That one-word mantra has big meaning for Bev Gunter. Owner of Soothing Sessions, a massage and bodywork practice on East Main Street, Bev learned the importance of proper breathing in her early 40s. Her husband had just died, and she found relief in massage and craniosacral therapy.
“It releases energy blockages in your body,” she explains about craniosacral therapy, which she offers with other kinds of massage at Soothing Sessions. “That’s the type of stuff I never believed in until I experienced it, did the work and saw the results.”
Craniosacral therapy and correct breathing launched her from a career in banking and a snack distributorship she owned with her husband to enrollment in Mt. Nittany Institute of Natural Health in State College, Pennsylvania, near the town where she lived. Eleven years later, she’s a nationally certified massage therapist and wellness consultant, remarried and living in Lexington, near her sisters.
Bev’s hundreds of clients call her “Magic Hands.” She and her assistants, Paul Miller and Sheila Presson, practice integrative massage, which allows them to offer different techniques – Swedish, Deep Tissue, Trigger Point, Neuromuscular – as they notice their clients’ needs. Their newest service is Massage Cupping, an ancient technique that uses glass cups to draw out congestion and muscle knots, break down cellulite, and soften and erase stretch marks. “It’s vacuum therapy,” she says. “It does the opposite of what we’re normally doing, which is pushing in with our hands.”
But breathing right is a must. People who don’t get enough oxygen frequently carry stress in their shoulders, resulting in neck-and-shoulder stiffness. “Their bodies are hard as a rock,” Bev notes. “Their tissues need to be softer. They’re sore, tender, they can’t move right.”
Just as she knows to pay attention to what her clients need, she knows to be mindful of her breathing. “As we get older, we forget how to breathe,” she says. “Little babies’ stomachs go up and down. We, as adults, breathe from our chests.”
Healthy breathing prompts relaxation, calm, and good health, Bev instructs. “Deep breath in and deep breath out.”
