Transcription of Julie Wright for the show Body Balance #278
Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle, and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick, Maine. Show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Julie Wright: Today, more and more people are seeking that out. The acupuncture, they’re seeking out naturopathic care certainly, and then even as I said, the polarity work or energy work, people are a lot more attuned to, which I think is wonderful because there’s this whole other spectrum of how to take care of yourself versus heading straight to your primary care.
Carrie Levine: I’ll never forget walking into his office and making my plea, “You have to have the residence labor sit an entire labor. They don’t understand what’s going on when they walk in for just five minutes. You have to have them sit through at least one entire labor so they get the whole picture.” He listened well.
Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, Show #278, Body Balance, airing for the first time on Sunday, January 15, 2017. Do you need to bring your body into balance? We ask a lot of our physical selves through our work and play. Today we speak with two healing practitioners who help their clients find balance through modalities such as massage, energy work, and dietary change. Julie Wright is the owner and director of Soma Massage & Wellness in South Portland, and Carrie Levine is a certified nurse midwife, functional medicine specialist, and founder of Whole Woman Health in Newcastle. Thank you for joining us.
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Lisa Belisle: Today in the studio with me I have Julie Wright, who is the owner and director of Soma Massage and Wellness in South Portland. She has been practicing massage since 2003. She specializes in therapeutic and nurturing massage, stress reduction, grief recovery, healing, and balancing work and lives with her partner and daughter in Bar Mills. Thanks for coming in today.
Julie Wright: Thank you for having me.
Lisa Belisle: You have such an interesting background. I don’t hear all the time that people who choose to go into massage, and you also have reiki training. Is that….
Julie Wright: Yes, I do.
Lisa Belisle: You have reiki training, but you have also worked for the Youth Resiliency Project…
Julie Wright: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: Which is a branch of the People’s Regional Opportunity Program, and you also did work with Outward Bound and you just… such a broad range of things.
Julie Wright: Yeah. You know, I had the wonderful opportunity to stumble upon Outward Bound when I was a high school student in South Portland. I went for a 12 day sailing course and just fell in love with it. It really spoke to me, being out on the water. The team building exercises, all of it, was really just a pretty wonderful experience, and so I found out how to become a volunteer and go back. That summer, I returned as a volunteer and then from there, went through their staff training and became a member of, you know, one of the instructors teaching in Maine and down in Baltimore as well. I did that through college and really loved the work, the dynamics of being outdoors, working with people, helping them really get connected to who they are and see their own resiliency, to see their own gifts; it really spoke to me. Yeah, that’s how it kind of started and continued and still remains a strong passion of mine even though I’m not teaching anymore.
Lisa Belisle: It’s interesting that the work that you do now is also about connecting people to themselves in a slightly different way, but it’s still helping people bridge whatever gaps they need to.
Julie Wright: Exactly. I think that’s one of the things that I love and feel so honored about being a massage therapist and a body worker is the opportunity to work with people, and there’s certainly the clients that come in for pain management or discomfort and that’s very sort of physical and concrete, and then there’s a whole spectrum who are really looking just to find more comfort within themselves. Those particular clients just, I enjoy so much supporting them and helping them feel that comfort and balance, and it does weave through, the work of educating and then being a body worker, I see as an extension of that. We are helping people to become more aware of themselves and empowering them, and it’s a wonderful blessing to be doing that. I feel blessed each day that this what I get to call work.
Lisa Belisle: What was the turning point for you that caused you to decide, “Okay, I think I’d like to do massage now”?
Julie Wright: Yeah. So to back up when I was at USM, there was a non-credit class that came up and it was Introductory to Massage Therapy. I was pretty excited about that. It just spoke to me for some reason. I hadn’t even at that point had a professional massage. It was just… I knew there was an interest. I signed up for the class. It was, you know, just like a six-week, once a week class, and I went through the program and just loved it. It lit up something in me that I was like, “Wow, this is pretty great.” I was already at USM in the social behavioral sciences, so working with people was something I knew I wanted to do. This just sort of opened a different door that I hadn’t considered, and after the class, I went to the instructor and actually had my first massage with her, and as I said, I fell in love with it, I loved it, and then from there, it was just a pursuit to sort of figure out how I would get to school while I was already in school and make that all work.
About ten years after having taken that class at USM, I was working for PROP in Portland in the youth resiliency program, and there were a few budget cuts that needed to happen and one was reconstructing what my position was. When I saw that, I could kind of see the writing on the wall and where things were going and I said, “You know, this is really the time for me to go follow something that actually continued to speak to me for those ten years.” I found myself back in school. I decided upon Spa Tech, that is in Portland. I went through their holistic massage program and never turned back. I finally felt like I was on the right path, and from there I worked for a chiropractor for a while and learned a lot from working at his office, and I always knew, I think, going back to my time with Outward Bound and in experiential education settings, working with other instructors and creating community and holding space for people just was something that felt natural to me and that I wanted to continue. Building Soma I think has roots in that, and that’s what I set out to do about a year or two after completing my massage certification.
