Empowering others through Self-Care

Self-care: You need to take care of yourself, in order to empower others to take care of themselves.

After 5 years of being a very productive physical therapist doing a lot of manual therapy all day, I started feeling the aches and pains of over using my body to make other bodies feel better. One day I was driving home from work, my neck was so wrenched up creating a severe headache that I could barely drive. I hit a bump just right, jarred my neck and I threw up. At that moment I began to realize I needed to start taking better care of myself. The next day I talked to my mom and she was very concerned about how bad my neck had gotten since a former sports injury in high school. She stated “Have you ever thought about seeing a chiropractor?” That one question changed everything for me. I came to terms with the fact that I was good at making other people feel better, but I wouldn’t be able to do that very long unless I started to take of myself. I knew that if I could make other people’s necks feel better, I could make my own neck better. I just needed to take the time to take care of me, and adapt all of the techniques I used on other people to taking care of myself. So from that day on I have been creating and practicing self care techniques, exercises, and corrections to improve my posture, flexibility, and mobility.

 For the past 6 years, I have successfully improved my posture, flexibility, and almost eliminated my headaches while developing an amazing mind body connection. Once I found over time my collection of ZenShuk self care techniques, exercises, and corrections successfully working for me, I started to share them with patients teaching and empowering them to take care of themselves. It has been truly amazing how well my patients have responded. They are so grateful to be taught ways to take care of themselves at home. The techniques have allowed patients that felt they had no control over the pain in their body to start having control and no longer be dependent on others to make themselves feel better. It has also allowed for a quicker recovery than just having manual therapy performed two to three times a week on them. Instead they can do the manual therapy corrections multiple times a day whenever they need to, minimizing the amount of time in pain and improving rehabilitation outcomes.