Just Breathe Manual Therapy helps wellness-focused active adults feel more powerful & resilient by relieving pain and restoring harmony between their mind & body.
Hi <<First Name>>!
This newsletter has three big announcements!
Big News Part 1: Just Breathe Manual Therapy is now located in Arlington, Massachusetts! This means easier access for most of my current clients and more availability for sessions.
Big News Part 2: For new clients! I am now taking on new clients for March. I am offering a new-client on-ramp program made up of 3 sessions over 5 weeks for $385. If you or a friend have been on the fence, this is your time. I am only starting four new clients in the month of March. Reply to this email and we’ll get you started!
Big News Part 3: For existing clients! I’m shifting to a membership model where you’ll get either one or two 90-minutesessions per month. Members who come in regularly get the benefit of progress compounding over time. If we only see each other when something’s wrong, we’re always playing from behind. Also, members are my number one priority in terms of scheduling and availability. If you’re ready to learn more about this just shoot me a note.
Building on those three updates, the rest of this newsletter dives into why I’m making these changes. I hope you’ll choose to read it because it will help you understand not only where I’m coming from, but how having a close relationship to someone like me can literally save your life.
Thank you for joining me on this journey,
Jeff
A New Beginning.
When I opened the doors to Just Breathe Manual Therapy, I had a single mission in mind: I wanted to help people get out of pain and to restore harmony between their mind and their body.
My gut instinct was that most folks have great people in their corner: doctors, chiropractors, therapists, and coaches. What I thought people didn’t have (and that they wanted to have) was someone who could help tie all those different voices together.
Why did I have that hunch? Because I had that same experience.
In 2014, I was training my ass off as an athlete, I was working a high-stress, challenging job. I was on the edge of burning myself out.
That was when my body gave me some really clear messages that I was doing something wrong. My body just more or less failed me and I found myself in a hospital bed learning what a pulmonary embolism was (in the words of my pulmonologist, “it’s like a heart attack, but with your lungs”).
That week in the hospital and the few months of recovery that followed were a turning point in my life. In the lead-up to that hospital stay, I’d worked with my doctor on the physical symptoms I was experiencing (I will largely leave out the repeated misdiagnoses). I’d worked with a therapist to deal with the emotional challenges that came with the stress I was experiencing. I had a coach guiding my workouts. I had a chiropractor and massage therapist to help my body recover. I had an acupuncturist who was helping me keep everything together internally and energetically.
Of all of those people, it was my acupuncturist who took a step back and looked at all the factors and pointed me to the emergency room to get an ultrasound. Without exaggeration, he is the reason I am alive to tell this story.
All of this is to say that when I say I want to help people restore harmony between their mind and their body, it’s because disharmony can kill you. Every single leading cause of death in the US lists stress as a risk factor. And this says nothing about the quality of life of those who are living.
So why share this story today?
Through the survey responses I received over the past month, I learned that almost all of us experience pain and stress. Furthermore, almost universally we know those can be connected and we want them addressed together. I also learned that very few of us have someone on our care team who will take that perspective.
Through Just Breathe Manual Therapy, my aim is to help people realize that wanting a practitioner to take this kind of holistic approach is not only reasonable, but necessary. Just Breathe Manual Therapy is part of a sea-change in how we are address our health and well-being on a larger scale.
Together, we are building a movement that embraces the nuance of our lived experiences. We’re building a movement that will make us better people, partners, parents, and citizens.
Together, we’re going to change the world.
Copyright (C) 2021 Just Breathe Manual Therapy. All rights reserved.
I hope this message finds you happy and healthy and ready to open the books on a new year. This month, I want to share a recap of what 2020 meant to me and what I’m looking forward to in 2021.
Before I dive into any of that, I want to ask you a favor. In connection with an entrepreneurship program that I’m in, I put together a short survey about the health and wellness industry in the Boston area. It will take three minutes of your time and your feedback will be really helpful for the future of Just Breathe Manual Therapy. Feel free to share this survey as well – the more responses, the better!
For all the cliche comments about how 2020 was a crazy year, there’s one crazy thing that stands head and shoulders above everything else for me: Just Breathe Manual Therapy was born!
Easily, this is my most momentous event of 2020. It’s also one of the most momentous events in my life.
The birth of Just Breathe Manual Therapy is a story of liberation. For most of my life, I’d felt hemmed in by fear. A fear of failure, a fear of inadequacy, and even a fear of opening myself up to people.
In the early part of 2020, I went to Hong Kong to teach a Reflexive Performance Reset clinic and realized that the fear I felt was really just a story, and I could make the decision to leave the story behind. In Hong Kong, I learned what living without fear felt like. It felt free, it felt powerful, and it felt natural.
When I returned, I had a burning fire to continue living with this feeling of freedom and to help people start to feel it as well. With my background in massage therapy and the work I’d done in studying the disciplines of psychology and neuroscience, I saw that I could help people make massive changes in their lives by helping them find some of that freedom in themselves.
