Know Your Therapist–Shaila Suleman, LMT

Know Your Therapist is your chance to meet our great licensed massage therapists and help you decide which one will best suit you. You might even learn something about the therapist you’re already seeing. Our therapists love building long term relationships with their clients and getting to know their specific needs.

By the way, do you have a favorite therapist at The Good Life Massage? Leave us a review, and make sure to mention them by name. Your review will help others find the treatment they need from the therapist who’s right for them. Plus, it’s a great way to say thank you for a job well done.

Today we’d like to introduce you to Shaila (Shy-luh) Suleman, LMT. She’s early in her massage career, but wow, do we feel lucky to be in on the ground floor! She does outstanding work, and we’re confident she’ll only get better. Shaila’s style is extremely versatile. Her skill and sensitivity will have you rolling off the table in a relaxed, euphoric haze. So let’s get to know her better! You can read the interview below, or watch the video.

Book your next massage with Shaila now!

So, first tell us about yourself. What do you enjoy doing outside of work?
I really like to go hiking as a hobby. I like being outdoors and I love just enjoying natural beauty at its best. I like hanging out with my friends and family when I can.

How did you get involved in massage? Tell us about the journey that lead you to GLM.
I started massage school back last year. I’ve always been interested in the body and how the body works, as well as different medical conditions. So, I went to school and I started learning about different modalities and practices: chinese cupping, gua sha treatment, moxibustion, Thai massage, and a couple of different other modalities. It just fascinates me so much that all these modalities work towards making your body better and helping improve the status of your health. So, I enjoy doing that and learning more, and getting that ancient wisdom and knowledge.

What do you like about this job? What gets you excited to work with your clients?
What really excites me about work is just seeing people smile and happy after a massage, and knowing that I helped contribute to that–I helped contribute to them becoming happier and healthier and just helping people in general. Because there are so many things in the world that can cause people to be sad or upset or stressed, and I get to be part of that one thing that makes things better for them.

What makes your massage style unique?
I like using a lot of deep pressure. I like using mostly treatment work, but I’ve been told by numerous people that I have healing hands, a healing touch. So, my spectrum of massage goes from very light pressure and really relaxing and soothing to treatment and therapeutic deep pressure.

Pick a superpower: flight or invisibility. Explain your answer.
Out of the superpowers between flying and invisibility, I would choose invisibility. The reason why I like the concept of invisibility is that You can hide away from things! With invisibility, it can be very beneficial to observe and watch things without interferrupting the status or the way things are.

What’s your favorite health habit?
I practice hot yoga in the mornings. I go and do hot yoga for an hour, and it really just helps get my muscles relaxed while being able to stretch further than you can normally stretch. I do practice the modalities I mentioned. I practice cupping on myself, an do practice mostly stretching.

Is there a client you’ve worked with in the past who really stands out in your memory?
When I was in massage school I had a client that I worked on for the first time and she was very sensitive to touch, and she had a couple of health issues regarding her legs. Pressure was a constant problem for her. I wanted to do treatment work and I was used to going in really deep and trying to exercise my strength. But with her I knew I had to go very light and easy. I had to monitor and pay attention to her a lot. At the end of the massage, she was just really ecstatic that I was very nice and used a gentle touch. As the course began to move forward, she would always return to be a client of mine, and she just really appreciated how I would take time with her and talk with her before we got the massage started and listened to her. I paid attention to what she needed and what we wanted to focus on for the day. It really made me feel good that she wanted to come back continuously with me. It was always a pleasure on my end to work with her.

Finish this sentence: “I wish my clients knew …”
I wish my clients knew the importance of stretching and how beneficial that is for everyday life.

Thanks, Shaila!

Have you had a massage from Shaila? Leave a review and be sure to mention her by name! Facebook is our favorite place to read your reviews, but you can find us on Google and Yelp as well.

If you haven’t had a massage from Shaila yet, you don’t know what you’re missing. Book now.

As with everything on this blog, none of this information should be construed as medical advice or care. The employees of The Good Life Massage, including the writers of this blog, are not medical doctors. Consult with your physician before making any changes to improve your health.

Tom Gunn is the blog editor and marketing director for The Good Life Massage. You can contact him or hire him at tomgunn@gmail.com

 

 

Know Your Therapist–Charlie Fadness, LMT

Know Your Practitioner is your chance to become more familiar and comfortable with your massage therapist. If you aren’t sure which of our talented therapists would be best for you to come back to regularly, this is a great way to meet them and get to know who they are, both personally and professionally. This is Part 6 in the series. To learn more about our other therapists, check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

We’re pleased to introduce you to Charlie Fadness, LMT. Charlie is highly skilled, and comes to us with a great facility for deep tissue work, and can get good and deep with the pressure if that’s what you need. Being fairly new, Charlie isn’t our busiest therapist as of this posting, but we’re confident that will change soon; his clients are already starting to come back for more. We sat down with Charlie to talk about his experience, his inspiration, and his motivation for working in massage.

