes it’s it’s um
there’s so much more that goes into every second of the service and the reality is is a massage industry has
been it’s all fattened up with people who shouldn’t have been in it in the first place if you have a dark soul if
like if um if you’re if you genuinely are not super charged
at the end of helping someone you’re in the wrong business and if and at the end if you feel un if you and if
you’ve never said like you pursue perform a massage and you’re uncertain whether or not you did
what the client needed then you probably are not in the right place because you need both of those things you need to
feel supercharged and in doubt because humility is the core truly is the core
virtue of being a massage therapist if you lack it you can’t do it you’re just you’re you’re a pretender you’re a
tourist um and you’re never going to provide this this out of this world transformative massage
experience and you it and that is the goal in my opinion it should be the goal every time
to provide someone with the best massage experience of their life every time so humility is like the
cornerstone of that and you know well how do i know if i’m being humble okay well you know you’re being uh
pridefulness is the opposite of humility now it’s okay to take pride in your work but whenever it slips into arrogance
when you’ve been to um when you start taking on this god complex which a lot of therapists do i’ve had people i have
a guy come in and interview once and he said he was the jesus of massage and i instantly disqualified him because
once you believe that you’re on the top of the mountain this is true of wisdom when you think you’re the wisest when you think you’re the best once you’re at
the best you’re sliding down the other side and wisdom knows that
with wisdom you know that everyone is probably wiser than you are you may know stuff but as soon as you start putting
elevating yourself above others you have failed um i mean that’s why uh like wearing a hat or a kippah is one
of the great ways to remind yourself that there is something greater than you and you we wear these things whenever
you’re learning because it’s easy to believe that suddenly you were the master of something or everything um and
you lose sight that there are there is someone or something or some great force above all of us always it’s a in that
that acknowledging that helps humble you know humility and have written extensively
about humility and how it exercises in order to achieve it far too much for this podcast but the second virtue that
you need is empathy humility is more important than empathy and the reason it is and i know that
it’s strange to just say in that same context is you can you can reason why humility is more important is
because um with empathy sometimes we can mistake people and
think they have empathy when they don’t because it’s not quite empathy
if you have personally just experienced a horror and you’re just identifying with it right that can be simulated and that’s why
humility is more important because you can even if you have no no empathy
whatsoever and you’re a humble dude people will love you they’ll want to be around you because you elevate others in
a fair way you’re not now humility is not down talking yourself humility is not talking about yourself in a poor way
or making fun of yourself all the time but you have a realistic understanding of your place in the world
all right so with that you don’t have to be able to empathize with anything anyone if you understand your place in
the world and people will respect you words you have to say because they know that you’ll never hurt them on purpose and the likelihood of you doing it by
accident is relatively low because you know you’re not better than they are well humility is a lot more obvious to
people anyway right it is yeah yeah well you know uh empathy is really important though
empathy is really important for massage therapists because we have to be able to imagine what this feels like as i touch
you so there’s times whenever like a client would be like i heard here it’s doing this and so i’ll be like okay so so
their leg is hurting i want to when i’m doing my massage i may turn my leg to the side explore it you know and be like
okay it’s that muscle this is probably what it feels like this is what we need to do all right how’s this feel does that feel
like it’s hitting the right spot i’m imagining what it feels like and adjusting um what i’m doing based upon what
they’re saying and empathy is kind of like the is a an is amazing tool
because uh it helps you uh helps you fight against like false intuition a lot of people
like there’s this in a massage it’s really important that you switch on and
off your your clinical reasoning and your intuition you have to do it throughout the entire massage if you
operate purely on intuition uh you will easily assume a god complex you know better than they do i’m gonna
tell you a reality here your client they’ve lived in their body their entire life they know it better than you do
um you should just be their tool to feel terrific and if you’re anything more than that then you’re not their tool to
feel terrific you’re gaining some kind of power from it and it’s an arrogant
power and then it slides you away from humility and then once you’re sliding away from humility your massage is
dropping the third virtue of massage which is absolutely essential is creativity a
