pain relief · posture work · ease of movement
I don't offer any magic and can't guarantee results. If you're in chronic pain you've probably been through more than enough disappointments in seeking effective healthcare; you wait to hear a realistic yet hopeful attitude. So, you're welcome. Here's the frontside: I rarely see a case in which we can't make a meaningful and lasting improvement in chronic pain through bodywork and/or through learning about the body through the special lens that trained hands plus extra eyes and ears provide.
I'm here for the project of discovering what works for you--through bodywork, individual coaching & advocacy, or group classes on self-care strategy and techniques. A main agenda if it's right for you is to help you get to the best local healthcare providers I know with specialized understanding of how to work with often marginalized, invisible, and poorly understood conditions. I also collect the best and most pertinent information I come across on areas of special interest, which you can access here, in hopes of shortcutting anyone else to solutions that took me years to find. I specialize in helping clients relieve chronic pain and functional challenges due to:
headaches or migraines
immune hypersensitivity or autoimmunity
hypermobility disorders and related conditions
postural factors, injuries, overuse, and imbalances in strength and muscle tone
unknown causes
I love working with people whose health has been a medical mystery or who want to better understand and take care of their bodies using the simple tools that I can offer. The goal is to live with more of the best we have.
Our work together will focus on these principles and strategies--whatever works best given your location, preferences, and needs:
My work is highly individualized, solution-oriented, and assistive.
Given the context of my work in a number of areas where not even the forefront of medicine has a lot to offer yet, it's sensible to be cautious, curious, developmental, and measured in our work together, whether through bodywork or in advocacy and learning aout your body. While as a massage therapist with only a year of initial training I can't diagnose or treat any illness nor prescribe any solution, I offer close observation, a decade's experience working hands-on, and a great deal of personal experience and research to help you identify what may be worth further investigation with your healthcare team. We discover tools for your particular case as we go as well as applying everything I've learned so far.
We will work to reduce your chronic pain as efficiently and as far as possible with hands-on techniques if you're near, self-care if you're at a distance, while letting observation inform our overall plan.
I like to work in a highly individualized way, acknowledging the basic biomechanical and physiological principles as they specifically play out in your case. Observing your own body and how it responds to movement, balance, pressure, stretch, and strain, we'll identify a targeted collection of techniques to use in bodywork or coaching sessions together to efficiently reduce mechanical factors in your pain. We'll work to free your body to develop a healthier posture and ease of movement. Although my main bodywork tools include trigger point therapy, a whole-structural focus, and tailored deep tissue massage that safely meets the body on the table, sessions can be wholly different from person to person. To the degree that it is useful and desired I like to explain what I'm feeling and seeing in the body as we work and how that information adapts our work; understanding and coming to know their own bodies better often helps my clients to better work with their pain as well as seek additional care more effectively.
As we study your body's unique characteristics and needs we will rebuild your habits and self-care strategies to help you maintain better health, greater ease, and more energy for what you love. Deciding what works best for you and dropping what doesn't makes room for our best results--we'll focus on the areas where we can find success by adapting our approach to you as you are, as your life is right now.
People in chronic pain are often moving mountains every single day just to show up, and prioritization is inevitable for everybody. Taking the opportunity to adjust habits and your day-to-day is key to making lasting physical change--but I'm not here to help you overwhelm yourself. Whatever energy and intention you've got in this moment, let's put it to work in small or large ways that fit well with your needs and lifestyle. Our goal is ultimately to help you keep experimenting and finding tools that fit so smoothly into your life that it's all easier and better when they're in use. When we find those right changes, they last.
As we come to understand the signs that bodywork provides about your health, I will connect you with any other practitioners I believe may be helpful in making further progress.
Through bodywork we can observe signs like adhesion, inflammation, constitutional traits, muscle imbalance, and many more. Your health story gives us far more still to work with in understanding how to get to the right people to help solve further elements of your mystery and how to communicate what is going on for you. I keep a list of quality local practitioners whom I know can work well to investigate as needed and treat at levels that work, focusing on resolving root causes as much as possible. When needed, we can also search together for appropriate healthcare practitioners outside of my current network, information, and other resources.
Let's try working together if you've been looking for this approach. Be in touch to schedule a free fifteen-minute interview, bodywork sessions (rates and insurance billing info are here), or to request any of the classes that I list.
