09/26/2026
Hey friends and family.....its been a minute since I've posted. I've been trying to figure out how to move forward with all the changes at the office. I've met so many new clients and I've relaized many of you have reached out for massage, but how do I share what we offer and how I got here......so here we are!
Before you read this one, I want to invite you to slow down for just a few minutes.
This isn’t a post about a new service or something I’m trying to sell you. It’s a little more personal than that.
Maybe grab your coffee or tea, find a comfortable place and give yourself a few quiet minutes to read. You may recognize a little bit of your own story somewhere in mine.
I’ve spent more than two decades working with the human body, but some of my greatest lessons haven’t come from a textbook, continuing education class or treatment room. They’ve come from being the patient, experiencing pain, navigating loss, learning to live with grief and realizing how deeply our experiences can shape the way we move through life.
So this is an invitation to sit with me for a few minutes while I share a little more about how I got here, why Renew Wellness has continued to evolve and why I’ve come to believe so strongly that sometimes we need to look beyond the place that hurts.
🙌It Was Never Just a Massage🙌
If you’ve been with Renew Wellness for a while, you’ve probably heard me say that where it hurts isn’t always where the problem begins...
...Usually I’m talking about the body. A hip that hurts because something isn’t moving well somewhere else. A shoulder that’s doing more work than it should. A knee that has been compensating for years. But the longer I’ve worked with people, and the more life I’ve lived myself, the more I’ve realized those words can mean something much bigger. Sometimes we have to look beyond the place that hurts. Sometimes we have to look at the whole person.
If you want to understand why I practice the way I do today, I think you have to understand a little bit about how I got here. My journey into healthcare didn’t begin with massage. It began long before Renew Wellness existed.
When I was a freshman in college, I experienced sudden and incredibly painful losses. My life changed in ways I wasn’t prepared for, and eventually I made the decision to take a year away from college to focus on healing. At that age, you think life is supposed to follow a certain path. College, career, adulthood. Then something happens that completely changes the direction you thought you were going.
Eventually, I went back to school. I pursued my education to become a Physical Therapist Assistant, earned my license and began working in outpatient therapy and skilled nursing. I loved learning about the body. I loved figuring out why someone wasn’t moving the way they wanted to. I loved helping people regain pieces of their independence. But while I was learning how to help other people’s bodies, I was also trying to understand my own.
For years, I had dealt with significant pain from endometriosis. Once I finished school, secured my first job and established care with a new doctor, I was finally able to start getting that pain under better control. Then life handed me another lesson. An incident at work resulted in a herniated disc, and suddenly the PTA became the patient.
I went through physical therapy myself. I understood the exercises. I understood the anatomy. I understood what my therapists were trying to accomplish. But being on the other side of treatment changed something in me. I began noticing how much what I did outside of physical therapy mattered. How I moved mattered. How I rested mattered. What made me feel confident enough to move again mattered. What made me guard mattered. What scared me mattered.
Recovery wasn’t something that happened during one appointment and stopped when I walked out the door. Neither was pain.
Years later, I could slightly tweak my back and immediately feel more than the physical sensation. There was fear attached to it. That instant thought of, “Oh no. Not again.” Anyone who has experienced a significant injury may understand that feeling. Your mind remembers what happened the last time. Your nervous system recognizes something familiar and may respond before you even know how serious, or minor, the new irritation actually is.
That experience stayed with me.
Eventually my professional journey led me to massage therapy. On paper, Physical Therapist Assistant and Massage Therapist may look like two different chapters of my career. For me, they became layers. My PTA background taught me to assess. Massage taught me to feel. Continuing education taught me to keep asking questions. And life taught me to listen.
That is probably the simplest explanation I can give for the way I work today. I listen. Not only to what someone’s tissues feel like beneath my hands. I listen to the person attached to them.
I’ve heard the words, “No one has ever asked me that,” more times than I can count. Usually I haven’t asked some profound question. A client may tell me their back hurts and the pain goes down their leg, but nobody can tell them why. Someone else may tell me their knee still hurts. They’ve done the injections. They’ve done therapy. Now surgery is being discussed because they still don’t have the range of motion everyone wants them to have. Another person may simply say, “I’ve hurt for years.”
Of course I want to know about their symptoms. But somewhere in that conversation, I may ask, “How are you doing?” Or I might ask, “What was happening when this originally started?”
Sometimes that one question changes the entire conversation.
I remember a story about a knee injury. What initially sounded like a musculoskeletal complaint had happened during an incredibly frightening event. This person had their baby in their arms and nearly fell through a glass window. They protected their child and themselves, but their knee was injured in the process.
Years later, the knee was still part of their story. But when we talked about what had actually happened that day, something else appeared. Fear, guilt, emotion and tears. Suddenly I wasn’t only hearing, “My knee hurts.” I was hearing, “Something terrifying happened to me while I was trying to protect my baby.”
Those are two very different stories.
The physical injury was real. The emotions surrounding the experience were real, too. That doesn’t mean every painful knee has an emotional cause. It doesn’t mean massage replaces medical care, and it certainly doesn’t mean pain is all in someone’s head. It means we are human beings, not isolated body parts. Our experiences can become part of the way we understand and respond to our bodies.
Then, in January, I lost my dad.
Grief taught me another lesson about the body because it didn’t arrive in a neat little box labeled Dad, January, grief. Other things surfaced with it. Emotions connected to losses I experienced back in 2001. Memories of my injury in 2007. Even feelings surrounding throwing my back out again while moving into my current office in 2023. Things I hadn’t consciously thought about in years suddenly felt closer.
