SA
One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you was because you have such a holistic understanding of the body, because, I wanna get this right, you’ve had Ankylosing spondylitis since you were a teenager?
F
Right, and because of how long I’ve had it, at first it wasn’t even clear what it was. It was first a holistic chiropractor who identified it, and then later an MD.
SA
And what was the diagnosis from that?
F
Well that’s the diagnosis, the chiropractor called it Marie Stumpell disease, which I guess is a very old way of identifying it. Or, a common way of identifying it.
SA
And living with this, I imagine, has helped you a lot with understanding how to prepare holistically, for your clients, and to help you understand maybe the deeper elements—
F
Well that’s why, when I decided to try to move from being just disabled and go back to work, it was in no small part inspired by years of physical therapy, medical care, had a little bit of acupuncture and massage. So I wanted to see if I could do something good I guess, something with the knowledge that I had.
SA
Was there a turning point for you, where you felt like this made sense?
F
All throughout school, part of it was learning from my classmates, who didn’t know how I was doing what I was doing. I had one friend who said— “I didn’t see it happening, I didn’t see how you would finish school.”
SA
Wow, why?
F
Because when I first started school, my posture was more like this — it was very difficult to even have a straight, forward head appearance because of the way my posture would change from arthritis. It changed in no small part, with lots and lots of acupuncture. It’s really been a combination of west and east for me.
SA
So east, with acupuncture … What would you include massage in?
F
Um, so straightforward massage, Swedish massage is helpful, like what they do at Swedish Institute, because even there now, they teach, they have more emphasis on Thai and Shiatsu. Pacific College of Health and Science, formerly Pacific College of Oriental Medicine, that’s what they did differently, they always taught the Asian body work—Thai, Shiatsu, etc. So I learned it as a way to create an integrated style. That’s the only thing I knew, because of how I was taught. We’re taught acupoints for massage therapists, and within that curriculum at Pacific College, they teach east/west courses that cover basic Chinese medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, so at the end of a year and a half, two years of our education, a massage therapist should have an understanding of the five elements, the elements of Chinese medicine work, and a rudimentary understanding of the channels of chinese medicine work.
SA
Can you explain to me the five elements are?
F
Right, wood, fire, water, metal, and what did I leave out? And earth.
SA
And what do they each correlate to?
F
So wood is the liver and the gallbladder. Fire is the heart, the cardium channel, the small intestine channel. Water is the kidney and urinary bladder, metal is the large intestine, and Earth is the stomach. They break those two extra into fire, that’s what comprises the twelve channels. Because fire has three organs, versus the others that have two.
SA
So what is the synthesis of these many different styles of medicine and learning that you’ve created, how do you feel like that helps the body in your opinion?
F
Well, that we’re all both physical and energetic beings. Especially in New York State, massage therapists have to get a little over eleven hundred hours, and an individual is taught both the Western science, so as an individual practitioner you understand the science of what you’re doing when you’re moving circulation, moving blood, and manipulating bone. For example, I’m doing rib compressions. I have to understand that this is a very delicate structure, and if I compress more than just a little, I can cause somebody great harm. I can crack the ribs, the ribs can go into the lungs, lungs can puncture. It can go from something very easy, superficial, feels good, to something very horrible. So the education for massage therapists is in part, how to keep the client safe, how their basic body systems work. Same with the Chinese medicine aspect, or the asian medicine aspect, which is how the body works but from an energetic perspective that’s been studied for thousands of years. What’s often lost in the west about acupuncture, that it’s a very ancient modality with lots and lots of experience underneath it. And in modern times the chinese government actually does a lot of studying, but in the west sometimes the studies are not looked at as authoritative.
SA
To anybody who might not, I mean I’ve come across this a lot, even people I know who might be interested and have come across these sort of modalities, to them acupuncture feels so foreign, how do you explain that to anybody…
F
We have lines of energy in our body, we’re physical and energetic, Chinese medicine has discovered that these lines of energy have a back and forth, a two and fro, and they go up a circuit, and when that energy is blocked or stagnant, not just the flow of our energy but the flow of fluid, of water, the flow of blood. They’re given many iterations, like phlegm. We think of phlegm as something that comes out of our face. In Chinese medicine that could be anything that’s fogging, the phlegm of the mind. They’ve understood there has to be a free flow of fluid, energy, blood, etc. If that circuit is free flowing, the healthier the person is. The more stagnant it is, the more deeply pathogenic it can become. In Chinese medicine a pathogen is not just an infectious pathogen, it can be a behavior, the wind with our neck exposed, the wind hitting our open pores can be a pathogen.