View the video version of this interview below:

Tell us a little something about your personal life: hobbies, interests, family, friends, etc.
My name is Charlie Fadness. I’m born and raise here, living in Seattle most of my life, kind of jumping around a little bit, kind of going towards south, then kinda coming back to Seattle. My hobbies right now are spending time with family and friends, and then occasionally gaming on my computer from time to time. When I go out with my friends, I usually either try to either catch a bite to eat, or go to the movies, or kind of try a new activity. Our last activity was going to an archery range and then going out for dinner. That was really fun.
Tell us about your career in massage. How did you get started? What events lead to you working here?
As a kid I’ve always done massage, just kind of massaging my dad’s back, and my older sister would always make me massage her hands and feet before she went to bed. So I was always doing massage in my life. But the one thing that kind of triggered it was I was playing volleyball with a friend, and we were playing and she injured her shoulder. And I really wanted to figure our what was going on in the muscles. So I was kind of feeling around and seeing what was going on in there, but I couldn’t really find out what was going on. But I really wanted to know. So I believe that kind of sparked it all, really.

Before The Good Life Massage, I started at a chiropractor. That was my first job. I was excited! It was fun. And then slowly I moved over to Massage Envy just because the hours were a little bit better. Working at The Good Life Massage, everyone is kind of one big family. Everyone gets along. The atmosphere is really great. The clients are really great.

What’s your favorite part of this job? What gets you excited to come to work?
My favorite part about massage has to be the clients, because each day you walk in the door, you don’t really know what you’re expecting, so it’s like a whole new challenge every day, which I really like. I’m not a big fan of the “go to this job and you only have to do this set of things and not much really changes. So, when you’re in an atmosphere where everything changes, even by the minute, it’s really fun and exciting. You never know what you’re gonna tackle.

What is it about your massage that keeps your clients coming back? What makes you stand out from the other GLM therapists?
One of my strong points in massage right now is going and finding knots. I love working out the knots, and a lot of clients have told me I just kind of know where they are, and so they’re really fun for me to work out, and it brings a lot of tension release for the client.

Pick a superpower: flying or turning invisible. Explain your answer.
If I could pick a superpower, I think I would pick flying, because if you’re invisible, you can still be invisible. If you can fly, you can get to distances really quickly. So I just feel like it would be like soaring through the sky like a bird. It would just be amazing, and the views and the landscapes would all be amazing and breath-taking.

We’re all about wellness here. What’s your favorite health habit? This can be something that you’re working on, have mastered, or just feel like our clients should be doing.
Right now, as for health for myself, I’ve been really trying to eat healthy–rarely going out to eat, making all of my dinners, making all of my lunches. So that’s really be healthy for me. And drinking a lot of water and starting to exercise a little bit more, and you really feel that. Eating healthy nowadays is really important for the body just because of all the chemicals and stuff that are in the food, and sometimes when you go out you don’t really know what’s inside the food. But when you’re at home making it, you know exactly what’s inside the food. I feel like it’s a lot more beneficial for our bodies.

Is there a client you’ve worked on who stands out in your memory? Someone for whom massage made a big difference?
One of my clients that I’m seeing now has benefited a lot from massage. She would always wake up every day and have to kind of pop her hip into place. That really irritated her until her friend recommended massage. So she went in one day and I was working into her glute muscles and her hip muscles and she felt a lot of relief. She didn’t have to pop the muscles in her hip all the time, and she was really happy. I took quite a long vacation, and when I came back, she made me feel so welcome. The first time she saw me after I came back she was jumping in joy. So that made me feel really happy and excited inside.

Finish this statement: I wish my clients knew …
I wish my clients knew how important their bodies are, and how we influence the muscles in their bodies, and just kind of moving things around–that can benefit them so much.

Thanks, Charlie!

Book a massage with Charlie today through our website, or give us a call.

425-243-7705

Please note that Charlie is unable to perform the aromatherapy enhancement due to an allergy.

Tom Gunn is the blog editor and director of marketing at The Good Life Massage. You can find him online at TGunnWriter.com or on Twitter, @ElManoRoboto

Know Your Therapist–Amy Gunn

Know Your Therapist is your chance to become more familiar and comfortable with your massage therapist. If you aren’t sure which of our talented therapists would be best for you to come back to regularly, this is a great way to meet them and get to know who they are both personally and professionally. This is part 2 of a series of posts. Click here to read Part 1.

Amy Gunn has been a massage therapist since 2000 and is one of our most experienced employees. She’s the co-founder of our clinic, and is as passionate about business as she is about massage. She’s built a loyal following over the years, so she can be hard to schedule on short notice, but her clients will tell you her massages are well worth the wait.

We sat down with her and asked her a few questions about her life, her work, and what makes her particular brand of massage unique.

