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109: Season 4 Highlights: Insights and Legacies

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Summary: Join us as we revisit the key moments of The Thinking Practitioner’s fourth season. This year, our esteemed guests shared both the latest research, and historical insights into the legacies that continue to shape our field. A heartfelt thanks to our amazing guests, sponsors, and to you, our audience—your support continues to drive the Thinking Practitioner community. Subscribe now for a condensed dose of practical wisdom and discerning reflection. 🔍🗣️👥🔊

Watch the video and get the full transcript of their conversation on Til or Whitney’s sites: 

Resources:

Whitney & Til’s Season 4 Favorites:

Your favorites (top downloads of all time):

Episode 109: Season 4 Highlights: Insights and Legacies

Whitney Lowe:

Welcome to The Thinking Practitioner Podcast.

Til Luchau:

A podcast where we dig into the fascinating issues, conditions, and quandaries in the massage and manual therapy world today.

Whitney Lowe:

I’m Whitney Lowe.

Til Luchau:

I’m Til Luchau.

Whitney Lowe:

Welcome to The Thinking Practitioner.

Til Luchau:

The Thinking Practitioner Podcast is supported by ABMP, Associated Bodywork and Massage Professionals. ABMP membership gives professional practitioners like you a package, including individual liability insurance, free continuing education, and quick reference apps, online scheduling, and payments with Pocket Suite, and much more.

Whitney Lowe:

ABMPC E-Courses, Podcast, and Massage and Bodywork Magazine always feature expert voices and new perspectives in the profession, including Til and myself. Thinking Practitioner listeners can save on joining ABMP at ABMP.com/thinking.

Til Luchau:

Are you ready to take your skills to another level? Come check us out advanced-trainings.com. Whether you’ve been practicing for decades or just starting out, Advanced Trainings offers a wide range of online and in-person programs, designed to boost your effectiveness, deepen your understanding, and inspire your professional creativity.

With innovative self-paced programs, ranging from one hour certificate courses on the most common client complaints, to our comprehensive CAMT certification program, we offer practice changing learning events with industry leading instructors and a supportive learning community that will take your work to another level. Plus, for a limited time, Thinking Practitioner listeners like you can enjoy a special offer.

Sign up today at advanced-trainings.com and get a free month of our amazing AT subscription. Explore an extensive library of courses, cancel anytime, and keep your credits all from just $20 a month with the first month free for TTP listers like you. Enter ThinkingSubscriber at checkout for this limited time offer at advanced-trainings.com. Thank you.

Hey, Whitney, how are you doing here?

Whitney Lowe:

I’m doing fine, sir. How are you doing? This is the beginning of 2024 when we are making this recording here. We’re looking forward to a new and exciting and innovative year at the Thinking Practitioner.

Til Luchau:

Beginning of the year, and we’re going to take a little bit of time and look back on this past season. You and I were both surprised that it’s the fourth season. We’ve done four of these full year seasons of the Thinking Practitioner.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah.

Til Luchau:

That’s like, yeah, we’re up in 109 episodes now, and the purpose of our conversation today is to share our highlights, but also with the listeners, help you, the listener, get some gleanings, get some interesting points from our year of interviews with each other and with interesting guests, but also to give you some breadcrumbs to follow back into the season to see which topics you want to dig into further.

Whitney Lowe:

Absolutely. With this being the Thinking Practitioner, I tried to, as we were doing our reflections, really think about what of our episodes had really made me think a lot during this year, and there was a lot of them. It was hard to pick out some of the highlights. They were all things that made me think, I know, in particular.

Til Luchau:

That’s right. It made me think. It also gave me tangible things to try and to do differently too. That’s always my litmus test here.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah.

Til Luchau:

Practitioner being the second part of the title, we want to practice these things, we want to do them.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, that’s right. Put it into practice for sure.

Til Luchau:

Yeah.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah. Tell me, you’ve got some, I think some stats on where we are currently with this.

Til Luchau:

Yeah.

Whitney Lowe:

Tell me, how are you doing?

Til Luchau:

With the show itself, not to bore you with too many stats, but we’re four years in, we’re up to over 350,000 downloads, and that’s still climbing. The number of listeners has been climbing every year. It’s still climbing. It’s about 70% of the listeners in the last year were in the USA, which leaves 30% for the rest of the world, mostly English-speaking countries, but a pretty broad variety.