In April, I gave it a name. In May, I began to take on remote clients. In July, I started seeing people in person. In August, I opened my location in Lawrence.
Since opening the doors, I’ve helped dozens of people start to feel more at home in their body. I’ve witnessed people realize for the first time in twenty years that it’s possible to be out of pain. I’ve seen people begin to move past traumatic events from their younger days. I’ve seen people realize the possibilities that exist in their lives that they didn’t know were there.
As I shift my gaze toward 2021, I see evolution. The work of Just Breathe Manual Therapy is only beginning. There is big news which I’ll announce in January. I’ll continue to add more clarity to how I believe this work can fit into your life and make it easier for us to work together. Above all, I will continue to learn and practice so that I can serve you better. If I preach change and progress, I need to live those principles as well. Together, we can make 2021 the best year of your life.
The Podcast
Here are two recent episodes of Hands At The Table that are worth highlighting.
Episode 14 – Talking Books: Job’s Body. For Bori, the book Job’s Body was a turning point in how she saw the intersection of science and spirit. The interweaving of hard and soft sciences is at the heart of what makes great manual therapists. This book presents those two worlds in a way that makes them easy to hold together without the false assumption that to believe one is to dismiss the other. Holding those two together are at the heart of what drive the intense curiosity that Bori and I share.
Episode 15 – Stand Up for COVID. Despite the title, this solo episode with Bori is not just about COVID so much as it is about realizing your self-worth. Through the lens of how people have responded to the pandemic, Bori explores how we can learn to set boundaries and how sometimes we need to have a line crossed to realize how important those lines really can be.
Cause Of The Month
Each month, I contribute 10% of Just Breathe Manual Therapy’s gross revenue to causes that are making a difference.
GiveWell is a charitable fund which vets specific charities and ensures the highest impact of each dollar given and largely focuses on childhood vaccinations and malaria prevention.
While in the past and future, my focus will be on organizations who serve closer to home, I chose GiveWell because through their partnership with the podcast 99 Percent Invisible, the donation will be doubled.
Copyright (C) 2020 Just Breathe Manual Therapy. All rights reserved.
Hi <<First Name>>, Welcome to the first Just Breathe Manual Therapy monthly newsletter! I’m going to use this short monthly message to share the news at JBMT (including the cause of the month), what’s on my mind (and how it might help you), and one awesome story from a client.
Before we dive in, starting in January I’ll be offering online classes focusing on how we can develop habits that set us up for success in our lives. I’m really proud of how these are shaping up, so keep your eyes peeled. The first people who will know about it are people on this email list, so please pass this along to anyone who needs that help in their lives.
Stay well and see you soon, Jeff
What’s New
It’s been one hell of an autumn. Here’s what’s been going on.
Gift Certificates You asked, I (finally) answered! Just in time for the holidays, you can purchase a Just Breathe Manual Therapy session for your friends and family! Click the button below to purchase and I’ll reach out to make the gift package something special!
Website Relaunch Two weeks ago, I relaunched JustBreatheManualTherapy.com. As it develops, it will be the hub for all of my work – my writing, the podcast, and upcoming group classes I’ll be offering. Keep an eye out there.
Cause Of The Month Did you know that each month I donate 10% of total revenue to a cause whose impact is meaningful to me? In the month of December, the organization I’ve chosen to partner with the Merrimack Valley Food Bank. Since 1991, the MVFB has been on the front lines of combating food insecurity. Through a variety of programs, the food bank provides food for between 65,000 and 70,000 families on a monthly basis.
What’s On My Mind
Responding vs Reacting This has been a chew toy of mine for quite a while. Victor Frankl says that the space between an input and reaction is where humanity is found. That sounds really elegant and beautiful, and it’s amazing when you really put it into action. When we can find space in our minds to think reflect on a situation before jumping in – choosing to respond, rather than react – we can see the world as a much more welcoming place. What’s the best tool we have to choose response over reaction? Our breath. I shot a short video about it on my instagram recently. Give it a look here.
The Psoas A recent episode of a podcast I really enjoy called The Thinking Practitioner spent an episode talking about the positives and negatives of psoas work in a therapeutic setting. The hosts did a great job of covering the considerations worth taking and balancing risks against the possible benefits. Psoas work is a key to the work I do with Just Breathe Manual Therapy, and for a number of reasons. The psoas is one of our first muscles that we need to learn how to use developmentally, and as our primary hip flexor it fills the most important conscious role in our survival. On Hands at the Table, the podcast I cohost with fellow massage therapist Bori Suranyi, we took on the psoas and how it factors in with our work. You can check that episode out here.
One Awesome Story
Melody owns two small businesses, is a mother of two, and leads an incredibly active lifestyle. Here’s how she felt after our second session together.
