The Missing Piece in Manual Therapy—And Why It’s Time to Reclaim It
Article #7 in the Healing Beyond the Body series: A New Paradigm for Practitioners
Since time immemorial, humans have used touch as a means of healing. Before there were textbooks, before there were professional standards and governing bodies, before there was a clinical, mechanized approach to health—there were hands, presence, and intuition. Every ancient culture had its healers, mystics, and wisdom keepers. Every lineage had its ways of holding, sensing, and guiding people back to wholeness.
And then, much of that was stripped away.
Colonization and the rise of reductionist medicine dismantled these traditions, casting intuitive and spiritual healing as primitive, unscientific, or even dangerous. The clinical gaze took over, segmenting the body into systems and structures, turning patients into cases, and divorcing healing from the realms of energy, emotion, and spirit.
Massage therapy, like many healing professions, has been caught in this tension. In an effort to gain legitimacy, it has become increasingly medicalized—focused on biomechanics, pathology, and evidence-based protocols. And while these tools have their place, something essential has been lost: the recognition that true healing is not just physical. It is emotional, energetic, and spiritual.
This is my wish for the profession: to take a stand for wholeness. To disrupt the idea that modern medicine holds all the answers. To reclaim the truth that healing is not just about fixing the body, but about honouring the entire human experience.
The Missing Piece: Integrating the Full Spectrum of Healing
The limitations of the current model of massage therapy—and many other regulated healing professions—stem from a fragmented understanding of what it means to heal.
Traditional models tend to isolate systems:
The body is treated as a biomechanical structure.
The mind is referred out to psychology or psychiatry.
The emotions are rarely acknowledged.
The energy field is dismissed as unscientific or irrelevant.
The spirit—a core part of healing across cultures—is almost entirely absent.
But healing does not happen in silos. The body, mind, emotions, energy, and spirit are all interconnected. Ignoring this complexity does not make the clinical model more legitimate—it makes it less effective.
What if, instead of reducing massage therapy (or any healing modality) to just a physical intervention, we embraced a model that integrated the wisdom of multiple traditions?
Imagine if massage therapists—and all hands-on practitioners—were encouraged to cultivate not just technical skills, but also:
Somatic awareness—helping clients listen to their body’s subtle signals.
Nervous system literacy—recognizing and working with fight-flight-freeze states.
Energetic sensitivity—understanding how touch influences more than just muscles.
Trauma-informed presence—offering a safe and attuned experience beyond physical manipulation.
Ritual and intention—honouring the sacredness of healing through presence and meaning-making.
These elements are not "extras"—they are what make hands-on healing truly powerful. They are what has been practiced in every healing tradition that existed before colonization imposed its clinical, compartmentalized framework.
This is not a call to erase modern advancements in healthcare. It is a call to reintegrate what was lost—to recognize that the most effective healing is both ancient and modern, both intuitive and evidence-informed, both spiritual and scientific.
Expanding the Role of the Massage Therapist (And Every Other Manual Therapist)
Right now, there are strict boundaries around what massage therapists (and many other hands-on practitioners) are “allowed” to do.
Stay in your lane.
Focus only on soft tissue.
Avoid anything that looks like psychology, energy work, or personal transformation.
But what if the role of a manual therapist was understood as inherently holistic?
What if we acknowledged that a person’s chronic pain cannot be fully treated without addressing their stress patterns?
What if we recognized that touch influences the nervous system as much as the musculoskeletal system?
What if we stopped pretending that people’s emotions, beliefs, and histories don’t show up in their bodies?
This doesn’t mean turning massage therapists into psychotherapists, energy healers, or spiritual guides. It means allowing them to work with the full human experience rather than being forced to deny it. It means recognizing that healing is relational, not just mechanical.
This shift would not only deepen the effectiveness of hands-on healing—it would also restore dignity to a profession that has, for too long, been forced to justify its existence through Western clinical frameworks that ignore the wisdom of centuries.
Bringing Back What Was Lost
To bring intuition, spirit, and energy awareness back into healing practices is not to reject science—it is to expand it. It is to acknowledge that humans are not just biological machines but energetic, emotional, and relational beings.
It is also a way of decolonizing healing.
For centuries, Indigenous, African, Asian, and other non-Western traditions have practiced holistic healing that integrates touch, movement, breath, spirit, and energy. These traditions were suppressed, demonized, and nearly erased by colonial forces that sought to replace them with a rigid, mechanistic view of medicine.
But these ways never truly disappeared. They live in the wisdom of those who remember, in the ancestral knowledge passed through generations, in the unspoken ways people still hold each other to heal.
A Call to the Massage Therapy Profession
Imagine if massage therapy evolved—not into something more clinical, but into something more whole.
Imagine if we trained therapists to be attuned not just to muscle tension, but to nervous system states, emotional cues, and energetic shifts.
Imagine if we encouraged practitioners to develop their own intuition alongside their technical skills.
Imagine if we normalized conversations about embodiment, self-trust, and the ways the body holds life’s experiences.
Imagine if we saw healing not just as treatment but as a return to connection—with self, with others, with spirit.
This is not a rejection of modern medicine—it is a refusal to let it be the only way.
It is an invitation to remember.
To remember that healing has always been relational.
To remember that touch has always been sacred.
To remember that we do not need permission from governing bodies to honour the full complexity of what it means to be human.
This is my wish for the profession:
To stop amputating itself from its own roots.
To stop pretending that healing is just mechanical.
To stop apologizing for the things that make it most powerful.
And to step forward—not as mere technicians of the body, but as facilitators of wholeness.
Final Reflection
This series has explored the unseen elements of what made my massage therapy practice transformational—attunement, intuition, trauma sensitivity, and a belief in wholeness. But more than that, it has been an invitation.
An invitation to practitioners, healers, and anyone who works with others in a helping capacity:
To trust your felt sense, even when the system dismisses it.
To see your clients as whole beings, not just bodies and brains to fix.
To reclaim what was lost and integrate it into modern practice.
To honour both the science and the spirit of healing.
We are at a crossroads. We can continue down the path of hyper-clinical, disembodied, mechanistic healthcare—or we can disrupt it. We can choose to reintegrate the wisdom that has always existed, the wisdom that can’t be measured in clinical trials but is felt, known, and deeply effective.
My hope is that more practitioners find the courage to embrace the full range of their gifts. Because healing, at its core, is not just about making bodies function better.
It is about making people feel connected again—to themselves, to each other, and to something greater.
And that? That changes everything.