The other interesting statistic or feature is that you and I both started publishing these as YouTube episodes on our respective YouTube channels, and that’s gotten a lot of response as well too. It seems like a lot of people tune in via YouTube. It’s been a good year. I’m looking forward to the next one. Well, looking back again on these 20, whatever it was, episodes we did, 26 episodes in the last year, where do you want to start with? What’s one of your highlights?

Whitney Lowe:

Well, I think we both kind of put together a little bit of a list of some of the things that were influential for us, and I was interested to see when we came together with these lists, we had a couple of them, we decided to pick five each out of… What was that total? Somewhere probably around 25 or so episodes. I didn’t count exactly how many it was, but so we only got to talk about one-fifth of them.

I was interested to see that you and I had some crossover of similar ones that landed on both of our lists. One of the first ones was the one that we had done with Robert Schliep about fascial stiffness and pain. That was pretty interesting, and we got some interesting feedback from folks about that too, wanting to hear more, learn more about that.

Til Luchau:

That was episode 99, which we called Wait, What? Fascial Stiffness and Pain, because Robert Schliep, being the co-author of this study, talked about how their findings showed what we would not necessarily expect as body workers, that stiffer fascia was less painful, and that painfulness, at least in the plantar fascia, correlated with less stiff fascia, so that our very simplistic narrative of let’s make things less stiff so they feel better, didn’t hold up in this case.

He shared some of the findings and some of the ideas around why that might be, and maybe some more refined ways, more nuanced ways to think about what we’re doing. I did get, just this morning, I did get an update from him about that study. In that same episode, he mentioned a depression study correlating fascial qualities with depression. He says, “As mentioned in that talk, we now have two larger clinical studies going on currently to explore fascial aspects involved in depression. Both of them have over a hundred patients. I would expect the first reliable results in the spring of 2025.”

That’s been a really interesting topic. It has some of the first, that I know of, research correlating tissue qualities with non-physical states, in this case, psychological or emotional states. In other good news, a radiologist from the university where he is, ALM University, has developed a way to assess fascial tissues on inflammatory markers via conventional MRI scans. Doctor Schleip’s quite excited by this possibility.

This may have the pay of the path towards including reliable fascial tissue diagnosis into conventional orthopedic exams, such as in low back pain, tennis elbow, plantar fasciitis, et cetera. He’s already started a collaboration with this clinician and this researcher to compare his assessments with our fascial stiffness assessment tools, and he includes a link about the press release on that. We’ll put that in our show notes.

Whitney Lowe:

That sounds very significant, especially being able to finally see something about soft tissue structure like that on an MRI, especially with fascial tissue. Sounds…

Til Luchau:

Inflammatory activity, not just density, which is what MRIs traditionally show, but the inflammatory activity would be really interesting to see on a real life scan. Then third piece of news from Dr. Schleip, in October, I got the position of a full professor here at ALM University. In Germany, that’s as much of a step upwards from PhD as a PhD is itself. Congratulations to Dr. Schliep.

It’s great to have your contributions in the field, and I’m glad you’re getting to a place where having did more influence and contributions to move forward.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah. We’ve had a couple of wonderful episodes with him, and hopefully we will get him back again to talk about some of these newer findings. We certainly have, as we watch the download statistics, his talks are always ones that are very interesting for a lot of people, because there’s just such fascinating things that they’re on the cutting edge of discovery and learning about there.

Til Luchau:

More interesting things coming out of his group and his work. We’ll watch for that in the coming years.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, absolutely. What’s on your list there?

Til Luchau:

The first one that went on my list was your conversation with Walt Fritz. That was episode 87, Shared Decision Making. Walt’s just an entertaining guy. I like listening to him, and I did a conversation with him too later that I enjoyed a lot, but the topic of shared decision making, it was gratifying that he even gives it a name. This process of really deciding what to dom or designing the session with the client’s input is a key one. It’s close to my heart, and I know it is for a lot of people.

The longer you work, the more you realize that’s what really makes the difference between effective work, and just working on people, and shooting the dice as it were. It’s like, how can we involve our clients in the decision making we do during the session, and even how we focus our session itself? He had a wonderful way of describing that process, and I really enjoyed your conversation with him.

Whitney Lowe:

That was so fascinating to get into that, and that whole idea of how empowering it is to be working… It’s basically like getting two people to do the job instead of one, in a lot of instances. Yeah, he brought some really interesting insights I always loved sitting in on. You mentioned too, the other conversations that you had had with Walt Fritz too in another episode, and there was some other great gems in those too, when you were doing the work with Walt, and Ruth, and some other things that you had talked about there.

