Do Less. Focus More. Care Carefully.

We all know what giving a great massage feels like—those magical sessions that remind us of how much we love this work and how lucky we are to do it, where it feels like we have the greatest clients in the world and we could do this work forever.

Then there are all the other sessions—those hours that don’t feel quite so magical, when the pain creeps in, when your mind keeps wandering, when you are going through the motions; days when each client seems to be more annoying and demanding than the last and you want to be anywhere but your treatment room.

I’ve been a massage therapist for 21 years, a continuing education teacher for more than 10, and have worked with thousands of therapists. Boredom, tension, frustration, and pain—these are nearly inevitable parts of a massage therapist’s career, as best I can tell. We need to reckon with this pervasive reality.

For some of us, our difficulties are just physical—that increasing achiness in the wrist, the slowly intensifying low-back pain. For others, the burdens are more mental or emotional—passion for helping that slowly withers, a growing realization you are daydreaming your way through sessions. Some of us are burdened by just one facet; some of us drained from multiple.

There are many paths toward burnout and many ways to get stuck in our work. So, how do we get unstuck?

Going Beyond Self-Care

We all know what we’re supposed to do next. According to a growing avalanche of advice, you should take care of yourself, invest in your self-care, and maximize your wellness routine. From TikTok to Substack, self-help books to how-to blogs, self-care content is everywhere. We have more suggestions than ever for how to get ourselves out of the problems that plague our profession. We’re all a part of the self-care industrial complex. And yet, I don’t see any evidence that the amount of pain or tension or distraction among us massage therapists is diminishing. In short, I’m not convinced our version of self-care is working.

From Self-Care to Self-Aware

To be clear, I agree with everything we massage therapists say about self-care. Yes, it’s important, and yes, we should be doing more of it. I’m a big advocate for taking time off and for setting better boundaries around how we engage with clients. I love a bubble bath and candles and daily meditations as much as anyone. I’m here for all of it. But it’s not enough.

The first reason is because there is only so much external change we can make. A lot of us can’t afford to take more time off. There are only so many ways we can shift our work-life balance to take more bubble baths. And that pile of used treatment sheets doesn’t care about your new “prioritize me” mantra.

I believe that to get unstuck—to fall back in love with your work—you need to challenge the parts of you that do this work.

But the real reason self-care isn’t enough? It’s too limited. It can nourish us and soothe us, but it doesn’t challenge us. I believe that to get unstuck—to fall back in love with your work—you need to challenge the parts of you that do this work: your body, brain, and breath. By recommitting to these parts of yourself, you can rekindle your love for massage. More self-care is great, but for long and happy careers, I think we need to become more self-aware. How? You acknowledge inevitability and then cultivate awareness.

1. Acknowledge Your Inevitability

Acknowledging that difficulties are inevitable is a crucial first step. If you are lucky enough to massage long enough, you will likely experience boredom or distraction or pain. Do yourself a favor and say it out loud: My massages are not all marvelous. Sometimes, I phone one in.

My goal as a teacher is to enable ease in each therapist I work with—I want each of you to give as many massages as you want for as long as you want. I want us all to feel better in our own bodies while we help our clients feel better in theirs. But the only way that ease is possible is by acknowledging that this work doesn’t always feel good, that we don’t love every session or every stroke, and that sometimes the last thing we want to do is touch other people.

Yes, these feelings are difficult. Yes, it is easier to ignore them. But you shouldn’t. After all, what truly valuable part of life isn’t difficult? If massaging were easy, it wouldn’t be life-changing. If we want to have long and fulfilling careers, we must acknowledge that these difficulties are inevitable. Grappling with that inevitability is a challenge for many of us. Because so many of us so deeply love our work (at least at the start), it becomes incredibly hard to acknowledge how hard it is to stay in love with our work. It feels like we are betraying ourselves, our clients, or our profession.

But we are not letting our clients down if we acknowledge that massage is hard. We are not letting ourselves down if we acknowledge that some days we’d rather be doing anything but this. If we want to get unstuck, we have to acknowledge that we can—and will—get stuck.

2. Cultivate Your Awareness

If we can push past whatever guilt or shame or embarrassment we might feel, and if we can get over ourselves and those false beliefs we have about what it means to be a “good” massage therapist, then we can start to cultivate a deeper sense of who we are. We can cultivate honest self-awareness. I believe when we can acknowledge our endless imperfections without shame, we can find our love for this work again.

