Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/918051
28 m a s s a g e & b o d y w o r k j a n u a r y / f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 28 m a s s a g e & b o d y w o r k j a n u a r y / f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 SAVVY SELF-CARE best practices Living Loving Kindness By Heath and Nicole Reed Heath and Nicole Reed here as your new Savvy Self-Care guides, and we're inviting you to join us on a practical journey of self-care—a voyage where you can experiment with your practice to experience greater amounts of vitality, positivity, and friendliness. On this journey, we will explore the essential nutrients that have fueled our thriving and resilient bodywork practice for over 17 years. Just like the necessary sustenance provided from eating food and breathing air, these essential nutrients both nourish us and have the potential to expand our capacity to feel good in our bodies, minds, hearts, and spirits for longer periods of time. When considering self-care, many people focus on safe ways to move, massage, and exercise their physical bodies. These are important approaches, though we also emphasize the powerful impact of choosing to nourish our body intelligence, befriending the continuous waves of all our emotions, and appreciating how we direct the focus of our thoughts. Savvy Self-Care advocates generating a variety of feedback loops that create possibilities and collaboration with the events going on inside and outside of us in ways that feel simple, easy, and fun! LIVING LABORATORIES Over the years, we have cultivated a daily practice of self-care that relies on experimentation. We notice that ideas don't have meaning or impact until they are experienced. Therefore, regular experimentation is a fulcrum by which we constantly test what serves and works best for us in the present moment. We have found this experimental attitude has opened us up to more possibilities than we previously imagined, and we are excited to share these tools with you. As a result of our daily experimentation, our work, play, and relationships have become "living laboratories" where we seek to generate more aliveness and zest. And just like any empirical scientific study, we emphasize approaching life, ideas, and situations as opportunities to test out different practices and notice if the results of our living laboratory are in alignment with what we most want. If we like the results, we practice these more often, and if we don't, we simply let them go without criticism. Since we started dating 20-plus years ago, we have been exploring the essential nutrients to a thriving relationship. Experimenting in the living laboratories of our relationship, as well as in our bodywork practices, we have discovered this most essential nutrient: our ability to practice loving kindness. In fact, our company's name, Living Metta, is inspired by our many trips to Thailand, where we were introduced to the Thai word metta, meaning "loving kindness." For us, loving kindness is the architecture of our living laboratory. And we fortify this architecture with a self-care practice that is friendly, fun, and compassionate.