Changes ahead

by Jan Schwartz

What is easy about change? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.  What is good about change? Everything!  I thrive on change.  So what does that say about me?  I’m easily bored? Well that’s true–I definitely need variety.  I love to see what’s possible? Yes, that’s true too–love knowing what’s around the corner and how much better we can make something.  I also read a lot and what I read tells me that without change nothing gets better, even if it gets worse first (but we try not to allow that to happen, but if it does, nothing to stop us from changing again).

Why are some, actually many, people so afraid of change?  I think it’s mostly because they don’t want to feel uncomfortable or insecure – there is comfort in inertia, and familiarity is security.

It’s easy to get preachy about this, especially if one likes change as much as I do.  So I will try to be cool here.  My favorite ‘change quote’ of all time is Mahatma Gandhi’s, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”  It’s about personal responsibility. A bit of a contradiction is a Zen quote that I also like that says something like, sit quietly, spring comes and the grass grows by itself.  Not exactly the message I’m trying to get across here, but I appreciate the Zen-ishness of it, and it definitely has a place in my life.

So this slight rant has to do with change in a field about which I am passionate, but not so involved that I can’t see the forest for the trees.  That is the field of massage therapy.  I came into it in 1992 as a student and I’m still here as a volunteer, and you know what?  It could still be 1992! Oh sure, we have a couple of new agencies since then and there are certainly thousands more therapists in the country, and now we have licensure, but what’s REALLY changed in the last 18 years especially in terms of the advancement of the education of all these therapists?  Well we teach a whole lot more in 500 hours than we ever did before and our techniques have lots more names than they did when I was a student.

There is resistance to increasing the level of entry level education (or at least discussing how we can differentiate levels of education), there is resistance to a new independent organization that represents education (that would be the Alliance), there is resistance to advanced population or modality-based certification, there is resistance to excluding people and modalities from the field of massage therapy when there needs to be exclusion, and there is resistance to changing how we learn and how we teach.

Are we too big now to effect change? Are we afraid that the education we have will become null and void?  Are we afraid to say no, when the answer needs to be no?  Are we afraid to exclude someone–anyone?  I think in many respects the answer to each of these questions is, yes, because in many respects, we are waiting for the grass to grow by itself.  What do you think?