There’s just, he’s a wonderful resource, and I certainly would encourage people to go back, take a listen to those episodes. Anybody who’s doing any kind of clinical work, there’s always gems that come out of those discussions with him.

Til Luchau:

Well, his background as a PT, and then as a teacher for a long time, just comes through in his eloquent or articulate way of describing what he’s up to, and putting names to things that we can understand.

Whitney Lowe:

He’s just a wonderfully nice guy. He’s a nice guy, good to listen to. Yeah, that was good. That was a good piece there.

Til Luchau:

All right, so what’s one of yours?

Whitney Lowe:

Well, it’s looking through the list again, trying to think, what was impactful for me? The episode that I had done with Nicole Miller, talking about working with veterans was one that I got a lot of insight into things that I just don’t think about very much. This is a group of people who I don’t do much work with, and that’s one of the reasons that I wanted to talk to her and find out what’s going on here.

It is certainly a group that can be tremendously impacted by a lot of things that we do with manual therapy, and there’s such a need for addressing this, but there are so many fine points and subtleties about the experiences that veterans go through, the things that are necessary for practitioners to think about, in terms of being prepared to work with some of these people who have had very serious trauma, obviously, psychological as well as physical traumas, for many of them.

There are just, I think, so few intervention approaches that can be as powerful as what we’re doing with a lot of the hands-on work. It was really inspiring to hear the wonderful work that Nicole has been doing with the Veterans Administration for many years, and trying to work with a lot of these people here.

Til Luchau:

That was a great one. That was episode 84, and we got some good feedback on that. People really appreciated your conversation with her. It made me reflect on how much trauma impact, combat war, combat danger, military danger has had on our country. It’s like, we don’t think of it as being on our soil, necessarily, but there are so many people that are actively involved in that, or have been in their lifetimes, that it’s like an invisible presence here amongst us.

There’s so much we can learn, so much I can learn by working with people that have been through those kinds of things, or dealing with the effects of that that apply to everybody.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, absolutely.

Til Luchau:

Thanks for bringing her in.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, she’s done some wonderful work over the years. I would encourage people, anybody who’s interested in learning some more about working with veterans, I would encourage you to go back, take a listen to that. There are some really good resources that she brings forward in there as well.

Til Luchau:

War is with us, combat is with us, and the effects of trauma are with us. That’s present as ever in our world. It’s a great one to have a relationship too within ourselves.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, yeah. Next on the list, I noticed there was one that we both shared an interest in, and this is one that we actually got a lot of feedback about…

Til Luchau:

Which one was this?

Whitney Lowe:

… On your list next?

Til Luchau:

Episode 92, The Art of a Good Question. The Art of a Good Question, where you and I discussed that topic, what makes a good question in different topics? Why did it end up on your list? What’d you like about it?

Whitney Lowe:

Well, because I love… I have to say, this is one of the things that I love about doing this podcast with you is interesting questions that we get to ask people, but things that we ask each other, and the way that we think about the questions that we’re trying to, that are the big questions we’re trying to solve in the treatment room with clients, or in our profession in general. What are some of those things, and how do we look at what is the meat behind a lot of those things?

We came up with some interesting angles here, talking about both individually, how we ask things of our clients, but also how we’re asking things of ourselves, and what we’re looking at, how our learning processes are working in the stuff that we’re doing as well.

Til Luchau:

That’s how this got on my radar. We were doing these online study groups, and I saw some practitioners, some participants coming in with amazing questions that just launched us into the whole discussion for that whole period. It started me asking, “What is it that makes a good question, and how could I actually get better at that myself, both as a learner but then also as a practitioner?”

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah. I think so often, in a lot of our traditional education, the classroom questions are mainly just about getting information in there, but we have to always remember, I think now, what we’re really trying to do is help build inquiring minds that are really looking into deeper things, and asking some of the tough questions, like, “What happens when what you’re teaching us doesn’t work? What do we do?”

Til Luchau:

Yes.

Whitney Lowe:

“How do we do these things, and how do we look at things differently?”

Til Luchau:

That’s right.

Whitney Lowe:

These are all things, because the real life clinical environment is, in fact, messy. It doesn’t follow those rules easily. The better you can be at asking those questions, and looking and finding those answers, I think the better for everybody involved.

Til Luchau:

Especially in the situations where there may not be a clear answer. Sometimes the right question is all you need to open things up.