massage therapist who isn’t creative cannot perform an amazing massage okay because i can teach you you know i could
teach anyone how to do my routine but if you lack the creativity
to make alterations based upon what the client’s needs are at that moment
it won’t be great and it also creates a variety so
my time at the art institute was really important because i learned some foundational stuff that built upon my my
art background and in every massage there were it has parallels to the
techniques that are employed one is that there are elements and principles of of art and those translate very well
into massage and one of the big ones is like variety if i keep rubbing your arm the same way your mind will get bored of
it and you’ll be like oh dude stop that stop doing that um and all of the elements have value
and so you want to like if you i believe that massage therapists should have a creative outlet outside of massage
something that that in that gets their imagination rolling and infuses them with this this beautiful energy so that
whenever they go into the treatment room they have a power to them this creative
passion that that flows into their massages because if it’s not there you can feel it and it becomes rote and
boring and in every massage truly uh every massage should be completely different every
massage should be custom tailored to meet the the needs of their client um and i tell you what you go to a lot
of these mega chains they will be the same massage every single time so like
you’ll say you see you know robert flamanjo it’s not a real person so just it’s a wacky name so that i
don’t accidentally call someone out you know robert flamanjo if he does six massages in a day they
are all the same the only difference is the first massage he does is the best the last the massage he does is the
worst and um because he doesn’t know he doesn’t know that
there are like that there is more to massage than poke spots and squeezes because he probably is one of those
people who shouldn’t have been in the industry in the first place that doesn’t mean that’s not necessarily always true a lot of people just don’t
know they don’t know what they don’t know they’re unknown unknowns and but i firmly believe that
The Three Virtues
when we look at rebuilding this industry when we look at transforming how the schools work the first thing that we
need to do is focus on these three virtues now i’m the only person i’ve ever heard articulated whenever you
break it down i’m not saying oh i’m the smartest dude in the world i don’t believe that i just think that i have
been given these beautiful gifts in life and with these beautiful gifts of like um
it has made me think about the future and the things that i want to do now i’m going to go into this school thing in a
little bit more detail but i want to give you a little understanding of why it is that i’m so intense with my
analysis of massage i’ve been given the opportunity to taste the barrel of death i’ve lived for years
thinking i was going to die it was only until like recently that i’ve given up like that i’ve begun to
like push it away and whenever you know when you have a little bit of a awareness of your survival prognosis
whenever you’re looking at your life and then those are in like single digit years
you begin to look at what you can accomplish and like whenever i had my lung removed
it’s a magical moment one of the most magical moments of my life um i was learning how to like walk
around and breathe again and i was with this amazing man his name is hans i was walking no more than maybe a
hundred yards from my sister’s house up to this big rock and um you know we get to the rock and i
sit down um hans is this um uh like he’s a the most masculine man i’ve ever
met and then do this guy like i wish that he was still on this earth because like such an inspiration and transformed
so many lives but he had this like beautiful dutch accent and i’m sitting next to him and i’m like
look i go i feel like i’ve wasted my life i feel like i haven’t accomplished anything i’m you know i’m like 35 years
old what have i accomplished and he’s like he said well sean white
you know i’ve been around the world i’ve met a lot of people you’re ahead of the game you’re ahead of the game and
maybe for some people that wouldn’t mean anything but that was that was a transformative moment that that took me
from that dark pit of despair and showed me that there was that i could do something and that um you know this man
who i looked up to and deified in many ways i see him as like my second father i love him intensely and dearly
and i was that that put a fire back into my furnace whenever i was looking down the
barrel of death i know i was in excruciating pain but realized that i could do something
and that those words carried with me as i continue to push forward you know even
Hope
whenever i had to go through chemotherapy and i’m like okay all this pain is happening for a reason all these horrors
are happening for a reason these are gifts and i could use them to help others and it was through that journey
that i learned that every hardship that we face is an opportunity to learn how
to help others and so even whenever i was in absolute agony beyond imagination
levels of pain i was like i had these these moments where i’m like okay we can tap into this this will show you a
pathway that will help other people see the light and otherwise completely dark seconds and they are seconds and those
