Creating Peace with Your Hands

Imagine giving your clients massage therapy and bodywork all day, and you're the one, the massage therapist, that gets injured. That's author Karina Braun's experience in " Creating Peace with Your Hands: The Therapist's Survival Guide for a Healthy Career " (ISBN 978-0-9816199-1-0), a personal account of her experience with a work-related injury. She experienced an injury to both her ankles and lumbar spine while performing barefoot compression massage, an injury that took three years to recover from. Taking body mechanics into consideration, this experience led her to write a book to help others going through the pain and suffering and hopefully to help others prevent themselves or lessen the chances of a prolong injury due to performing massage therapy on their clients.

Not only is the book about prevention but also a step-by-step guide on what to do if an injury occurs, therefore, Braun announces that her book can help all fields of bodywork practitioners currently in demand from yoga instructors, massage therapist to chiropractors.

Braun seamlessly weaves her personal experiences with a spiritual-practice, holistic approach to prevention and healing. Themes such as body mechanics, proper technique, yoga, and nutrition are important according to Braun to maintain balance, relieve stressful movements, and to help speed up healing. According to Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, bodyworkers and massage therapists suffer from a high rate of work-related injuries, approximately 78% percent of them have had a work-related injury at least once in their career.

Readers are invited to consider that bodyworkers are like athletes requiring endurance and strength to do the physical work required to perform massage therapy and bodywork. Every chapter in this 200-page book contains prevention tips as well as illustrations for corrective techniques that help alleviate acute and chronic pain, identify stress patterns to reduce muscle tension. Braun offers ideas on increasing and improving circulation and flexibility as well as helps relax the entire body.

Creating Peace with Your Hands is an inspiring and essential book for each student and experienced bodyworker.