Masseuse Has Feel-Good Message
Pamper yourself. Pile on the therapeutic mud, the heat, the oils. Let someone’s scented hands revitalize your shoulders, arouse your scalp, awaken your soles.
It’s not self-indulgent to feel good - it’s wise. Europeans have known it for centuries. Americans are just catching on.
“Health shouldn’t just be for the rich,” says Jeane Plastino-Wood, a licensed massage therapist who expanded her American Institute of Clinical Massage this year to include spa treatments.
“Everyone deserves to feel good.”
Jeane didn’t study massage therapy five years ago with the world’s health in mind. She wanted a career to support her two daughters.
School taught her the mechanics. Work turned her into a healer. She discovered that people responded to touch. They confided in her, relaxed, wept.
“I didn’t know that by just holding a person’s hand, you make a difference,” she says.
A stint as an EMT revealed to her touch’s role in healing. While she held a patient’s hand to calm him during his ambulance trip to the hospital, his vital signs improved.
Jeane opened the Panhandle’s only licensed massage therapy school north of Moscow three years ago in Coeur d’Alene, determined to teach her students to reach beyond the physical to the human spirit.
She set low prices to move massage from the realm of the rich into public domain. Massages from students were free.
She also stayed in school herself.
The body’s design and ability to mend itself fascinated her. She studied in Germany, Austria and England, where spas are as plentiful as health clubs are in the United States.
She learned about the infinite nature of cells and the high absorbency rate of skin, which is one reason mud treatments are so popular in Europe. That’s when she decided to open her European-style spa in Post Falls.
Intent on changing the American notion that spas are frivolous and for the rich, she set comparatively low prices and promotes health rather than beauty.
The organic muds, clays, oils and herbs she stocks come from Hungary. There’s French Alps Red Clay to stimulate cell renewal and rejuvenate skin. It’s particularly good for burns, she says.
“Mud is like an external vitamin and it feels good,” she says. “This isn’t new age, it’s old age, ancient.”
Dead Sea Mud moisturizes and purifies skin. Tart pine oil relieves joint pains. Fennel oil helps reduce cellulite.
Jeane plans to teach European spa techniques. She’s also courting seniors as clients because she says they have the most to gain from massage and spa treatments.
“It helps them sleep, lowers blood pressure and releases endorphins,” she says. “It gives them a feeling of well-being, and it’s social. I think they deserve all that.”
Wild flicks
For $5 tonight, you can support wildlife and see five award-winning films. Can’t beat that.
The films are the winners of the 1998 International Wildlife Film Festival. The Predator Project, a Montana group that protects predators and their habitats, is showing the movies at 6 p.m. at Sandpoint’s Panida Theater.
The lineup features “Lower Orders,” a laugher about back alley wildlife; “Alaska’s Coolest Animals”; “Survival in the Sea”; “The Ultimate Guide to Elephants”; and “Leopard.”
Sounds like a good activity for family night out. Advance tickets are $5 for adults and $3 for children at Java Adagio or Eve’s Leaves, or a few bucks more at the door.