Lisa Belisle: I went to Soma, as you know, a few weeks ago for a massage, and I was really struck by how… it’s in South Portland, but it’s in this interesting neighborhood that has continued to evolve since the new bridge went in. It’s a neighborhood that I think people have a lot of affection for.
Julie Wright: Absolutely. We’ve been there, this will be starting our twelfth year in 2017, and we’ve seen businesses come and go, but at the same time there’s been traction and it’s been growing and growing. There’s a great love and affinity for that little downtown area. If you go around the corner a little bit to the Willard Beach where Scratch Bakery is and the other, 158, I think people have been looking for more small boutique style stores or cafes to go to. Portland has a wonderful selection of things, but for the folks living in South Portland, it’s nice to, I think… everyone was sort of rooting for and excited to see that growth start to happen. So yeah, there is a lovely, vibrant, really artistic community that’s growing over there.
Lisa Belisle: It has a very welcoming sense to it. That neighborhood but also Soma in particular. I think when you first walk in the door, I was struck by the diversity of the clientele that was there, but everybody was welcome. The front office was more than happy to have whatever conversation was needed. I think somebody was there who never had a massage before or I’ve had a few massages, and it was just that wanting to connect from the beginning when somebody walks through the door. It seems as though you have a variety of different practitioners who work there.
Julie Wright: We do, we do. Right now, there’s about 20 massage therapists on staff, you know, with varying degrees of experience and passion. We have folks that have recently graduated from school, and so we’re sort of their first spa to practice, and then we have seasoned practitioners who’ve been practicing for 13, 14, 15 years. I think that spectrum really lends itself to that sense of welcoming. Everyone’s excited about what they’re doing, whether it’s new and fresh or something that they’ve been doing for a while and the opportunity to work with a network within the team that we’ve created, I think, is quite special as well.
Beyond the massage aspect, we also work with Heather Kingsley who is an acupuncturist, and she’s been with us since the day we opened, and Sangita Pedro is a naturopathic doctor that has been with us for a couple years, and then we’ve recently started working with a gentleman named Sada who is an ayurvedic health counselor. Beyond massage, we have this other spectrum of health care offered as well which I think is exciting.
Lisa Belisle: I completely agree, and I’ve seen that the interest in this type of healing work has really just grown by leaps and bounds.
Julie Wright: Absolutely. I’d say in the years that I’ve been practicing, in the beginning, I had to explain a little bit more about what I was doing and in particular when you start to add in pieces like reiki or other energy work. Today, more and more people are seeking that out, the acupuncture, they’re seeking out naturopathic care certainly, and then even as I said, the polarity work or energy work, people are a lot more attuned to, which I think is wonderful, because there’s this whole other spectrum of how to take care of yourself versus heading straight to your primary care.
Lisa Belisle: Tell us about reiki. For someone who’s listening who’s never really experienced this before, what is reiki? What does it do, and what can it be good for?
Julie Wright: I can probably lump that into polarity work as well because that’s a little bit more of my stronger training, but certainly it’s all about energy, energy that we have within or that we find in nature and around us and, I guess, harnessing that and using it to help center ourselves mentally and spiritually. The work itself is very gentle, and more often than not a client is, which does make it a nice option for people who might be new to bodywork, that you don’t need to undress. You just come in, lie on the table. Obviously you’re doing an intake form and discussing with your practitioner about what’s going on, but generally speaking, it’s light hand holds and pressure points and really wonderful for stress reduction and relaxation. Some people infuse other things, use of crystals or chanting or sound therapy. Again, those services are offered at Soma as well. It’s a lovely experience certainly if you’ve not had it before and you’re looking for something more gentle and relaxing.
Lisa Belisle: Is there a difference between polarity work and reiki?
Julie Wright: The difference probably boils down to intention and the tools that you use. Polarity was created many years ago by a chiropractor and naturopath and sort of looking, infusing Chinese meridian points as well. Reiki traditionally came from Japan as a healing practice. The difference was, the intention or the result is very much the same, but how you go about getting there and the tools that you use are different.
Lisa Belisle: It’s an interesting description because I’ve been doing acupuncture now for about 11 years, and in my training as a doctor who does acupuncture rather than someone who has a Masters in acupuncture and what they call oriental medicine. You can do Japanese acupuncture, you can do scalp acupuncture, you could do Chinese acupuncture, but you’re right, it’s different sorts of roads that bring you to the same place, and it’s all about energy. It’s just that some people seem to resonate more with a specific technique than others.