seconds will pass and and you can always have hope and
hope we all are we all misunderstand what it is you know we all end up thinking that hope is like oh we’re
going to survive we’re going to make it to the end that’s all that’s all garbage hope is making the most of your moments
it’s it’s um it’s knowing that life is hard it doesn’t you could be you could be
like all of us sitting around here we can lose hope here and there but you can still have it it’s not knowing that
you’re going to survive to the end of the day even if you’re on your death bed you can still have hope and my mother
showed that to me when i was like 25. my mother she died of pancreatic cancer and i’m glad that she’s they give her
like three months to live she died in a month and a half thank god because that is so such a horrible disease
and she showed me in her last few uh weeks of her life that you can have hope and you can give love and you can share
beautiful um just the beautiful beauty of the world with others and she did it because she
loved cruises and she planned this big beautiful cruise at like three weeks before she died and took the whole
family and we had our last time together as a complete family with my mother as she was dying we came and then you know
we came back and then like after we came back she died a week later and i was able to die beside her i mean she was i
was able to be beside her as she died and hold her hand and her last breaths and
the the way she died helped me survive going through my cancer journey
she showed me the the building blocks of what hope was and then how hans lived his life this
guy out of this world amazing like this dude was a painter and he would like he would
drive around the mediterranean and he would paint people and that’s where he fed himself and like that’s how he would
buy whatever he needed and this guy lived everything to the fullest moment and so when he died
and he died in a terrible mortal cycle accident i love him dearly but his death was easy to mourn because i knew that he
made the most of every moment he lived every sensational second and i was like okay he died the way he
died doing what he wanted to do and so with those two people there’s two enormously pivotal human beings in my
life between my mother and the things that she taught me and her end of life and the way that hans lived i put those
things together and discovered what actual hope was now
My Purpose
my purpose is built into that and then my purpose is i’m you know i exist because i want to
make this world better in some meaningful way so that whenever i leave this earth
i’ve had a contribution and but i can’t affect the whole world i
have to influence some kind of microcosm and what microcosm do i love the most i love massage
i have a lot of peers who sometimes say and they listen to me talk because i sound you know i’m really intense guy and i’m
hyper critical of my own industry they’re like if you’re so burnt out why don’t you leave i go because first off
i’m not burnt out i just see things that you can’t see because i’m on a timeline
i have a time period that we’re looking at i’m not going to share it with you because it doesn’t need to be said but there’s there’s a but when you
whenever you have like the viewpoint that you have a shorter rope whether it’s real or not right but my probable
statistical survival rate is different than what everyone most other people are who’s listening to your podcast so
whenever you’re looking at those digits you’re like okay i have a limited period of time i need to accomplish make the
greatest amount of contributions in the shortest amount of time and i’m going to burn my wick at both ends until i make
it happen and that’s how i’ve graduated from five years ago you know and you know after graduating
have my long room move going through chemotherapy entering the workforce realizing that they that the industry
was just junk on every level and then you know saying i’m done with this i’m gonna transform this industry and i’m
gonna i’m gonna make it better than it ever was and you know now i own my own spa i have the best massage therapist in
the industry working for me i have a company where you know our we’re known for providing the best
service experience in the industry and it’s not going to stop because i’m here to transform that industry i
started my business to transform the massage industry so when you say what are you doing well i created my spa as
that beginning point to say it can be better creating an opportunity for massage therapists to pursue their
dreams to live in a to live a life as a professional where you’re treated like a professional and
yet and but that comes with consequences right when i treat you like a professional there comes the expectations that you
will be professional and uh putting the emphasis on education my my next step
that i’m going into is i’m working on a uh a school okay
since i said the schools are the problem well i know how to fix the problem i’ve been working on a curriculum since february after seven
iterations of a curriculum i found what i was going to do now i’m working on the lesson plans and those three virtues
permeate every facet of its existence they have to because if they don’t then
it’s not genuine from surface to center and the mind looks for incongruencies if
something is different it’s a con in our loving industry it must be pure from one
side to the other because if you’re not pure all throughout with your intent the clients feel it and the last thing we
