About Me/What's Up With the Plotinus Quote

Hi folx! Thanks for checking out my blogpost. I wanted to take some time and write about who I am so my newbie clients can get an idea of who the stranger is that's about to touch them (patience, Plotinus coming). My name is Emily Wire I grew up and have lived in Chicagoland for all of my 39 years. I took a brief four year side journey to Michigan where I received my BSW (Bachelor of Social Work) degree from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. I worked as a social worker for six years in Chicago serving adults with intellectual disabilities. During that time I went to massage school at The SOMA Institute. I graduated from there in 2009. It was in 2014 that I started practicing massage therapy full time. This is where it gets more interesting.

After about three months of full time massage I started to notice that I could feel something deeper than just massaging tissues. I started to notice I could control muscle release through intense focus on pressure, rate, frequency and depth. I could feel where to massage and how. It was a knowing that was deeper than intellect. It was embodied knowledge and I was sharing the experience with my clients. From that moment on I became fully engaged in massage and thus began my instruction with the body itself as my greatest teacher.

The last four years I have been working with Dr. Kathleen Morris, DC. Through her wise presence and instruction I developed my own approach to massage. I came to call it trauma informed massage therapy. Through the gift of my clients' willingness to feel I began to see how massage therapy practices also mirrored practices and theories in mental health/relational therapy and even in mathematics and the natural world around us. Enter Plotinus.

I was today years old when I found out about Plotinus. Turns out he is considered the father of Neoplatonism (New Plato-ism). The most common idea held in Neoplatonism is the doctrine that all of reality can be derived from a single principle, "the One". The One is a little hard to explain because of it's nature. Think of it as the insubstantial that Was before the big bang. However, the One has no relationship with existence or non-existence. It is upon the Neoplatonic idea that all things emerge from this inconceivable One and so reflect or contain parts of it that my massage practice is based. The idea that there are universal truths across every facet of life that bind together what we generally mistake as separate. In my practice, body truths have become people truths, have become exercise truths have become psychological truths. And doesn't it make sense since we are all one?