Julie Wright: Exactly. Exactly. I think that’s true in all work, which is nice that there is a spectrum to choose from because not one single thing speaks to everybody. It’s nice to have that variety, certainly.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, I think that’s an important point too because a lot of people just think, “Okay, massage. Massage is where somebody puts their hands on your shoulders and helps you relax,” but that’s not really…. That’s a very simple way of looking at it. I’ve had sports massage and deep tissue massage and relaxation massage and hot stone massage, and the massages that I’ve had are as different as the people who are giving them.
Julie Wright: Absolutely. Absolutely. To weave Soma in there a little bit with that, you know, that was one of the things that I was really excited about. When we created Soma and the intention behind it was to create options for people, and we looked at the menu and what we could provide because, certainly at that point in time, as I said earlier, massage therapy was massage therapy and it was still… I had to still explain what that was. In that, as you said, there are many different styles. There’s sports and there’s muscular, deep tissue. What I wanted to do with Soma was again, with the idea of kind of building that community and really sense of trust within our center was to create a menu that our clients could decide for themselves what style they wanted versus coming in and getting maybe everything all mixed into one, but creating the options that they could choose, a really relaxing session, because all they wanted was just to reduce their stress and feel cozy and comforted. Or we have a lot of athletes that come in that need more deep tissue focus work. We try to break that out so we could create, again, those options for our clients and honestly, I feel like doing that lended itself to help create that sense of community that is felt at Soma.
Lisa Belisle: The massage that I had at Soma was a Maine-themed massage. It started with a footbath that included… I think there was some balsam there.
Julie Wright: There was, yeah. Some beech rose and seaweed.
Lisa Belisle: I believe you have something to do with this.
Julie Wright: Yeah. Just a life passion, interest, hobby, has been making essential oil blends and lip balms and oils and bath products. Over the progression of Soma becoming what it is, I realized, “Wow, there is something here. I can maybe make some things and use them in these sessions,” and started doing that and got a really lovely response from our clients. Yes, now when I’m home on our farm, I’m spending more time creating those blends and growing what I can and using what’s coming from our farm as much as possible in those and then sharing them with our guests at Soma and, in particular around the holidays selling some of those things too. Yeah, so it’s fun.
Lisa Belisle: Well, it was really interesting because it did kind of bring in the connection to the outdoors. It was very Maine. This idea that we have things around us that we can use to stay healthy. We just have to connect back to the place that we live in.
Julie Wright: That’s right. Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: How does a person that grew up in South Portland end up with an interest in being on a farm and growing things and making stuff and where…. How did that happen?
Julie Wright: Yeah. I think it does lend itself to my years working for Outward Bound out on Hurricane Island. I learned a lot about being self-sufficient and homesteading, and that certainly sparked an interest. I have to give credit to my partner who’s very much the motivator behind leaving South Portland even though we love…. I was born and raised in this area and I love South Portland, but moving, 20 minutes, a half hour out of town gave us this space and land to do a little more of growing for ourselves and dabbling in farming. We have American guinea hogs, which are on the endangered list, and they’re a wonderful animal, and we have goats and chickens and lots of gardens. It was a passion of mine, too, or an interest I should say, but it was really my partner’s passion that said, “Let’s go and do this,” and that’s what, we’re sort of in the midst of it right now, just seeing where it’s going to go. Not sure yet, but it’s exciting.
Lisa Belisle: I love the scents that you’ve created. Those are the ones that I have smelled. You were kind enough to provide me with…. I think one was a room spray and a travel spray. There was really something, it wasn’t too sweet. It’s gentle and it’s a little spicy. I really could get a little bit of a sense of who you were by the scent that you gave to me.
Julie Wright: That’s great. Thank you.
Lisa Belisle: Also, you gave me this lovely mug that says Soma on it, and I must tell you that my 20, almost 21 year old, loves that mug.
Julie Wright: That’s great.
Lisa Belisle: You have some sort of interesting artistic temperament, I believe, that’s going on here as well.
Julie Wright: Yeah. Thank you, first off. I’m glad that you enjoyed those things. Shannon Wong is one of our massage therapists, and she’s a potter. She created the mug and other mugs that we sell at Soma as well. I think being in bodywork, working with our hands is really about expressing something inside of us and so I think there are a lot of…. Certainly at Soma, there’s some artists and I think in this field, people who want to express themselves with their hands, I think it’s a natural extension to be interested in doing other things as well that do that. In particular, in the field of art, whether it’s painting or potter… for me, blending essential oils and natural products.
Lisa Belisle: How does this all balance for you with raising your 9-year-old daughter?