I managed my migraines off and on for two decades before receiving the diagnosis that helped end them. I learned a lot both as a bodyworker and by all of my efforts to keep the pain and disability at bay. While I am still susceptible without adequate cautions, I rarely now deal with the formerly constant threats and regular migraines. Mast cell activation syndrome, microbiome balance, gut healing, mechanical strain, and other topics are key in managing my migraines. I skipped them entirely for two years, though with some major threats. At one time I was fighting them 3-4 days a week with pre- and post-migraine pain patterns alive typically every day--I was practically never without the anxiety of trying to manage them.
My goal is to help shorten your path to relief through learning more about the specific triggers that may be most relevant for you and may currently be missed in your care plan, then getting you back to your doctors or specialists to further investigate those factors. We can do this through bodywork and/or coaching and group classes.
Much of my present training in this area comes through a group in Los Alamos, NM that is developing unique work to unlock neurovascular and organ guarding patterns. This gentle approach is highly effective generally, but especially appropriate with those who are hypermobile, chronically ill, or sensitive to deep work. I use myofascial release work where fascial adhesion is restricting movement or referring pain. Golgi tendon organ work tends to be highly effective when high muscle tone is a factor--it usually is in those who are hypermobile as the soft tissues are fighting for stability. Better stability and reduced pain are achieved by better balancing the structure mechanically through a combination of habit retraining and reducing any limiting factors that negatively impact postural habits.
I am working on a book summarizing what I've learned about navigating chronic migraines. It will probably be downloadable here by late 2025. It focuses on self-care, prevention, and navigating medical care effectively to find any missing keys to your condition. I'll cover rescue techniques and strategies to the best of my ability in a second book somewhere down the road.
This group is part of The Ehlers-Danlos Society's Global Affiliates Program--you can see our listing here and my personal listing as a bodyworker here. Our group is new and small but has ambitions to aid in making diagnosis and treatment better available locall.
Mild hypermobility is extremely common--at least one in ten are "double-jointed" or a little loose. It's a benefit and a point of pride for athletes such as dancers, gymnasts, and yogis to move easily and deeply. Some people are so hypermobile that it's a serious problem, however. It can cause chronic dislocations of the neck, shoulder, hips... any joint in the body. Usually many joints are problematic in the same person at least from time to time--sometimes cyclically, sometimes chronically.
The name hypermobility is a poor fit for the breadth of its import, as joint hypermobility itself is often the least problematic concern--and sometimes not really an issue at all, while other tissues than joints are still affected. Collagen deficiency syndromes occur as a result of a vast variety of gene mutations, which singly or in combination can affect one or more different types of body tissue--not just joints. Issues that regularly co-occur include:
a sensitive gut
chronic muscle tension and/or pain
chronic fatigue
chronic headaches or migraines
endometriosis
autoimmune conditions
immune challenges such as mast cell activation syndrome, histamine intolerance, food and drug reactions, allergies, or environmental sensitivity
neurovascular compression syndromes such as median arcuate ligament syndrome (MALS), nutcracker syndrome, gastroparesis or other gut motility issues (frequently causing chronic constipation), etc.
dysautonomia, POTS, dizziness, or undiagnosed fainting spells
anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges
unusual response to anesthetics, antibiotics, and other medications
uncommon challenges in healing from wounds or after surgeries
mast cell disorders
lipidema
... the list goes on.
This is not your average person's list of symptoms. Many are not well known. For those who are affected with only one let alone a collection of the above it can be very hard to find effective treatment. Few have had the package neatly tied up with a diagnosis such as Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome that helps to explain why any number of uncommon complaints chase them through life while others seem to live so much more comfortably.
Although estimates posted by the NHS on prevalence of problematic levels of hypermobility remain as low as one in five thousand people, in research circles estimates continue to grow. The numbers vary so widely I'll have to leave you to do your own research if you're curious. What I believe strongly by now is that the full spectrum is so wide, prevalence so high, and physiomechanical impacts so significant that we will only be able to optimize health for the individual when we've understood how to deeply incorporate the offerings of this lens into healthcare, prevention, and wellness plans.
Through having affiliated with the EDS Society, I've now worked with and talked with many diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome or Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder. I have also trained with the Ehlers-Danlos Society in Patient Advocacy for EDS and HSD. Both training and experience confirm that hypermobility in all its forms remains vastly underrecognized medically and socially and that collagen differences explain differences in function that frequently alone or compounded with other health factors create the conditions for all the above mysterious medical complaints to arise--regardless of whether external hypermobility is evident.
