Meet
Roselie Rasmussen
My Philosophy
One definition of health is “the absence of disease” or “the state of being free from illness or injury”.
I prefer this definition.
“Health is a relative state in which one is able to function well physically, mentally, socially, and spiritually and to express the full range of one’s unique potentialities within the environment in which one lives.”
Health is reaching toward harmony within yourself, and within your environment. It’s also possessing the resilience to maintain or return to that harmony in the face of chaos.
With that definition in mind, I’ll tell you that your health matters because your potential is unique to you. The beauty of your heart is irreplaceable, and the world desperately needs your unique beauty. Health is your capacity to express yourself, artistically, emotionally, physically.
Your health matters because the less energy you expend on just managing to function, the more energy you have to bring your heart into the world, and to inspire others, help others and to become a harmonizing influence on everything around you.
The more complete, full, versatile, compassionate and fearless you become, and the more you expand your capacity, the more you can see more clearly, speak more clearly and have the energy for action when you see that action is needed.
The health of the community is made up of the total health of all the members of that community. Cultivating your health is a service to the communities that you are embedded in.
Cultivating your health is also an affirmation and a celebration of the gift of life. It is a position of strength and power to acknowledge the control you have over your health.
Diversity is healthy for all living systems. We can celebrate our individual variation. It may feel like a cross to bear, like if you have a cervical rib or a differently shaped acromion process, but as you get to know yourself and your uniqueness over time you will simply accommodate your variations. Likewise the diversity or uniqueness that accumulates in us with time, those things that people often regret, like the old knee instability from an event in one’s childhood, these are just more nuances that we can delight in getting to know. We were never meant to be like everyone else, and you get to love all of this. It’s hard to express how all of these things don’t make you less, they make you more beautiful in the way that something intricate is beautiful.
Here’s some of my story. It’s not the whole story,
but these are significant moments that shaped me.
Self Love
When I was 23, I was stepping into the shower after riding my bike home from massage school. I glanced at myself in the mirror, and the usual thoughts and feelings came up, but this day I actually noticed them. I heard myself judge my body negatively and cast all my feelings of not-good-enoughness onto it.
And then I just said, “Stop”.
“Stop. You can’t talk to her that way.” I actually felt a little angry at the person insulting me, even though it was myself.
“Don’t you know how hard she works for you? Don’t you know how much she loves you?”
I saw that, day in and day out, my body worked to meet my demands. And what I gave her in return was a constant litany of how she’s not good enough.
My heart filled with so much compassion for my unappreciated body.
I resolved from that moment to be her friend, to support her and stop criticizing, to acknowledge her efforts and when she was tired, to make sure that she knew and continues to know that I’m there for her, always.
I believe that at the heart of our health is extending compassion and friendship to our own body
Some years later, I was lying on the grass, next to the garden that I was starting to cultivate. We’d recently bought property that I was free to shape with my own imagination. If I wanted a tree someplace, I could plant a tree, if I wanted a flower bed, I could build a flower bed. I could do anything I wanted, because this was our own property. I was so happy.
And I was so frustrated, because I was in a lot of pain.
There was so much I wanted to do, and it was hard to stay upright for more than fifteen minutes.
This wasn’t my first experience with debilitating back pain. The first time was when I was 14 years old and tidying up the tool shed at the community garden. I reached forward to set down a few wooden stakes and something happened in my back. The pain was so intense that I dropped down onto my side and waited to see if I would die.
Realizing my dream of having my own bit of land happened to correspond with the most prolonged and intense period of back pain that I had yet experienced. I could look all around me and see things that I wanted to do, and yet, on a physical level I no longer wanted to do any of them, because I knew it would hurt. That was really frustrating.
As I was lying on the grass, letting the seized up feeling in my back subside so I could stand up and work in the garden for another round, I realized that my body was full of both pain and fear. There was the actual pain, somewhere along my spine, but also sort of everywhere. But there were also a lot of stiffened muscles and a physical belief that if I moved it would provoke something terrible.
I wondered what it would be like to just find the point, or points, of pain, and if I could let everything else go that I was more or less doing to myself as a protective strategy.
So, I closed my eyes, shifted my awareness to the inside and looked around for where this pain actually was. As I did this, everything that got dismissed as not being the pain relaxed. I went deeper and deeper, resolved to separate out everything that was physical fear, from the actual point of pain. More and more parts of my body relaxed as awareness showed us that there was no damage there. As I found an area of pain I looked into the center of it to see just what the size and shape and density of the pain was. Sometimes there was nothing at all in the middle. In a couple of places (maybe it was just one, my memory no longer serves) there was a point in the middle, and as I looked closer at that point, it became smaller and more defined. Next I tried influencing that point of pain to see what made it hurt and what didn’t. I made little micro-movements inside my body next to the pain point. I found that not all movement made it hurt. I tried making bigger movements that only moments before I was tightly clamped down against making. I found that I could make some bigger movements without making the pain worse. Eventually I stood up. I twisted, squatted, took a step. I tried bouncing a little, and then jumped up and down. This would have been impossible 10 minutes before. I was actually jumping up and down, jostling my spine, and I felt safe. There was still pain, but it was much smaller, no longer my whole back and no longer every movement.
That was when I learned in my own bones, the difference between fear and pain, and how fear makes pain so much bigger than it needs to be.
It was in this time, between when I was 14 and when we bought the property that I became keenly interested in the question of recurring and persistent pain and what we can do about it.
That was the end of my back pain stopping me from doing things.