How do we find our way back? One stroke, one session, one breath at a time. This cultivation happens in three ways, each distinct but overlapping: Do less. Focus more. Care carefully.

Do Less

We begin with the obvious: Massage is physical work. It’s manual labor. So, let’s start with what our bodies are doing—or often overdoing.

Massage therapists work too hard. We wear our stress and strain like a badge of honor. But you don’t have to hurt to be a good massage therapist. As a profession, we need to practice what we preach. We aim to make our clients feel relaxed, but if we don’t strive for relaxation ourselves, we are hypocrites. We cannot effectively—or sustainably—create ease if we embody strain.

In order to do less, we need to acknowledge we are doing too much. We need to deepen our awareness of what is happening during our sessions. That’s harder than it seems. Our instinct is to focus thoroughly, devotedly, unendingly, on our clients. But ultimately, that single-minded focus doesn’t help our clients, and it definitely doesn’t help us.

Broaden your awareness so you can sense your body and your client’s body simultaneously. Your goal should be as simple as possible: During your next session, scan your body for excess tension. Perhaps you’ll feel your toes gripping as you do long effleurage strokes up the legs. Perhaps you’ll see how your hands clench into fists when you do work with your elbow. Perhaps you’ll sense how your anterior deltoid and your biceps strain as you try to release your client’s gluteus medius.

As you scan, you gather information, learning more about yourself and your habits. Here’s where it gets difficult: Try to notice yourself without judging yourself. Try to see each of these habits as neither good nor bad but what your body is doing.

What I propose is this: do less. My goal in every massage I give is to do the minimum effort needed to get the maximum result. I do deep work, but I do as little as possible to achieve that depth.

When you contract your muscles more than the client needs, you jeopardize the health of your body and brain. The more strain in your musculature, the more likely you are to feel tense or tired and injure yourself. Excess tension is like static on the radio. The more static there is, the less you can hear what’s playing; in a session, that means the less you can hear what the client’s body is telling you. Your tension impedes your ability to communicate with the client, which limits the benefit of your work, frustrating you and your client and often pushing you into a rut where you work harder to try and get more results, only leading to more tension and frustration.

Improving body mechanics is good, but a more systemic solution is to be aware of how your whole body moves. For me, that solution has been to use less muscle and more body weight. For the last 20 years, I have been cultivating a method, adapted from t’ai chi, that I refer to as “pour, don’t push.” The permutations are numerous, but the basics are as follows.

Every stroke you create should begin in the lower body—by shifting body weight from your feet, knees, and hips—so your point of contact is not doing anything, just delivering the power that’s generated from your lower body. Your hips are more important than your hands. Often, stepping further away from the table than you are used to can make it easier to lean forward into your client. I also find that using less lubricant can aid with the ability to pour, rather than push, into the client.

Your ongoing challenge, in every session, should be to create every stroke with less effort. In my experience, the easiest way to cultivate this ability is to use each exhalation as an opportunity. Notice the spots of holding and tightness in your body. Each time you exhale, invite those muscles to do a little less while still performing the same stroke. Allow them to settle into a more neutral position. (If you can’t feel your muscles settle down, do the opposite: inhale and tense your muscles as much as possible—shoulders and glutes are usually the easiest to tighten—then on the next exhale, allow the muscles to soften down to neutral.)

Allowing your muscles to do less is challenging. It takes practice, but it’s worth the effort. When a therapist realizes this possibility in my workshop, that they can give each client exactly what they need while simultaneously feeling good in their own body, there is a palpable sense of joy. Instead of wondering when our bodies are going to give out on us, we can be fully present in the beautiful work we are doing.

Focus More

Feeling better in our bodies is wonderful, but it’s only one step in getting unstuck. The second component that gets us stuck is our brains. One of the greatest gifts we can give to ourselves, and to the longevity of our careers, is to acknowledge how powerful our thoughts are. What the brain does—or doesn’t do—during a session is as important as what the body does, even though the impact might be less obvious.