Really, my view has become that medicine broadly speaking is missing an entire paradigm: simply recognizing the gross, tangible qualities of the body, how they all intersect, and their mechanical and physiological implications. Medicine has advanced to perform miracles daily, but it has lost the vocabulary of touch and interpretation to great detriment. Because of that, those who are in the nearer end of the hypermobility spectrum struggle far longer to find appropriate care than more evident cases of EDS--who still tend to search for diagnoses for over a decade. This is unnecessary. Handling the extremes should be informing the care of the middle cohort, and would if we gave touch back its place with just a little more awareness of the now so-accessible world of variety. So much information about the body is available so readily. We should be screening. The full mobility spectrum with all of its complexity should be understood in at least the simple way that clinicians working with it do as a central, observable phenomenon that shortcuts us to not only answers, but preventive and maintenance measures--a more accurate and useful, individualized care manual for the body than the collection of general advice... perhaps even evolving into what we need more--a true cultural appreciation of the value of diversity and a deeper, more connected appreciation of the body, the environment, and life itself.
Here's exhibit A on why I'm so passionate about invisible illness, why I work in advocacy. I myself was very unwell for two decades. While there were numerous strong factors setting me up for this and making it hard to escape, I now do very well. I had a great deal of help, but the legwork in understanding any of the disparate pieces of my condition and how to see their underpinnings together as pieces of myself that needed the right support and environment were up to my own labor while ill. This is exactly the story I hear from most of my clients, wherever they are in their timeline.
If the care manual were made for hypermobile bodies, especially if the culture shifted to embrace the proactive wisdom of individuality, we'd see a better world. Three quarters of adults in the U.S. are chronically ill. In adults under 35, half live with at least one chronic condition, the most prevalent of which we know are largely preventable. Although we know these conditions are preventable, we've not directed our culture and our system of living to do the job of preventing them. Those numbers only include the folks who have diagnoses. In the world of hypermobility, the more prevalent outcomes are conditions that often take many years to name--autoimmunity, mast cell activation syndrome, endometriosis, dysautonomia. Talents and years are being wasted. We are canaries in the coal mine. Redesigning our lifestyle to meet the needs of our bodies with their tendency toward initially subtle but ultimately often unlivable conditions will improve conditions for all. I love Sarah Ramey's "The Lady's Handbook for her Mysterious Illness," which speaks on all of this.
I'm determined to help those who are undiagnosed or so-far dismissed and help them find medical care appropriate for their so often invisible and misunderstood or unrecognized conditions. I continue to train with The Ehlers-Danlos Society, The Mast Cell Disease Society, Project ECHO, and other organizations relevant to the needs of the hypermobility and mystery illness communities. I will pursue Board Certification in Patient Advocacy late in 2025. I am working to build a local network of healthcare providers who know these areas. (See some favorite information resources and local trusted providers listed here.)
Contact me to be put on the email list for group meetups (free!) and classes (generally donation based or sliding-scale): sarah@lightspiritstudio.com.
I'd like ultimately to help provide resources for those in other medical mystery categories, and this group may grow into that. The tradeoffs of focus and fit and the limitations on what I'll be able to pointedly offer myself are important to consider, but over time I'd like to be linked with others who have knowledge and passion in other specialties. That might offer another route to creating a wider service. Be in touch if this is relevant for you and you want a chance to speak on how it might develop.
Why reference zebras? Here you go.
There are a great number of ways to be hypermobile. There are a great number of ways to be sensitive. Intersections involving any number of hypermobility and sensitivity conditions predispose some of us (women and those with more female-leaning biology in much greater numbers) to show the world what environmental, dietary, and social factors are out of balance. We are the ones for whom a modified, processed, stabilized, imported, and/or haphazard diet breaks the body sooner rather than later.
We who for any reason are more sensitive to the environment than others need a maintenance plan put in place from the first and knowledgably run throughout our lives. As a result, we often end up knowing ourselves and our bodies in a deeper way than most--which can often be labeled as sensitivity or hypochondria among those who don't understand. We often are forced to become our own experts, researchers, and healers because general maintenance plans and outside experts are by and large absent at the moment, culturally. (This has not always and everywhere been the case!) See Sarah Ramey's The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness for a second, 400 page summary on this viewpoint.
In my practice over the past decade I've seen many, many clients affected by these issues. They describe themselves as "medical mysteries," as having "given up hope" or "having to be their own doctors." These cases have intrigued me in part because loved ones reflect the same challenges. Although it shows up in many forms and often needs specialized treatment, the roots of mysterious illness tend to be similar. As an advocate, having been through it for twenty years myself, I'm here to say at least that if any or all of those conditions are with you too you're not alone. Everyone is at different stages in navigating the complexity of all these sorts of conditions. If you need an introduction to the basics or if you need to be connected with some of the practitioners in Santa Fe who currently work well with these kinds of issues, be in touch. If you're by now your own expert and have found people nearby who have been able to support you effectively, I'd love to talk and make sure that those people are on my lists.