Whitney Lowe:

Right.

Til Luchau:

It’s great discussion.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah. That had landed as the next one on my list, so we’ll consider that we’ve done that. Tell me, what’s next on your list there?

Til Luchau:

Back to me? Okay. Speaking of curiosity, this is the episode we called Curious Souls, it was 96 with Aaron Alexander and Sue Hitzmann, and we just talked. They are both high profile podcasters in the health and fitness niche, and I enjoy both of them as people as well. I thought, let’s just get on and see where the conversation goes. It went lots of places.

We talked about lots of things, but mostly we talked about curiosity, and how we learn, and how we focus on what we give our attention to. It was just an enjoyable time with them, and also, one of the ones that seemed to resonate and we got a lot of feedback about as well too.

Whitney Lowe:

This is what I find interesting too, is that, and people talk about this a lot of times with videos too, you might produce a whole series of videos, and think like, “Oh, this one is gold, this is a great piece of content,” and it goes nowhere. Then you throw something together, like, “Oh, somebody asked me this, I’ll put this up there.” All of a sudden, everybody’s just looking at this.

I think I oftentimes am surprised at what it is that people really get the most out of her really want to hear more about it. That was a really good episode for broaching a lot of things that I wouldn’t have necessarily thought to be landing on our radar screen frequently for a lot of listeners.

Til Luchau:

That’s right. One of the things they each do is they talk to people, and their work addresses health in general. You and I have narrowed our podcast to hands-on practitioners appropriately, and I love that, but it was great, again, to pick up a little higher above the fence that we’ve set up, and say like, “Okay, so how does this relate out into the bigger questions involved?”

Whitney Lowe:

Which is always, I think, a valuable perspective and helping us break down those silos, and look at how we can reach out and connect with other people who are doing similar types of work, or working with similar people and wanting to get results there. I think that’s very helpful for them.

Til Luchau:

Okay. What’s on your list next?

Whitney Lowe:

Let’s see, next on my list, of course, I had to put this back on the list. I know I put, it was on my list last year, our episode was Stuart McGill, and we had another one with him there this year. I just learned so much from him. Again, this gets me thinking about all kinds of stuff. It has made me dive a lot deeper into a lot of his other work, his other writings, and productions, and things like that.

He’s just such a brilliant clinician who’s come at this big, big question of back pain from so many different angles, and with some really interesting kinds of solutions for things. I’m so in awe of his analytical capabilities for identifying a lot of these back pain problems. I kind of consider this something that I aspire to try to get better at and work towards, in terms of being and sharing those clinical pearls.

Til Luchau:

He’s dedicated his life’s work to the puzzle of back pain, and he’s largely retired, although he still does some interesting things, and was very generous of him to come and spend some more time with us, and talk through his lifetime of learning. He’s also such an interesting guy to listen to, and an unapologetic spokesman for the value of physics.

His background as an engineer says, “No, sometimes it’s just the way you do things, it’s just the tissue. Psychosocial stuff. Yeah, sure, maybe, but let’s talk about physics.” Just as a counterpoint, sometimes, to the things that I get most interested in and spend my time with, I really appreciated his point of view as well too.

Whitney Lowe:

Just as a side note too, this wasn’t on the podcast, but because this was a magazine article that came across my desk yesterday, I think it was, and I read it this morning before our podcast. It was about disc herniations. The article’s essentially, what causes disc herniations? I was like, “Okay, let’s just see. Was there anything new and different in here?”

The author was talking a lot about, there’ve been different camps of focusing on causes of back pain from disc herniations, being mainly mechanical loading has been a big one. One of the things that they brought up significantly was genetics, that a lot of times, it’s not necessarily about loading, and it’s not necessarily about metabolic process or things like that. There are people who have a genetic predisposition to weakened discs, and that may be a very simple thing that you might do that might seem completely innocuous, leads to a really serious kind of injury like that.

It’s not because of excessive loading, it’s not because of excessive heavy lifting, but genetics is a factor. We can’t really evaluate those factors of genetics. It’s something, I think, as a clinician, really important to remember, that a lot of times, there’s no one single answer for so many of these things. There’s really a lot of different things that might be potentially at play there.

Til Luchau:

Then the puzzle that genetics presents us around, if it is genetic, if it is something that runs in our family line, is that fate? Is that something that we’re necessarily going to have? If we do have it, does that mean we’re just stuck with it, or are there things we can do as hands-on practitioners to help?

