Get To Know Your Therapist: Theresa Talley, LMT

Tell us a bit about your background.

Years ago, I was fortunate to be introduced to the Alexander Technique. I was always interested in functional body movements. You know, I was married to a chiropractor, and everything in chiropractic is centered on the first two cervical vertebrae, the atlas and axis vertebrae. Originally, the chiropractic practice was just those first two vertebrae, that was it, you got an adjustment, and the body intelligence took over and your body did the rest. I liked the idea that our body has this wisdom and intelligence. So that’s what got me started on my journey. 

Can you speak a bit more on what you mean by innate intelligence?

The body’s inner wisdom. If I could only have one area to work on in the whole body, I would start at the altanto-occipital joint because it affects the whole nervous system. If this is right, the whole body is right. If this is out of whack, the whole body is out of whack. 

Can you tell us about your Holistic Orthopedic Therapy sessions? And how is that different from a regular massage session?

In this modality, I’m just facilitating, but it’s healing from the inside out. You (the client) are doing the movement. I’m just doing a hold and then you’re doing the action or directive to release the fascia, the adhesions in the fascia, the limitations that could be in ligaments, tendons, fascial tissue. We’re not doing osseous work, but we’re affecting it once we release the soft tissues. So, through range of motion testing, that’s where the clinical work comes in. You perform active range of motion— flexion, rotation— and never go to where there is pain, pinching or pulling. If there is pain, pinching or pulling, you back away. So if your shoulder hurts to go there, but not here, we would just work with the point of no pain. 

It’s very collaborative and it’s deep tissue work with movement, but healthy tissue doesn’t hurt when you press on it, so I may just go through the body and, if nothing’s sore, we move right into the massage. They don’t need any movement work that session. 

The one thing with Holistic Orthopedic Therapy, in particular, is that you’re no longer an order taker. You’re a co-creative partner with your client. Listening to your client, instead of saying, “Oh, I always start at the feet, I’m gonna start at the feet, is that okay?” You would say, “Can you point to me where it hurts,” and then have them show you where it hurts and then start there. You know, let them address it. Or they’ll say, “Oh, my shoulder hurts here.” I’ll respond, “How about I start right there? How does this feel?”

So it does require communication. Now, if clients really just want to go to sleep and relax, there’s nothing wrong with that. In that case, we don’t need to palpate and see if anything hurts. It just varies on the day. Most clients, when they come in here, they don’t know what they want that day. It depends on how they’re feeling.

Tell us a little bit about this body pillow that you use.

One component of my bodywork is AMT, which is active modulation therapy. What I do is pain relief. If someone comes in with pain, they might not want to hear about their energy field or how their skin looks, or about transformational breathwork. They want pain relief, so that’s what I address first. 

In AMT, we use the cushion because it’s easier for you to do movements on it than lying flat on your back. Most people in pain, especially when lying face down, if they’re having back pain, it actually makes it worse. So, when someone tells me they have low back pain, right away, I know the pelvis and lumbosacral area need to be stabilized. So the body cushion just gives the body support, you know, the cushioning that the body needs to let go. So then they’re doing somatic emotional releases to let the shape (of the body) get restored back to its master posture. That’s really what the body cushion is doing. But we have to remember it’s a body support cushion. It’s supporting your body, so you can really let go to have that posture alignment take place. 

Most of my clients who I have worked with in my pain practice went from weekly chiro visits to every four to six weeks, just from this cushion being introduced to them. This approach helps provide relief from tension headaches, sinus congestion and TMJ, as well as balancing the body to improve posture.

What other modalities or treatments do you offer clients?

I am also an aesthetician so I do skin care. I don’t do it here, the skin care, but I can. What I can do here is a facial massage for uplifting and toning, with lavender CBD cream and a warm towel. If a client wants the facial massage, but they don’t want CBD, I can massage dry or I maybe use a little bit of our gel or cream just to give a glide. I also use rosewood tools.

If someone comes in and they want a 90-minute or two-hour session and they’re open to it and they want it, we’ll do Therapeutic Touch. I’ll do acupressure, muscle balancing, foot reflexology, and then massage. It takes 90 minutes to two hours to do all that, holistic balancing.

That’s great. Anything else that you would like clients to know about your methodology, your philosophy, or training?

All healing occurs from the inside out. We’re just facilitators. None of us really make anything happen, you know, we just don’t. We can apply what we know as massage therapists, but it’s ultimately that connection that you have with your own inner being that does all the healing. 

I would like our clients to know that one of my scientific directors, Albert Schatz, discovered streptomycin (the first effective treatment for tuberculosis). He was a retired soil microbiologist from Temple University, and he was the scientific director. The very first course I ever took was Therapeutic Touch, which is a continuing education class for nursing. They call it Healing Touch now, I think. But he actually studied with Dolores Krieger (the author of Healing Touch), and that was our textbook. And this is a learned man, a soil microbiologist, and he was a spiritual healer.  

Therapeutic Touch is all about having a co-creative partnership with nature, and the very first thing is no domination, manipulation or control. You can’t have that in a partnership. You can say this is the direction I want to go in and this is the purpose and state your intent but not force it. And that’s what Albert always said: in anything in life, it’s always your intention. So I say to my client, “What’s your intention, why are you here?” And we go from there.