SA
Yeah, it’s like the mysteries of the body and the mysteries of ourselves are explained through these ancient modalities.
F
Right, they’re seemingly unafraid to speak about things that are kinda weird about the human experience. In the west, if you ask a doctor and they don’t know, they’ll tell you they don’t know or they’ll come up with a theory, but they’re very reluctant to speak in esoteric terms. Even though, human life is in part very esoteric.
SA
Exactly. What have been some surprising elements of this work for you, as a massage therapist, have you had any breakthroughs when working with people?
F
Most surprising this is how disparate parts of the human body are. I constantly bring up the children’s song, the “head bone is connected to the tail bone,” you can touch places that have the weirdest connections, somebody’s hip thinking, or no, it was their shoulder, I’m thinking, I’m getting nowhere with this shoulder, and they would also complain about hip pain. I went to work on the hip pain, with seeming satisfaction with that, went back to the shoulder, and the shoulder was completely open. It was my first year, I was like, I don’t understand! But then, we have a shoulder girdle, we have a pelvic girdle, so that interrelation, it’s not something that’s immediately clear. If somebody has a stiff hip, they might have a stiff shoulder. If you have a stiff ankle you might have a stiff neck because of the way we move.
SA
That’s something I’ve learned a lot. I think this is the beauty of, and also what I’m trying to explore with you, the way that somatic healing breaks through layers of trapped knowledge, or trapped information in our bodies, things that we’ve accumulated over our lives, and all of a sudden something in your body can let go and you can understand things more clearly. It doesn’t make any sense but—
F
Yeah, one of the things I appreciate about essential oils is that because I’ve had that experience where I’m in palpation just trying work with the client, and it’s so stiff, I have an idea about what I’m gonna do but I’m like wow, this is really tense, I give a person a mixed blend of essential oils to inhale, the one I create uniquely for an individual, and go back to palpation, and their body is softer. Just the inhalation of a pleasant aroma, changes the physical body. It’s the interaction between the lymphatic brain, or the emotional center, so something happens for some people when they inhale that aroma that’s pleasant, that can change their whole physical experience in seconds. It isn’t a cure, but in that session, any change that’s for the positive, is a positive. It is a mystery, because you could follow the logic and the science of how aroma flows, but that doesn’t completely answer how the rapidity of how someone can find relief from inhaling a pleasant aroma. There’s something deeper going on there.
SA
Yeah, I’ve never seen someone work with essential oils like you do, can you talk to me a little about how you came about understanding their use?
F
Well that’s also part of the massage therapy education at Pacific College, and I learned from a very gifted practitioner named Marc Gian, he’s both a massage therapist and an acupuncture specialist, he’s also a dream specialist, and my mentor. His mentor is a guy named Jefferey Yuen, who’s a worldwide renowned lecturer and healer and acupuncturist extraordinaire. What Jeffrey Yuen discovered is that the essential oils were a part of chinese medicine. He did scholarly work called Materia Medica. So he studied about 80 oils, using Chinese medicine concerns, parameters for data, and connected these 80 oils or so, to the practice of Chinese medicine, and by the time my mentor is learning from his mentor, and me from him, we’re understanding that – in Chinese medicine, each level of a fragrance matches to a healing level. Once you’ve matched the healing levels, once you’ve learned the safety concerns and what each oil does, you can start applying a very rudimentary chinese medicine principle to the essential oil you want to use. Depending on what a person’s feeling, happy, sad, and everything in between, they tell you how their emotions are, whether or not they’ve been sleeping, any little thing, the oils aren’ a cure but they can help a person tap into themselves. And essentially deal with themselves. So they seem to open a pathway into healing by getting us in touch with ourselves.
SA
Did that encourage you to study the oils as well?
F
Well it was part of the curriculum and then I got attached to the subject. And then I went from being a student, to a licensed practitioner, to a teaching assistant. Then I wound up teaching with, and working for, Marc Gian—and eventually now I’m teaching the course.
SA
What’s it like teaching the course?
