I have been a registered pharmacist for 20 years and I realized about 10 years ago that as a profession, the premise it is based on was no longer in-sync with my spirit. Over the years, I have realized that pharmaceuticals tend to focus on a symptom or a disease state and they do not address the whole individual. One must treat the whole person to even begin to help improve any health issue. We must look at it like a portrait and not a picture made up of puzzle pieces. We cannot take one piece out and think we solved the problem. That picture will always be incomplete. I began to educate myself on holistic health care. The more I learned, the more it resonated with my being. I knew I had to make a change in my chosen profession. My developing holistic mind and body could no longer do it. Around the same time I made this realization, I started to experience frequent occurrences of pain in my neck and upper back. It became so severe, at times I could not turn my head, I couldn’t drive, and getting out of bed was a painful chore. Working as a pharmacist, in a retail pharmacy is a very stressful job. I worked the overnight shift, which added additional stress to my body. Being off the natural Circadian rhythm we all live by affected my sleep, my eating habits and it began to show up physically. That in-turn affected my mental health and well-being. Through my pursuit of holistic health information, I learned about the benefits of massage therapy. I found a massage therapist in my town and I decided to give it a try. By a stroke of luck, I chose one of the best massage therapists I have experienced the services of to this day. She addressed my issues and after one session, I was able to turn my head more than I had been able to in days. That experience and the stress relief and pain relief I felt afterwards was mind-blowing. I decided in that moment that I needed to go to massage school so I could help people in a way that benefitted them physically and mentally as it did for me. I saw that massage could give them results they could see and feel quickly, sometimes after one session. That was something pharmaceuticals did not do enough of in my experience. I attended The Soma Institute and graduated and got licensed as a Clinical Massage Therapist in 2016. With the plethora of knowledge I gained in school, along with techniques I have learned since, the customized massage I offer includes Swedish, Deep Tissue, Trigger Point, Sports and Thai Massage techniques. In my experience, I have come across many people that believe massage has to be painful to be beneficial. Each and every massage I give provides therapeutic benefits with a calm and soothing touch.