want is for clients to feel uncomfortable for them to lose trust in it or to you know their perception to be
uh that it’s not going to provide them the benefits that they want so my quest right now moving into which
is i’m starting to do some tutorships with massage therapists not necessarily hands-on stuff but we’re
going to cover like academia if they need holes filled in terms of those gaps all they can watch me do massages if
they would like but of course it’s like a volunteer basis i’m not going to massage a client
in front of you but i might have a volunteer and i will share with any massage therapist any
massage meet that i have i don’t care if you work for me or not that’s another cultural problem that we have every
massage therapist thinks that what they have is a secret i’m going to tell you what guys if you’re a massage therapist you think your techniques are secrets
then you’ve lost sight of what the gift that you’ve been given god gave you those techniques and you’re supposed to
share them with the world because whenever you hold that stuff back all you’re doing is hurting your
industry and you’re you’re preventing other people who have the same dream as you from achieving their their dreams
we’re servants as servants shouldn’t we be sharing what we know with people who love the same
very things that we do and so you you discovered those like i’ve said earlier i had to create my own
techniques but really they were gifts i was put in a scenario where the only way that i would have learned them is if i
were facing those hardships and so and you’ve done the same thing in your life
the stuff that you’ve learned you’ve had to work your butt you took us off in order to get it don’t you want to save someone else the
hardship of going through all that horror wouldn’t you rather just give them love and be like hey look this is
what i had to do this i don’t want you to have to go through this you’ll have your own hardships but let’s build upon
the earth that we’ve had so that we can become better than we ever were before that’s that’s the only way that our
culture gets better and now we talk about what do we do with the culture i tell you what i i don’t care
about the massage industry as it stands because i think that we hear something like this and that’s going to sound real
this is going to sound like an incongruency with what i just said now massage therapy by and large
your survival rate with remaining in the industry is 50 for one year it’s going
to be about 70 washout rate at three years and 90 percent wash out rate at seven years so most of the people are in
the industry right now are going to wash out okay so i’m not a big fan of throwing money in in the waste bin i’m
not a fan of burning money i’m not a fan of wasting time as you can have talked about before i think time is of the
essence uh not just for me but for you guys like everyone seems to think that you have this infinite amount of time to
procrastinate and you don’t right because you’re whether or not it’s your beauty your intelligence your physical strength whatever time it is it
it drops and you lose it so you know find that thing that gives you purpose in life sink your teeth into it and run
because the longer that you wait it’s longer that you’re gonna that you waste and you know you don’t know when you’re
going to perish and i’m not going to try to scare you anything you’re going to die anytime soon but
you know live your life like you’re going to do something because um whenever so many years pass by and then
at the end of your life you’re like what i coulda shoulda and regret is the worst pain you will feel in your entire
existence and luckily and i say this to old people all the time i say i was luckily thank god i was
giving the guest a gift to tasting death at such a young age because it gave me the knowledge that like old people have
but they can’t do anything with it so you know i would love for other people like yourselves to think about that what
do i really want to do what i really want to accomplish because it can’t wait you know you’re going to get old your knees are going to
start hurting you’re going to end up having you know get married you know having kids suddenly have grandkids you
got bills to pay and then it’s gone now you’re like 76 years old wishing that you would have done this thing and like
i said regret is the worst pain you can ever experience so like shoot for a proactive prevention
of regret do the things that you want to do now that way you don’t regret not doing them later i’d love this question that
asks people well if you had all the money in the world you had all the resources you never had to work another
day in your life what would you do what would you be doing and then i mean some people will know
some people won’t but then then you can just say well why don’t you do that now right you know and it’s nothing like i
Death Contemplation
mean i can’t imagine this uh death how how obviously it puts things so in
perspective right i mean it’s um and this is why there’s a death contemplation because it’s not to get
bummed out it’s to realize to take every moment and take it to its fullest and
not take any moment for granted but when we don’t have that immediacy of death it
just doesn’t seem as you know like a top priority because oh we’ll just live well you know we’re not