But it wasn’t until just a few years ago that my back pain (and hip pain and knee pain) completely ended. I discovered physical fitness training or, as I think of it, looking for my physical weakness. In the same way that I looked for my actual point of pain I looked for undoable motions and practiced until I could do them.
I had no idea how many undoable motions I was working around over the course of a day.
Through practice and the physical adaptation that comes with practice, I started being able to do these motions. Walls turned into pathways and I started using all those new pathways. Thus I stopped the old set of stresses on my body, because I had so many new options for how to move.
It isn’t so much that we need to execute a motion the right way, it’s that we need options.
Why I Touch People
I originally went to massage school because I wanted to learn more about the human body, including my own. I had been considering chiropractic school and becoming the 4th generation in my family to take that profession. I eventually decided that touch has power and more time in contact matters.
For a while I thought that pressing harder on the body would be better, and looked for ways to push the body around artfully. Then I realized that the body is alive.
Even a light touch on the skin travels deep inside the brain.
Today, the most important thing to me about touching people is feeling their tissue respond. When it gets seen, it opens up. I touch people so that I can witness that change…and then see what happens for them. Read Massage Testimonials here.
Skin is the largest organ in our body and the conduit between our outer and inner worlds. Practicing massage has fine tuned my ability to communicate with someone’s body through touch. While touching people, I can feel their tissue respond. I am able to witness and be in rapport with their muscles, connective tissues, bones and sensitive nervous system. When these are seen, they open up.
When the person feels that change they start to radiate joy and freedom and let out their own inner light. They might just say they feel relaxed. But what does feeling relaxed feel like? It’s like taking a big drink of water when you’re thirsty, or a breeze blowing on a muggy day, or remembering how to be happy.
Seeing someone’s light come on turns my own light on.
People need their light to shine, and we all need their specific light. The world needs it like plants need water. The future of the world depends on bringing out the joy, and freedom and beauty that we have inside of us. It’s an essential element and we’re crying out for it.
Why I Teach Fitness Training
There were two parallel reasons that I got started.
I’d been practicing massage for many years, and I felt that there was something missing.
I felt that the process of seeing and getting to know one’s own body could happen, not only through touch, but also by practicing putting stresses through it and exploring movement. I had no idea at the time how profound and far reaching this really is.
I started training at 39 years old because I’d become increasingly aware that I was spending a lot more time sitting than I used to. I could see that if I stayed on the same trajectory, I would not be setting myself up for success in my later decades.
I’d tried for years to get started with another regular movement practice on my own, but I couldn’t do it and eventually hired Nathan Schecter from The New Bodymind Literacy. He was a great coach and I took some further training from him about coaching others.
It always bothered me that people would claim to be “getting old” at any age, when stiffness, pain and/or limitation presented themselves. Doing what we’ve been doing for a long time isn’t the same as getting old. Movement with appropriate challenge (fitness training) will build muscle, strengthen bone, increase mobility and decrease pain and stiffness. Now I have seen myself and my clients aging backwards.
I was so taken with the process of making the impossible possible I knew that I had found, not only my own movement practice, but what I wanted to share with others.
I love working with women who have the spunk to steer themselves where they want to go, and who want to be able to do the activities they want to do. There is so much amazing change possible through fitness training and I love helping women explore what their bodies can do and discover how quickly they can improve their strength, balance and vitality.
Read Semi-Private Training Testimonials Here.
Experience and Qualifications
I graduated in 2004 from a 1000 hour, accredited massage therapy program at the Brian Utting School of Massage.
I took an interest in persistent pain early on, because it is so common and there don’t seem to be a lot of good options in popular medicine.
I’ve taken numerous Continue Ed classes including Hellerwork and the Anatomy Trains styles of fascia work, and even co-authored a poster for the 3rd International Fascia Research Congress.
I became influenced by the work of Milton Trager, explored Craniosacral Therapy a bit and took a long course in Orthopedic Massage from Whitney Lowe at the Academy of Clinical Massage.
I retook that course when it was (briefly) offered as a nationally accredited certificate and after 80 hours of study got to claim the title of Clinical Rehabilitative or Orthopedic Massage Therapist. This helps me make better assessments and more relevant treatments.
My interest in persistent pain led me to the emerging field of Pain Science. I took Greg Lehman’s course, both online and in-person, Reconciling Biomechanics with Pain Science.
Stress and trauma interest me. I’ve received Somatic Experiencing Therapy and read about the long term effects of a lack of safety in our environment.
I’ve been self-employed throughout my massage career. And as a dedicated life-long learner I read a fair amount.
I got started with Fitness Training both personally and professionally by working with Nathan at The New Mind Body Literacy. Then I became certified as a Functional Aging Specialist through the Functional Aging Institute.
Before veering toward natural science I was a foodie and spent a year as a culinary apprentice when I was 17. I had ideas about opening my own restaurant, but eventually decided not to.
In the winter of 2004 I went to the South Pole and met the love of my life.
We built a house and a life together. I’d wanted to build a house for a long time and was keenly interested in earthen construction at one time.
I got involved with community volunteerism, largely due to my mom’s influence. And I worked to get the North Mountain Lookout restoration and rental started. This took me four years and my team and I brought it from something that seemed like a great idea to being well funded and half way done.
Tom and I walked across Washington state together.
We grow a big garden and fill our freezer every year.
We successfully navigated the change to a plant-based diet, and added more colorful and delicious diversity to our diet then we’d ever had before
For fun, here’s a link to my current training mix:
If you feel like I can be of service to you in some way, and what I’ve shared sparks
a sense of connection, please reach out, tell me a bit about yourself.
Take time for yourself, stay inspired,
the world needs you to become completely who you are.
by Heart Light Digital