Tell us a little something about your personal life. Hobbies, interests, family, friends, etc.

Amy Gunn, LMP, Co-Founder of The Good Life Massage

I’ve been married almost 11 years. We have a superhero-obsessed son who is 3 going on 18. He definitely keeps me busy when I’m not at work, and I love it.

I’m a little embarrassed by my number of different hobbies. I really love to write novels (nothing published yet), and knit (always have a project or two in the works) I’ve also dabbled in several different musical instruments. I used to be a decent cellist, but I sound pretty rusty now.

I also did martial arts for several years and really enjoyed it. Lately, I’ve been getting my aggression out at the gym running on a treadmill and doing strength training.

Tell us about your career in massage. How did you get started? What events lead to you working here?

I was actually getting ready to go back to school on scholarship for business marketing back in 1998-99 when I suddenly realized that I didn’t really love the things I was doing and couldn’t imagine doing them for the rest of my career (I mean seriously – I still can’t understand why people enjoy working at a desk all day long!).

I took a break from school instead, and I guess heard one too many commercials for a local massage program. I thought “Hey, I could do that…” Yeah, honestly–that was about all the thought I put into it at first.

I happened to live a few miles away from the Utah College of Massage Therapy, which had such a great program that many people regularly came from out of state, and even out of the country, to study there. I had some great teachers and learned a lot of different modalities, but especially loved my training in deep tissue and other treatment work.

After I graduated, I hung up my shingle with a massage room out of my home. I did that for a few years, and then moved to only outcall sessions for awhile.

Most of my early career, though, was spent doing additional work with hospice agencies, which was rewarding, but stressful. I drove a lot. By the time I left Utah in 2009 I had put over 120,000 miles on my 4 year-old car, and I was pretty burned out too.

I took a few years to go work for someone else at a local franchise. I actually enjoyed a lot of it: mostly the fact that I was working with a team of other LMPs for the first time in my life. But I missed being in the driver’s seat and feeling like I had control over the direction of the business. When I started working there, I’d actually thought that I was just winding down my massage career before doing something else completely. Instead, I found it got me excited to get back out on my own again, this time with even more knowledge under my belt.

I started my own practice called This Side of Paradise in early 2013 and initially just rented space from Kylee and her business, The Good Life Massage. We were technically completely separate businesses. But because we were sharing a single treatment room, we ended up making a lot of business decisions together.

This pretty naturally morphed into an official business merger a year later, though we had no idea that would happen when we first started sharing the space. It’s been awesome to see all the growth we’ve had in the past year since we merged.

What’s your favorite part of this job? What gets you excited to come to work?

I love working one on one with my clients. The most rewarding moments are when someone walks out of the treatment room with a completely different outlook on life because they finally found relief from something they thought was going to plague them forever.

What is it about your massage that keeps your clients coming back? What makes you stand out from the other GLM therapists?

I enjoy giving serious treatment work, partly because the body is a puzzle and I’m trying to work out how to put it back together. I love a challenge! I can go deeper than many therapists do, but in a controlled way. Don’t ask me to go as deep as I can unless you know what you’re really asking for.

Pick a superpower: flying or turning invisible. Explain your answer.

I would probably have to pick flying. Which is maybe ridiculous considering that my ears hurt like crazy when I get on a plane.

We’re all about wellness here. What’s your favorite health habit? This can be something that you’re working on, have mastered, or just feel like our clients should be doing.

I’ve been into having vegetables with every meal lately. I’m not perfect at it, but I work at it. What I like about trying to live this habit is that it has challenged my creativity and sense of adventure.

I’ve gotten very good at sneaking spinach into things like protein shakes and pancakes–where my family and I get the benefit, but they don’t feel like they’re just eating rabbit food.

Finish this statement: I wish my clients knew …

… that I don’t judge their bodies nearly as harshly as they judge themselves. They may look in the mirror and see flabby this or saggy that–imperfections they see above all else.

To me, the human body is a sacred thing–a miracle of nature. And I think that, no matter how the bodies of real people measure up to the ideal body images that are in the media.

I honestly don’t remember those things my clients may hate most about their bodies. What really stays with me is who they are as a whole person. My hope with every massage is that my clients come away feeling more complete, more comfortable in their own skin–more in harmony with the world around them.

Thanks, Amy!

Click here to book a massage with Amy today!

As with everything on this blog, none of this information should be construed as medical advice or care. The employees of The Good Life Massage, including the writers of this blog, are not medical doctors. Consult with your physician before making any changes to improve your health.

To stay up-to-date on last minute openings in the schedule and blog posts, follow us on twitter!

@goodliferenton

You can also follow our Facebook page: facebook.com/thegoodlifemassage

Tom Gunn is the official blogger and social media marketer for The Good Life Massage. You can follow him on twitter @tomgunnpoet.