going to die now but there really is no guarantee that i will make it through the end of this next breath i mean i
really don’t know 100 right there’s really no way to know uh and so it’s just such a inspiration and to be
able to meet those people and it doesn’t necessarily have to be something amazing um or and i mean something so over the
top to get encouragement and inspiration and empowerment i mean just the kind of
the admiration you had for this guy and just it seemed understated what he said but i know what you mean by when when
when some when you really look up to somebody and they just say something that really resonates with us i mean it’s kind of
hard to convey how much of an impact it can have when other people just don’t see it right away too um
sean i this has been such an eye-opening experience for me especially the um the
the creativity i didn’t obviously realize how important that was but once you you break it down like that it makes
so much sense um because yeah it would get boring
you know i mean it and another advice that i was given um was that for my own ego to have an outlet to have a creative
endeavor because that gives my ego something to do so then when i go into my work i won’t necessarily take that
part of my ego with me into into whatever work i do however in this
this case it seems to flow together so your creativity builds upon creativity
built upon creativity so now i guess before we we wrap up um
maybe we’ll do another one sometime um because i had questions about maybe this will be a
teaser about myofascial science and then um different
hiring criteria um about pregnancy going to a spa when
pregnant and the dangers of identifying as a healer maybe you might want to jump in on one of those um but um well i take
that back and then one more uh i guess to give people something they can use right now is um the supplements um
what kind of supplements would you recommend if you feel that’s important to to to to
to list about and then um whatever’s going on with that one just
Supplements
in general um so the uh i threw a lot of stuff out there so we can yeah we can set whatever you want
to sign for maybe a part two yeah we can do a part two do you want me to give you one of those sure whatever you’d like
and then i guess we can start uh wrapping up with with anything you’d want to uh leave people with yeah so
of all those i would pick what i think is the most important which is i don’t consider myself a healer and i don’t
consider massage therapist healers and here’s in the reason that i say that is because whenever okay
whenever we work on people we aren’t healing them they are healing themselves and it is a sign of arrogance
to assume that you have the magical ability to heal others we’re guides we’re helpers we’re servants we help
facilitate an opportunity for them to to be in the space so that their body can
repair themselves when you call yourself a healer it puts you on a slippery slide where you will
let go of your humility a lot of people who are healers begin to think that they are god’s gift to the universe that
their hands are magical that their sorceress is and that’s not a good way to go
instead you just you’re creating space you’re occupying uh the energy with them
you’re you’re encouraging them to achieve their highest level of wellness but whenever
you whenever you take the time to be like you know what i’m not creating this pleasure for them they wouldn’t be
experiencing the pleasure of all at all if they hadn’t come to see me they’re the ones who’s doing the work they’re
the ones who are investing their time in order to feel good you’re like i said you’re a tool and uh
in this instance i mean it’s a beautiful tool but uh if if they weren’t the ones doing
the work then you know that wellness would have never been achieved and so that’s like an
exercise of humility people may uh people may feel like they’ve been healed it may feel
wonderful but it’s really important that a wellness practitioner can isolate themselves out of the equation and pass
on that that that accomplishment to the person who needs it more and that’s the person coming to us to feel wonderful
well lovely sean yes i totally i couldn’t agree more because you get into these complexes
but the the healer and it really is about just creating the space for the or the body the body
knows how to heal itself when there’s when absolutely remove all the barriers for it the body can heal itself so and
that just helps facilitate it obviously so all right well i guess we can leave it there sean
i was it was an eye-opening experience learning just the ins and outs of the
massage massage industry with such first-hand experience and then
had having the added
i guess qualifications of just knowing the all the extremes uh of a
personal life um that would go into that go into helping having your unique
perspective but not only just unique perspective but one that is it’s really
kind of a um at the forefront of what i feel is the best thing i’ve heard so far about
how to view this industry and then what can actually be done to
um i guess take it to the next level right and while letting things that no longer
serve us fall away and i so appreciate the service to other mentality where um
i mean some people will kind of just use that as window dressing as another marketing message but i know people can
hear the sincerity in your voice with that so thank you i appreciate the compliments sir you’re welcome all right thanks for
joining us
Integrating Presence 