It made me realize how often we talk about grief as though we’re supposed to experience a loss, mourn for an acceptable amount of time and then return to normal life. Society gives us a few days, maybe a week, and then somehow we are expected to go back to life as it was.
But it isn’t the same.
It never will be.
The normal you knew before the loss is no longer your normal. You’re learning how to exist in a life where someone you love is no longer physically present. Yet the world keeps moving. Appointments happen. Bills come. Work resumes. Groceries still need to be bought. Eventually people stop asking how you’re doing.
But your world is different. You are different.
I don’t share this because I want sympathy. I share it because it has changed me. It has changed how I understand the people who walk through my door, and it has changed what the word healing means to me.
We sometimes talk about the human body like it’s a car. Something hurts, so find the broken part, fix it and move on. But pain is much more complex than that. The brain and nervous system are involved in our experience of pain. Previous injuries, stress, fear, sleep, movement, physical tissues and our individual experiences can all influence what we feel and how we respond.
Our nervous systems learn. They protect us. Sometimes that protection is incredibly helpful. Sometimes we continue to guard an area long after the immediate danger has passed.
That doesn’t mean emotions are literally trapped inside individual cells waiting for someone to release them. It means what we’ve lived through can influence how we experience our bodies today. Sometimes part of moving forward is giving ourselves an opportunity to feel safe enough to soften.
This is where frequency has become another important piece of my journey and of what we do at Renew Wellness.
As Renew Wellness has grown, many of you have watched the office change. Some of you may have wondered what a Sound Lounge has to do with massage. Why Low Level Light Therapy? Why a PEMF mat? Why sound? Why vibration? Why frequency?
To me, these aren’t random services I’ve collected. They are another layer of the same journey.
The human body is an incredibly complex electrical, chemical and biological system. Our cells communicate with one another, and our nervous system is constantly receiving and interpreting information from both inside and outside our bodies. Light is input. Touch is input. Sound is input. Movement is input. Electromagnetic fields are another form of input. Vibration is input.
Our Low Level Light Therapy, Pulsed Electromagnetic Field mat and Sound Lounge each work differently, and they shouldn’t be lumped together as though they’re the same treatment. But there is a common thread in why I chose to bring them into Renew Wellness.
Sometimes the body doesn’t need more force. Sometimes it needs a different kind of input. Sometimes it simply needs an opportunity to become still.
Before I brought the Sound Lounge into Renew Wellness, I experienced it myself, and I wasn’t prepared for what that experience would mean to me. This was during a year when I was carrying grief, growing a business, taking care of clients and continuing to show up for life while trying to understand a life that suddenly looked very different without my dad physically in it.
Then, for a little while, I became still.
There was sound. There was vibration. There was no phone. There were no responsibilities. There was nothing I needed to fix.
My mind became quieter. My breathing slowed. My shoulders relaxed. I experienced emotions I hadn’t necessarily given myself the space to experience.
That mattered to me.
Since bringing the Sound Lounge to Renew Wellness, I’ve begun hearing clients tell me their own stories. Some have noticed changes in concerns they’ve dealt with for a very long time. Some describe profound relaxation. Some become emotional. Others simply get up and say, “I didn’t realize how much I needed that.”
And some simply enjoy 22 minutes of sound and vibration.
Every experience doesn’t have to be profound. I think that is incredibly important to say.
I’m not interested in promising that a certain frequency will magically heal an injury, erase grief or release trauma. That isn’t what this is about. For me, it is about creating an environment where someone has permission to stop. To become quiet. To notice. To breathe. To experience their body without constantly asking it to perform.
We hear the word homeostasis when talking about the body’s drive toward internal balance, and I think about that concept often. Not as a promise that I can put someone on a PEMF mat, use light therapy, play a particular frequency or perform a massage and magically return their body to some perfect baseline. Human beings are far too complex for that.
Instead, I think about what I can provide.
Can I create an environment that supports relaxation? Can I introduce different therapeutic inputs without always forcing change? Can I give someone permission to be still? Can I help someone become more aware of what their body is communicating? Can I listen when they tell me their story? And when something is outside my scope, can I recognize that and encourage them to seek the appropriate healthcare professional?
That is whole-person wellness to me.
Sometimes when you come to Renew Wellness, you really do just want a massage. And I love that. You don’t need to uncover something. You don’t need to cry. You don’t need to tell me your life story. You don’t need to turn relaxation into work. You can simply come in, get on my table and enjoy your massage.
But sometimes there is more to the story.
And if there is, I want you to know there is room for that, too.
Maybe that’s why I don’t automatically start where you point and say, “It hurts here.” Maybe that’s why I ask questions. Maybe that’s why my treatment room now exists alongside PEMF, Low Level Light Therapy and a Sound Lounge. And maybe that’s why Renew Wellness has continued evolving right along with me.
After more than two decades of working with the human body, and after experiencing loss, chronic pain, injury, rehabilitation and grief myself, I’ve learned that I don’t have to have every answer.
Sometimes I need to ask a better question. Sometimes I need to use my hands. Sometimes I need to introduce a different modality. And sometimes I simply need to listen.
Because when you walk through my door, I don’t see a bad knee. I don’t see a herniated disc. I don’t see a tight shoulder. I don’t see an appointment on my schedule.
I see a person.
A person with a history and experiences. A person who may be hurting. A person who may simply be exhausted. A person who may just want an hour of peace. And a person whose story deserves to be heard.
That is how I got here.
That is why Renew Wellness has become what it is today.
And that is why, for me, it was never just a massage.
Relax • Reset • Renew
Your Mind • Body • Soul
Kristina
Renew Wellness
