Viveca Massage

There’s a viral video making the rounds in the past week. You may have seen the one: it features a well-known celebrity receiving “jaw release” from an energy healer. I’m not going to share it here or anywhere else, but in the video, the celebrity is physically held down by one provider, while another performs intraoral massage so aggressively that the celebrity sobs uncontrollably afterward.

I have a lot of big feelings about that video, and I decided to write a blog post about it.

If you have jaw-related symptoms or issues like clenching, headaches, facial pain, ear pressure, neck and/or shoulder stiffness, intraoral massage can help. It should feel therapeutic, relevant, productive, and helpful. Never, ever painful. A reputable practitioner will never intentionally inflict pain to provoke a reaction like the one in that video.

To read the full blog post, please click the link below:

That viral intraoral massage video — Viveca Massage & Wellness There’s a viral video making the rounds in the past week. You may have seen the one: it features a well-known celebrity receiving “jaw release” from an energy healer. I’m not going to share it here or anywhere else, but in the video, the celebrity is physically held down by one provider, whi...

My clients often ask me how massage therapy works. How do I “melt the knots” or “release the tight muscles”? And I usually begin my answer by saying there is a lot we don’t know about how or why massage therapy is effective, and what we once thought we knew is not necessarily true. That isn’t to say that massage therapy doesn’t work — it certainly does! — but just maybe not in the way we once thought it did. We don’t know everything, but I try to be more accurate (or at least less wrong) about the information I give to my clients.

We now know that massage doesn’t address tissues in a purely mechanical way; rather, massage works mainly on the nervous system. This article by Mark Olson expresses it beautifully. The pressure and rhythm of a massage, the therapeutic presence of the practitioner — all send messages to the interoceptive system, changing what the nervous system will predict and feel about the tissue. The Interoceptive Model, in my view, is the most accurate (or the least wrong) about the way massage/manual therapy works.

“Manual therapy doesn’t ‘change the tissue’ — it changes what the nervous system predicts and feels about the tissue.

That means we’re not correcting mechanics.

We’re creating new internal experiences.

The pressure, the rhythm, the quality of presence — they all send signals to the interoceptive system. And when those signals are safe, novel, and meaningful, they have the power to re-map perception. To interrupt pain. To support regulation. To invite trust.”

Why the Tissue Model of Manual Therapy Is Boring, Inconsistent, and Holding Us Back — DrOlson Let’s be honest: the tissue-based model of manual therapy is not just inaccurate. It’s boring. It’s a dry story. A story about tight muscles, stuck fascia, knots, and misalignments. A story where the practitioner “fixes” the passive client, and where therapeutic success is measured in inch...