Today we’d like to introduce you to Amanda Tarver.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Amanda. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I have had a bit of an unexpected journey getting to where I am now. When I was younger, in high school and college, my passion was the performing arts. I was involved in theatre, music, and dance. It was when I was working on my BA in musical theatre that I began considering massage therapy as a career path. Very few people actually make it in theatre, and those who book gigs often can’t make a living off of it, so I knew I needed a back up career. Performers tend to have much more relaxed physical boundaries around one another, and my friends and I would often give each other back rubs. I thought to myself “this isn’t so bad. I could do this.” and decided to give massage school a try when I finished my degree. Once I began doing massage I started to really love it, and have become more and more passionate about my massage work and continuing to learn about how amazing the human body is and what I can do to facilitate people in their quest to live healthier lives with less pain and discomfort.
As for the pregnancy and birth work, I had a bit of a roundabout path. Ten years ago, I would have told you that I wanted nothing to do with pregnancy or childbirth. Everyone I knew had horror stories about it and I thought that it was this terrible thing that one had to endure if one wanted to have a baby. After massage school, I started working in a spa where they would schedule prenatal massages for me. I would explain to reception that I did not do prenatal, had never been trained, and wasn’t comfortable because I was worried that I could hurt someone. I was told that they didn’t care and I would do the sessions anyway, and was even asked to lie to my clients and tell them I was certified, although I would always refuse to do that. I’m sure that those initial prenatal massages were just terrible. I didn’t know what I was doing and was very gentle because I was worried about hurting mom or baby. I decided if I was going to have to do prenatal massage, I was at least going to get trained. I got certified in pre- and perinatal massage, and during the process began to change how I saw pregnancy and birth. My teachers were both doulas and spoke about it differently than I had ever heard anyone talk about childbirth. I learned that it didn’t have to be a terrible experience, and that everyone I had known had experienced completely avoidable complications and in some cases, had even been victim of what I now know to be obstetric abuse. Now that I knew more about it and how wide spread these negative cases were, I decided to become a doula so that I could share my knowledge and experience and help families to not have the same horror stories that I was unable to prevent for my friends and family.
Has it been a smooth road?
It has been a relatively smooth road. I have been very lucky to have the full support of my family in my ventures. Most of my struggles or challenges have been internal. There was a lot of second guessing myself in the early years of my practice. When I would have weeks with no clients, I often had to talk myself down and remind myself that it was normal and to be expected that things would be slow at first, I just had to stick it out. I was very early in my career when I started my practice, so I didn’t have a client base to bring with me and had to rely entirely on advertising. Around year 4, things started to pick up quite a bit and I started to feel a bit more secure and confident in my abilities. Overall, I am very lucky to have had such a smooth road and that is something that I am continually grateful for.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Women’s Massage Therapy story. Tell us more about the business.
When I first opened my practice, I decided to work with women only. I made the decision because I had been put into too many unsafe situations working in spas and got to the point where I felt uncomfortable working with men. It got to the point where I felt on edge every time a man was on my table which I realized was not fair to me or to my male clients, most of whom were just looking for a massage. So in order to feel safe and comfortable, I decided it was best to limit my practice to women. Now, 6 years later, I am a lot more relaxed about my women-only rule than when I began, especially as I have become more confident in myself and my work and gender is being recognized as more fluid and not binary. Nevertheless, having chosen early on to work with women, a lot of my experience and expertise lies in women’s health. Being a birth doula and certified in pre- and perinatal massage, I have a fair amount of knowledge about pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period, and offer prenatal and postpartum massage as well as labor induction and augmentation massage. In working with new families, I also provide birth doula and placenta encapsulation services as well as teach infant massage classes where I go to people’s homes and teach them massage techniques that they can use with their babies. Within months of graduating massage school, I also began training as a Reiki practitioner and am now a Reiki master and teacher.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
There have been a lot of changes in our industry over the past decades. We are always striving to educate the public and public officials about what massage and body work are, and I expect to see that continue. It would be wonderful to have more insurance companies recognizing massage therapy as not only a fantastic way to facilitate healing, but as preventative care and covering it so that more people can afford to take advantage of its benefits. I would love to see a continuing shift toward more clients beginning to get regular massages as a means of staying well rather than just as a luxury or way to pamper themselves.
Pricing:
- 30 minute therapeutic massage or Reiki session- $40
- 45 minute therapeutic massage or Reiki session- $60
- 60 minute therapeutic massage or Reiki session- $80
- 75 minute therapeutic massage or Reiki session- $100
- 90 minute therapeutic massage or Reiki session- $120
Contact Info:
- Address: 636 Church St., Suite 505,
Evanston, IL 60201 - Website: www.massageanddoula.com
- Phone: 312.607.3194
- Email: atarverlmt@gmail.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/massageanddoula/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/massageanddoula
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/womens-massage-therapy-evanston
Image Credit:
This is Family Photography and Film
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