Julie Wright: Some days it doesn’t, quite honestly. I’m the one that needs to remind myself I need to go get a massage. I think there’s… I don’t know, a sense of joy and excitement in the chaos of life. Certainly there’s some days that we’re running around and it feels a little nutty, but it all comes back to center because we’re creating the life we want, and that feels really special and like a gift, really. Subsequently, I can’t complain about the nuttiness too much.
Lisa Belisle: You raise an important point and that is that not everyone feels as if they are creating the lives that they want. Many people feel as if they somehow made decisions and then they ended up somewhere, and now they’re just kind of slogging through.
Julie Wright: Absolutely. I hear that, and I see that with people who are coming in to get work. Again, doing this kind of work, I love supporting people to kind of help them find that passion and to step out. Whether you are working within your passion and that helps to feed your life financially, or if you have a job that you do, you still have a role to play, and there’s something wonderful in finding your joy, getting out there. Maine is a wonderful place to live and certainly raise a family. Getting outdoors is a way to connect to yourself and find that spark. Certainly getting bodywork helps that. I feel blessed that my work aligns with what I get to do every day and I love it, but certainly if it wasn’t the case, there’s lots to do to find that balance and that passion and help you feel more connected in your life and what you’re doing each day.
Lisa Belisle: Now that we’re in a new year, I’m sure that people are going to be interested in pursuing wellness paths, and massage is probably one of them. If you have clients who are coming to you that are trying to connect, what types of things besides the bodywork that we talked about or polarity, energy work, what types of conversations do you have with your clients that might help them with that, finding their passion?
Julie Wright: You know, I think journaling is a wonderful way to see through the clutter. Certainly finding a meditation class or taking a yoga class, walks in nature, and then coming back with a pen and piece of paper and kind of writing out your thoughts, I think we can find themes if we do it long enough, and that’s certainly something that I do talk with people about. There’s wonderful books out there. I’m a big fan of Louise Hay. I’m not sure if you’ve read any of her things or not, but I really enjoy her work, in particular the book You Can Heal Your Life, because of the insight that she shares about her own life and then how she sort of turned things around. She had cancer and was able to….
For her, it worked to make some changes in her life that helped her. She feeds into that book, in the very back there’s affirmations about different ailments or different parts of your body that might be blocked or whatever, and I love that. I feel like it’s a great tool that I use for myself and share with my clients as well. I guess to answer that, I think finding something that speaks to you or speaks to the client or person and giving permission to get out and do that. As was said before, Maine is a beautiful place, lots of mountains and oceans and beautiful scenery to get out and push yourself a little bit and find the grit and see what’s there.
Lisa Belisle: What would you like to do in 2017? What is your intention?
Julie Wright: This year, my daughter’s getting older, and she’s 9 and feels like she’s going on 14. My intention, really, as a mother and a partner is to stay centered and grounded in being a mother and partner. The years of building a business, there’s a lot of stress that’s involved with that. A lot of energy and output that is output. While I feel blessed and as I said excited to be able to do this work and having created something, I also made some decisions that put a lot of more focus on out. Now this year, I really am looking forward to being super present with all the activities that my daughter’s in. She’s in drama and is a singer and loves karate, so I’m really excited about helping to support her and nurture the things that she loves, and also continue with the projects. Working on the farm, and we have these ideas of expanding Soma, but we’ll see where that goes. Right now, I’m pretty focused on being a mom.
Lisa Belisle: Well, I hope that people who are listening will find it within themselves to schedule a massage over at Soma or maybe an ayurvedic consult or some acupuncture because it really is a lovely spot that you’ve created. A very homey, relaxing, quiet…. It would be a gift to yourself to make that call or even actually schedule online which I found very convenient because you have a menu of things to choose from, and it’s nice to be able to go in and just know, “All right, this is what I’m going to be doing and have it all done.” I think it’s important in the new year to be able to spend that time on yourself. During the holidays, we get a little bit outside of ourselves.
Julie Wright: Absolutely.
Lisa Belisle: The new year is a time to focus back in. Julie, I appreciate all the work that you have done to bring Soma to life.
Julie Wright: Thank you.
Lisa Belisle: I guess you have essentially what a… almost 12 year old child in Soma.
Julie Wright: Yes, very feels like that.
Lisa Belisle: I encourage people to reach out to you and really learn how it is that you’ve kind of figured out this path for yourself because it seems like this idea of creating one’s life is something that you’ve worked on.
Julie Wright: Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you so much.
Lisa Belisle: We’ve been speaking with Julie Wright who is the owner and director of Soma Massage and Wellness in South Portland. She’s been practicing since 2003 and specializes in therapeutic and nurturing massage, stress reduction, grief recovery, healing, and balancing work. I appreciate your coming in.
Julie Wright: Thank you, Lisa.