Most massage therapists aren’t taught to focus enough. The result is that we work too much with our musculature and not enough with our attention. My hunch is that one of the primary reasons why massage therapists suffer from high rates of burnout is not just what we are doing with our bodies, but what we are doing—or not doing—with our brains. The more our attention wanders from our client during a session, the more likely we are to grow bored or to injure ourselves. But this is not inevitable: You can cultivate your ability to focus. First, acknowledge the inevitability; second, create the conditions for focus; third, strengthen your most powerful focusing muscle—the diaphragm.

When your mind wanders, forgive yourself. Feeling bad about losing focus is just another distraction. Let go of your judgment and instead create conditions that enable focus. On the days I massage, I try to do as little else as possible. From turning off my notifications to prepping food and snacks in advance, I reduce as many external distractions as possible.

But reducing internal distractions is even harder. That’s where your breath becomes essential. We can’t stop our minds from wandering, but the breath is our most potent tool for coming back to ourselves. Breath helps you focus more.

Try this breath exercise now, then see if you can replicate it during your next massage:

• Stand up. Don’t do anything—just notice. Slow and lengthen your exhale.

• Notice what happens: Chances are, your body quickly reverses direction and pulls in that next inhalation. Let the body do what it wants.

• On the next exhale, be passive. Then pause. Don’t breathe in, just wait—know that your diaphragm will contract when the body needs the next breath.

• Repeat these steps: an effortless exhalation, a moment of stillness at the bottom of the breath, an effortless inhalation.

Notice how your attention has shifted. Are you more aware of your pelvis, legs, or perhaps the feeling of your feet on the floor? Chances are, your brain is wandering less and you are more centered.

Now, try this while you work. As you massage, increase your awareness so you notice your breathing while you notice your client’s body. Repeat these steps. Feel the bottom of the exhale as an anchor you can always return to. Whenever you find yourself distracted, bored, or tired, your next exhalation is waiting just around the corner.

As Jon Kabat-Zinn, a great mindfulness researcher and teacher, explains, “Paying attention to the breath is not primarily about the breath.” Indeed, the breath is a conduit: It’s one of the few ways we can voluntarily shift our (largely involuntary) autonomic nervous system—and our client’s. Breath is also a vehicle toward more conscious connection. The breath, Kabat-Zinn says, enables us “to attend with greater stability.”¹

No matter what kind of massage you practice or what kind of clients you work with, your massage will be more effective if it feels intentional. The simplest compression can be transformative if it’s offered with your whole being. The flip side is equally true: The most cutting-edge techniques will be meaningless if you are not mindful. In my experience, the breath is our single best tool to remain centered in the work.

Care Carefully

The third component that gets us stuck is the trickiest to articulate, because it sounds unkind: I think most therapists would be happier and more effective if they cared less about their clients.

I realize this seems like a terrible thing to say. Hear me out. Our profession defines itself by how much it cares. We are helpers. We are healers. We give and give. But this supposed selflessness has a real downside. I think our caring can be detrimental both to our clients and ourselves.

Too often, we believe we can fix our clients. We try to force our clients to change. Just like we overwork our bodies and do too much, more often than not, we care too much. The easiest way to think about how we care is to consider our caring in two categories: the care we offer during our sessions, and the care we offer between our sessions.

The longer I massage, the clearer my boundaries become. After 21 years, my aim is to not think about my clients between their sessions. I never ignore my clients. I email or text with them to schedule their appointments, and if they have specific questions, I try to offer useful, generous answers. Aside from that, I purposely do not think about my clients. I don’t check in with them unless they initiate the contact. And all of that, I believe, makes me a better therapist. Spending my time worrying or wondering about a client does not benefit that client. The more attention I give to a client between sessions, the less I have to give them during sessions and the more likely I am to feel resentful or frustrated by them. That doesn’t benefit either of us.

But the reverse is also true: Because I am unapologetic about prioritizing myself between sessions, I can give myself fully to my clients during their sessions. I intentionally set aside the rest of my life when I enter my treatment room; for the next 60, 90, or 120 minutes, I am just attending to the person on my table.

During that time in the treatment room, however, I give my client a very particular kind of care—I give them attention without expectation. That means I try not to have any preconceived notions of what I want their body to do or how their musculature should change during a session. I consider each hold I deliver, each stroke I offer, to be a wordless suggestion: See how it feels if the anterior hip sinks a bit. See what happens if you extend your exhale slightly. But what happens next is up to the client—sometimes the body takes my suggestion, sometimes it doesn’t. And I need to be OK with either.