It's a new world after head injury. Who knows what it's going to be like? Others who have been through head injury have some idea, but the information can be hard to find in meaningful breadth. And head injuries are really different for everyone. But there are commonalities to be learned from. This project is to help people suffering the impacts of head injury, their loved ones, and their providers to understand what it's like to be in a body after head injury, and to identify the areas in which bodywork may be able to help.
It can be hard to change your diet, whether you need to take a break from a single favorite food or dozens of items. The Yes Cookbook is designed to reinspire your diet with variety and positive options. This project can't go forward today... but someday it will.
Making my services as accessible as possible is a core value. You'll notice yet that my regular prices are on the high side; Santa Fe is a high cost of living area and at present the best means I have to offer lower cost care amidst all the increased costs of living and working here myself is to ask that those with the means to do so participate in care at a rate equivalent to what they'd pay for the luxury goods and services we're surrounded by, to whatever extent they find the freedom to live other parts of their lives at that level. For those who need it I'm happy to reduce my rates as much as I'm able--please ask if you need that support.
My slant comes in particular from the perspective that I've seen by now so many people who--like me--lost decades of their financial lives (not to mention quality of the rest) trying to figure out how to function with chronic illness or perhaps the more solitary, generally unexplainable frustration of a series of unidentifiable health challenges. Those who are in that latter position almost inevitably arrive feeling very alone in the world.
But just as important is this: while hands-on bodywork is a great aid in the physical care of the body, it offers far more potential than what we can do together in an hour here and there. I see my most important role as that of a mirror on your physical structure, my second most important role as a teacher. How rare is the opportunity to work with someone who will reflect back in detail what they observe about the body and make that knowledge accessible so that we can turn it into the methods we need at home throughout the day to take care of ourselves well? Those are the resources I've found ultimately most potent in caring for myself and I aim to be one for you.
The classes, coaching and advocacy services I provide are to help make those benefits of bodywork more accessible as well as to engage the benefits of context, comparison, and self-recognition. Many of the things that I've learned from working with many hundreds of bodies over a decade are generally decently represented even among the bodies who show up for a small class. Training your eyes to see difference is a great way to grow some love for your own uniqueness, which people often struggle with even while embracing it in others. We can often best see ourselves when we take a moment to look around and understand where we fall within the rainbow of human traits.
The hypermobility meetup is free and is also open to those who are chronically, mysteriously ill. I'd like to continue to develop social and advocacy resources for those who are not wholly fits for that group but do similarly struggle with the decades-long search for insightful care. Do be in touch if that's you. As other projects settle I'll be able to figure out how to give that branch more effort.
It is not just finances that limit the accessibility of bodywork. Some can't take an hour off work. Some are at home caregiving. Others are culturally excluded from thinking that this is a reasonable option. I am sad to see a proud fellow limping along on what might likely be a degraded or injured hip and recognize given what I can see how low are the odds that he makes it in for conventional care let alone preventive and maintenance care.
It's easy to admit that I can't always manage to make it anywhere for bodywork myself given various current constraints on my time and the urgency of making up financially for fifteen very unwell years--but I have wide arrays of tools and practices that find their way in small ways into every day, and I know where to go for help with a reset when all my other efforts are not doing enough to maintain against the strains of life. Getting to that point of independence, tool-rich and understanding how to address pain as needed primarily at home, has for me been the greatest value of bodywork.
I'm here to work with you through any or all of these challenges as well as I can:
We can work with you clothed instead of modestly draped as is usual for bodywork.
We can send you home with loads of things to try so that you're not coming back as often.
We can meet by video for an advocacy session.
Just let me know if there are challenges in coming in and receiving work and we'll see what we can come up with.
Access: My office is fully ADA accessible.
Light: Natural light is abundant. Artificial light isn't used during daytime hours. Lighting can be adjusted to your needs, but bring an eye-mask if you're sensitive to being in too much light generally.
Sound: The office tends to be very quiet.
Odors and Chemicals: The acupuncturist in the adjoining offices uses moxa and infrequently linaments or essential oils. I occasionally use liniments or essential oils but can avoid them prior to your appointment if requested. The shared space and offices are cleaned with mainly gentle, natural cleaning products but occasionally other cleaning odors may be present.
Be in touch if you need to know about any other areas of concern.