My bias is there always are, there always seems to be things we can do, because genetics determines, you could say, or influences a lot of the probabilities for things, but the possibilities, the other side of the coin, the possibilities of how we live and what we do is up to us, and up the inputs we have in our lives.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. If you’re interested in back pain at all, and my guess is, lots of folks are, because lots of clients have these issues, go back and take a listen. Great episode, number 97 with Stuart McGill. What’s next on your list? I think…

Til Luchau:

Well, I’m down to my last one, we’ve covered them all.

Whitney Lowe:

That’s right. We did actually talk about, the next one we shared in common was the fascial stiffness one. What’s the next one or last one you got on the list?

Til Luchau:

Number five on my list was my conversation with Dr. Peter Levine. It was episode 108, the most recent episode, where again, he kindly took time to just meet, and talk, and reflect on his background. If you don’t know him, Peter Levine published a book in the nineties called Waking the Tiger, I believe. I don’t have it here on my desk anymore, but that turned around the trauma world in many places from being, say, an intractable brain condition, to being a condition that involves the whole body, and brain, and somatic responses.

Much of today’s trauma work in all kinds of field, including with veterans, is strongly influenced by the directions he started us on, and being furthered, of course, popularized people like Bessel van der Kolk and Robert Scher, people who have taken this idea of the trauma as a body response, and elaborated on that. Us as body therapists get some relevance from his teachings and from his writings. What a lot of people don’t realize was that he began his career as a hands-on therapist.

Early in his career, he studied with Ida Rolfe. He and I got to tell stories about that, talk about that, and I got to pick his brain a bit on how that experience led to the trauma work he does now. Then what’s most important for us as hands-on practitioners to be able to recognize, and how do we respond to clients who may be dealing with unresolved trauma?

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, it’s a great conversation. Yeah, wonderful. A couple other things that really made me think about a lot there too is I was kind of reflecting back on some of the stuff when I was originally in massage school, and this was the late 1980s, 1987-ish, something like that, it was kind of a trendy, popular thing to begin looking at a lot of these issues around trauma and psychological impacts of things in people’s lives.

Some of the practitioners of that time were really, I think, grossly over-simplifying things, and people were coming out and saying like, “Oh, the reason your elbow hurts is because you’ve got anger at your father stored in your elbow,” kind of things.

Til Luchau:

Oh, that’s your jaw. That’s your jaw.

Whitney Lowe:

Your jaw, that’s right. Okay. What’s the elbow one? That’s your uncle, or something?

Til Luchau:

Maybe. Okay.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, but I think a lot of his work, Dr. Levine’s work and the things that he had really brought about, helped us see some of the much bigger pictures of things that are going on here, and that things are not just as simple as that, that they really are very vast in terms of how they may impact people.

Til Luchau:

That’s right. Not as simple as that, but still very tangible, in the sense that what happens when we’re traumatized is we dissociate, we split off from our experience. The way back, the way to help with the ongoing effects of trauma is to re-associate to get back into our bodies. That’s been his eloquent touchpoint for all the decades he’s been teaching, and brought us some really tangible ways to help with that.

Whitney Lowe:

He’s one of those people that you can look at him and his decades of work, and look at just a tree of people who have been influenced by him, and who he has had profound effect on, and just see a remarkable vast expanse of impact that he has had on so many people in a lot of different areas.

Til Luchau:

I was embarrassed, I was like a broken record. He kept saying these simple and clear ideas, and I realized, “Oh, that was you that helped me articulate that back in my,” since 40 years that I’ve known him and been learning from him as well.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, yeah. A wonderful discussion there with him.

Til Luchau:

It was.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah.

Til Luchau:

Well, you have one more on your list.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, I’ve got one more on my list. This was an interesting discussion that I had with Les Sweeney, the president of ABMP, where we were talking about the recent survey that they had done. They do this survey every few years on the state of the profession, and what’s going on. I sometimes get to be a little bit of an analytics, data analytics geek, and like looking at numbers about things, and see what kind of story those numbers tell.

There was some real interesting things that we talked about in terms of how things have shifted and changed in the profession. For me, also trying to think about, how does that impact not only me, and my business, and the things that I’m doing, but how does that really impact the whole experience of manual therapy for the clients, and the people that are out there receiving it? What is this going to mean for the future?