I have untethered my value as a therapist from the way each client responds. I don’t need my clients to be the determinant of my self-worth. In every session I give, my aim is to devote my body, brain, and breath to the client, from the moment I greet them to the moment I say goodbye. And that’s it. I aim to offer exquisite care, but my aim is only to enable change, not to force change.

These shifts in how we care may seem small, but I have found them to be huge. Our eagerness to help can cause us all kinds of hurt. The helping professions often define themselves by giving endlessly; we depict caring as an unalloyed good. But I believe one of the primary reasons we burn out is because too much care can be corrosive. Giving too much can erode our capacity to give at all. If we believe that we are responsible for alleviating our client’s pain, or getting rid of every knot, or just generally fixing them, we are setting ourselves up to get stuck.

But if we can cultivate a more careful kind of care—giving ourselves while detaching ourselves from the outcome—then we create a different possibility. We allow ourselves to value the work we do without having unrealistic expectations of what our work can do. And, just as important, we empower our clients to become active participants in their healing. When we realize we shouldn’t be responsible for saving our clients, we enable our clients to be more responsible for themselves.

Conclusion

Getting stuck is inevitable. There is no end to the problems in our work: the frustration of clients that ask for more, more, more, the burdens from the rest of life that follow us into our treatment rooms, the aches and pains that grow as we attend more to our clients than ourselves. But the opposite is equally true: there is no end to the possibilities in our work. The ability to get unstuck is waiting for us—every session is a new possibility, a new chance to deepen our self-awareness.

My suggestions—do less, focus more, care carefully—are not a solution. They are not a permanent fix. Instead, they are a process. You will still—inevitably—have moments when you get stuck. But those moments will be less sticky. You will become more able to get yourself unstuck.

My hope is that as we cultivate our self-awareness, we will also cultivate our self-love. One of our leading body thinkers, Tom Myers, puts it beautifully: “Treat yourself as a person worth cultivating.”² In order to have a happy and healthy career, you have to believe you are as important as your client. You have to care as much about your own health and happiness as you do about the health and happiness of others. If you are careful about how you care for your clients and adamant about caring for yourself, you have the chance to give yourself fully and keep yourself full.

Notes

1. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment—and Your Life (Sounds True Inc., 2012), 12.

2. Thomas Myers, “Burnout and the Commitment to Self-Care,” Massage & Bodywork 36, no. 4 (July/Aug 2021): 62–9, https://abmp.com/massage-and-bodywork-magazine/burnout-and-commitment-self-care.

A Deeper Dive—Before Burnout

In helping professions like ours, we talk a lot about burnout. My aim here is to focus less on burnout and more on the mundane, daily difficulties of our work. While we are good at ignoring tension, distraction, and pain, these things eventually push us toward the brink of burnout. I want massage therapists to spend less time worrying about burnout and more time addressing the little ways we get stuck.

To be clear, here’s the most recognized definition of burnout, created by the World Health Organization:

“Burnout is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions:

• Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;

• Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job;

• Reduced professional efficacy.”¹

Two points to keep in mind:

1. What can feel like burnout might be depression. According to the National Institutes of Health, the key difference is that burnout is only felt with occupational activities, while the similar symptoms of depression bleed over into other aspects of life.² If you feel symptoms of depression, seek help from a mental health professional.

2. As the concept of burnout seeps more into our everyday lives, some researchers believe that burnout might not really exist or, at least, is so ill-defined as to be unhelpful.³ I don’t have the expertise to weigh in on the efficacy of the existing research, but I point this out because I don’t think we should rely solely on the concept of burnout to shape our understanding of the difficulties of a massage career.

Notes

1. World Health Organization, “Factors Influencing Health Status or Contact with Health Services,” 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), Chapter 24, accessed October 16, 2025, https://icd.who.int/browse/2025-01/mms/en#1249056269.

2. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, “Depression: Learn More—What Is Burnout?” Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG), last modified April 15, 2024, https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279286.

3. Renzo Bianchi and Irvin S. Schonfeld, “Examining the Evidence Base for Burnout,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 101, no. 11 (October 2023): 743–5, https://doi.org/10.2471/BLT.23.289996.