F
It’s pretty fulfilling work to be able to teach people that essential oils are a tool that can help make a massage or even an acupuncture therapist more effective. It’s distinct, but since it’s from plants, the earth, connected to us — there’s this affinity between people and plants. In Chinese medicine there’s something called the Jing, it’s our life essence, and there’s a theory that essential oils are that life essence of a plant. So it’s the Jing of the plant connecting with the Jing of the human being.
SA
How many oils do you work with usually?
F
I try to keep my blends limited to three to five oils for a client if I’m doing something particular. The idea is to create a blend that’s complementary to the functions of the oils, coinciding with what’s happening with the client that day. Not creating a blend where the ingredients cancel each other out. So, peppermint and ginger are hot and cold, why put them together, they’re cancelling each other out. Not to mention they’re going to be very intense on the skin.
SA
Do you have like, miracle, go to essential oils, for specific things?
F
The closest thing to a miracle essential oil is frankincense, but it comes with the caveat of, we’re destroying the planet. So frankincense is truly an ancient healer, There was this story in Oman, how a writer went on this trip, and by the time they got to the trees, you would’ve thought the plants were safe because they’re so difficult to get to, meanwhile, they’re over-harvested. So as this ancient healer is becoming over-harvested, the one hope is, people are realizing, why don’t we just make orchards of these healing trees? Instead of wiping out their ancient brethren. The question is, will these orchards be created, and allow the ancient tree fields to survive? Because right now, it’s a contest.
SA
Because it’s becoming more and more commercialized.
F
Yeah, there was an article I read, where it was a part time family tradition. Like going back generations, maybe hundreds of years, if not thousands. And that person was doing it more often, because it’s just so lucrative. It’s become very lucrative, but at the same time, they’re worried about the future of the tree. So it’s created a dichotomy where people need income to survive versus these trees that they love.
SA
Yeah, and this oversaturation of the market.
F
When I first started teaching the course, aromatherapy and essential oils was 5% of the market. Now it’s already up to 16%. So it’s tripled in a very short amount of time, and if it keeps growing, exponentially, I don’t know how the oil business will survive, unless it’s all controlled planting grounds. Because the wild growing, the organic growing, will get harder to exist with that much pressure on nature.
SA
You bring up something that I think about, today even, for example, the ethical concerns of burning Palo Santo, and I think it’s a similar thing, of what you were saying about frankincense, what are our options, just to use it less?
F
That’s something I’ve been doing, using it sparingly, if I use it, I’ll use it well. There’s a purveyor called Sunrose Aromatics in Maine, and they sell the Indian strain of frankincense that’s been grown in an orchard. So I’m gonna order that and try that, it’s not the ancient strain, but it’s still frankincense.
SA
What is frankincense good for, by the way?
F
About everything! So it’s a vulnerary—that term means it’s a healing agent, and helps break down scar tissue, and it’ll close a wound and help it heal. I can fall and bang my head, and put frankincense on it and it’ll heal in half the time.
SA
You’re kidding
F
It’s anti inflammatory, it’s generally benefitting towards the skin, it’s antispasmodic, it’s an antidepressant, it’s a sedative, in Chinese medicine terms it calms the mind, it’s an immunostimulant, its an expectorant – that means it has an affinity for the lungs. It smooths and improves the flow of chi, which means it can help relieve pain, it has a kind of mysterious analgesic quality. Because in Chinese medicine, stagnation is what is causing pain, so frankincense improves the flow of chi, which can help degrade pain.
There are consequences for our choices in healing. One of my favorite oils ever is rosewood. A South American tree, mostly found in the Amazon rainforest. Well, that’s part of deforestation. There’s a purveyor down there called Enfleurage. Very ethical. They only source their rosewood from places that don’t do deforestation, or rosewood trees. So if one chooses rosewood, because it’s also a healing essential oil, you have to make sure you’re not part of the problem by getting rosewood from deforested trees. Because the only place to source rosewood is from the center of the tree.
Oregon lavender, is maybe not as nice as French lavender, but you know you’re supporting a local farmer in the United States, they’re growing it in a field, a pretty basic way of growing. So that would be one way of sourcing an essential oil that somebody wants — know where it comes from. Enfleurage.com and Sunrose Aromatics are two places to start.
Fabian Fernandez is an integrative health practitioner offering therapeutic massage based on Western massage science and the basic tenets of traditional Chinese medicine. Combined with aromatherapy and energy work (Reiki) Fabian’s bodywork empowers patients and clients to maintain their health and enjoy life.