One of the things that he said in there that was really resonated with me that I was just like, “Wow, I got to think about, what does this mean?” He was talking about how when they first started doing these surveys in the mid to the late nineties, I think it was when they got started with them, he would go around to schools and ask the students questions. These were mostly, obviously, massage therapy schools.

He was asking the students, “How many of you plan to go into your own business, and how many of you plan to go work for somebody,” or something like that. Usually, at that time he said, 80 to 90% of the hands were raised when people were going to start their own business. He said, “Now, it is completely flip-flopped,” that about, he goes around, asks that same question to the schools, and like 80 to 90% of the people are planning to go work for somebody. That might be a franchise operation, or it might be a health clinic, or a spa somewhere, or something like that.

They’re planning, they’re looking at massage as an employee-centered job that they will go get when they exit the field. I just think that’s a really profound change in our field and curious how it will play out in the years to come.

Til Luchau:

That’s right. That makes me think of other professions where that is the way in. I’m just thinking of physical therapy, for example. Most all physical therapists work in a clinic, work for somebody else at first, and then many of them aspire to be off on their own in private practice. Maybe there’ll be an evolution that…

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah. It may be-

Til Luchau:

Who knows?

Whitney Lowe:

… A transition, evolution thing, something just very much like that. It is particularly interesting to watch some of those different, and we talked a lot about the school closings that were impacted by COVID and some of the other, just the overall shrinking of the training programs, the number of programs in the school, which is, in this country, at least, which has gone way down since its peak around 2008 or so.

Til Luchau:

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, I think I got on my soapbox a little bit about saying, I think that we’ve really kind of needed that contraction, because I do think we had a very large number of schools that were populated by teachers who didn’t have a lot of really good experience teaching. That has all kinds of impacts going out into the profession as well.

Til Luchau:

The massage graduate boom peaked, even though, and there’s different contractures along the way, like you talked about, but even though the overall number of active practitioners continues to gradually rise over time.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah.

Til Luchau:

I don’t know what happened during COVID, honestly, I don’t know about that, but I think that the lines I know about outside of that time period, there’s been a steady rise in the number of active practitioners

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, and I think the demand is still there very high for these services from the public. Now that it’s become more popular, and people are a lot more aware of it, there is absolutely a greater demand for it. It will be interesting to see how those two things converge in the years ahead.

Til Luchau:

There’s certainly exceptions, I think, but in general, I hear in the little snapshot of practitioners that I have direct interaction with about how busy they are, about how their problems are, “How do I manage not being able to serve everybody I would like to,” or, “How do I take care of myself?” I think they tend to be practitioners that have been working for quite a while.

I know that there are exceptions, places where it still might be challenging to have the practice you want, even as an experienced practitioner. I think there’s so much demand out there in general for what we do, and it’s only increasing.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, yep. Just to put a plug in for being good, the better you are at really bettering yourself and trying to serve your clients better, those are the people who are the busiest. They are the people who, clients are really wanting to see those people who are digging in and trying to serve their clients in as many ways as possible. I think that’s kind of the recipe for being successful for a lot of folks.

Til Luchau:

Then the people that deal with busyness the best are also the learners, the people that are willing to find out how to be more specific, more intelligent, more focused, more intentional about what they’re doing. That’s how we survive. That’s how we get sustainability. Once you’re good, once you’ve got the people, then you survive by being even better.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, absolutely. On that note, I would say, our goal, at least me, I’ll sort of talk about me personally, but our goal for this upcoming year is to continue sharing as much content with you, the listeners, as possible about things that will help make you think some more. We have some interesting folks coming up. We’ve got some interesting folks coming up on our list of guests that we’re having. Who else is on our list?

Til Luchau:

Well, it’s going to be pretty soon after this episode, but you’re going to talk to Rajam from the San Diego Pain Summit. How do you say her last name? Rose? Roose?

Whitney Lowe:

Rajam Roose.

Til Luchau:

Rajam Roose, so that’s been an ongoing fixture in our profession for a while, that event that she coordinates. I’ll be interested to hear your conversation with her. Gil Hadley’s going to join us to give us a peek into his nerve tour process, and you and I each got to go be part of the audience there, so it’ll be fun to now talk on the other side of the mic with him, get that conversation. I have a date with Peggy Horan, who is one of the senior practitioners at the Esalen Institute and been there since the seventies.

Whitney Lowe:

Wow, that’s going to be interesting. Yeah.

Til Luchau:

She’s a wonderful person, and I’ve known her for many decades, and I’m really looking forward to catching back up with her. She is a lineage holder in that she remembers the place that Esalen and Esalen Massage held in popularizing massage in the culture in general. In many ways, there are many seeds that sprouted out of the work she and her colleagues were doing there in the seventies. She’s got some great perspective on that process.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah. For a lot of people who, maybe the history of massage and soft tissue work was just an academic thing in massage school that you just had to listen to in order to pass your class, these things influence a lot of where things have come from and where we are currently. I do think it is always valuable to have a good perspective on the history. I really look forward to hearing what she has to say there.

Til Luchau:

Important thread and the lineage for all of us, me in particular. I’ll look forward to that one.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah.

Til Luchau:

Then if we can find a date to get him in, Eric Dalton wants to come in. That’ll be fun to finally get him behind the mic.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, we’ve been trying to do that for a while.

Til Luchau:

I think he’s great.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, we’ll look forward to doing that, having a good chat there. As always, let us know what we can do for you, the listeners, what do you want to hear more about? What can we do to help provide you great content throughout the next year? We always appreciate your input, emails that you send us, comments that you send us, et cetera. Do let us know what you want to learn more about, what you want to hear us talk about, and we’ll try to squeeze it onto the list for this coming year as well.

Til Luchau:

As well as follow-up questions or thoughts for our guests. Those are always stimulating too, to hear your reactions, thoughts, questions, and ponderings, experiences around the topics our guests are talking about. Love getting those as well.

Whitney Lowe:

Yeah, wonderful. All right, so…

Til Luchau:

We’ll put a list of the links to these episodes on our website. Maybe I’ll slip in our biggest downloads of all time too. I’ll put that list in there. Our greatest hits forever, not just this fourth season.

Whitney Lowe:

Right. Yeah, yeah, that sounds good.

Til Luchau:

Who’s our closing sponsor?

Whitney Lowe:

Yes, and so Books of Discovery, and we want to thank them again so much for their continual support ever since the very beginning with us, so Books of Discovery has been a part of Massage and Bodywork World for over 25 years. Nearly 3,000 schools around the globe teach with their textbooks, e-Textbooks, and digital resources.

Books of Discovery likes to say, “Learning adventures start here.” They find that same spirit here on the Thinking Practitioner Podcast, and are proud to support our work, knowing we share the mission to bring the massage and body work community thought-provoking and enlivening content that advances our profession.

Til Luchau:

Here’s how I got connected to them, instructors of manual therapy education programs can request complimentary copies of Books of Discovery’s textbooks for review or use in their programs. That’s how, again, they sent me some review copies way back in the nineties, I believe it was. I was like, “These are cool, I’m going to start using these.”

Reach out to them, they still do that. Reach out to them at BooksofDiscovery.com, and you, a listener, whether or not you’re a teacher, can explore their collection of learning resources for anatomy, pathology, kinesiology, physiology, ethics, and business mastery at BooksofDiscovery.com, where you as a Thinking Practitioner, listener, can save 15% by entering “Thinking” at checkout.

Whitney Lowe:

Thanks to all of our listeners and to our sponsors, we appreciate you hanging out with us here, and stopping by, and sharing some of your ear time in the world with us. You can stop by our sites for the video, show notes, transcripts, and any extras. You can find that over on my site at AcademyofClinicalMassage.com. Til, where can they find that for you?

Til Luchau:

Advanced-Trainings.com. If you have questions, comments, or things you’d like to hear us talk about, as we said, do email us, or just record a short voice memo on your phone, and it’s easy to email it to us. It’d be fun to hear your voice, and might even play it on the air if you want. Email that to [email protected]. Look for us on social media under our names. I am Til Luchau, who are you?

Whitney Lowe:

Today, I am Whitney Lowe, and will probably be that tomorrow, so you can check us out over there on social. You can rate us on the Apple Podcast, as it does help other people find the show. That is actually quite important. We encourage you to do that. You can hear us on Spotify, Stitcher, Pod Beam, Google… What is it now? It’s YouTube Music. The Google podcast-

Til Luchau:

Oh, oh yeah.

Whitney Lowe:

… Is going away this year. It’s now YouTube Music.

Til Luchau:

Okay, there you go.

Whitney Lowe:

Wherever you happen to listen, and please do share the word and tell a friend. We’ll look forward to sharing with you again.

Til Luchau:

Here we go at another season. Thank you, Whitney.

Whitney Lowe:

All right, thank you.

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