Healing Touch

Stretching has been an important theme in BECKY BRENNAN’s life, helping her to heal from physical and emotional trauma and opening a professional path forward in young adulthood. Now Brennan, a massage therapist and owner of Blueberry Sage Healing Studio, is helping others access the restorative powers of stretching by offering Thai Yin Yoga, a blend of yoga and therapeutic touch techniques.

Brennan’s semi-private Thai Yin Yoga sessions combine elements of Thai Yoga, a form of massage in which participants actively move and stretch during the session, and Yin Yoga, which involves holding various poses for extended amounts of time to deepen the stretch. “They are in more passive postures: seated or reclined, and they usually hold the pose for three to five minutes, although some people have held them for as long as ten minutes,” Brennan says of the Yin Yoga practice. “It’s more relaxing, and the positions are simple ones like child’s pose or forward fold. Participants are fully relaxed. We’re targeting muscles and connective tissue, ligaments, joints. I’m adding in the Thai element of assisted stretching and massage.”

Brennan offers these massage-and-yoga sessions for groups of no more than six people so she can work individually with participants, tailoring their stretches and her therapeutic touch to their specific needs. The environment is intimate and her clients know she will be assisting them with certain stretches and adding massage here and there as they work through their routines. “They always have the choice to opt out,” of the touch, Brennan says, adding that she asks her clients how they are feeling and if there are particular areas they want her to address.

Thai Yin Yoga can be beneficial to people of any age and with a variety of health conditions, according to Brennan. “My mom is having really bad osteoarthritis and was hesitant to come to yoga because she can’t do all the physical postures,” she says. “I reassured her I will do my best to accommodate her, and that if something doesn’t feel good, she can just lie there and I will come and [massage her].”

Yin Yoga is also concerned with the free flow of energy, or qi, through meridian lines or pathways, Brennan explains. “Sometimes these pathways become blocked, and can cause constipation, headaches, [some kinds of] disease, or skin disorders. By strengthening and lengthening [the pathways], we can increase energy flow. We work with different meridians to help balance the pathways that have become stagnant,” Brennan says. “I’m not saying that Yin Yoga is going to heal a person, but it is a supplemental approach.”

Brennan developed the desire to provide a healing touch for others as she stretched herself past several adverse experiences. “I have been drawn to the healing arts, I believe, because I had childhood trauma,” she says. “I watched my dad die of pancreatic cancer when I was nine, and was always seeking avenues to make myself feel better.”

She discovered yoga and watched instruction videos, finding the practice helpful. Then, when she began having migraines as a teenager, a family friend offered massage as a way to address those. “I eventually started doing yoga classes at a studio in Chicago when I was in college, and later got a job as guest coordinator at one of the nice spas there. It was my first step toward a career,” she relates. “I saw various styles of massage, along with some chiropractic and acupuncture. I fell in love with the whole environment.”

Then, while still in college in Chicago, Brennan was on a break and ran to a nearby drugstore for a quick purchase. Crossing the street in a crosswalk, she was hit by a car. “I had some physical injuries, but I suffered emotional injuries that were awful,” she says. “I had round after round of physical therapy and pain management treatments, but nothing was working.”

Brennan dropped out of college and moved to Wilmington, where her family was living. To address her post-traumatic stress disorder, she started going to gentle yoga classes and found they helped relieve her physical and emotional pain.

She enrolled in massage school, and after completing that and becoming a licensed massage therapist in 2014, she underwent yoga teacher training and was certified in 2017. She opened her own studio the next year and obtained an LLC for Blueberry Sage Healing Studio in 2019. While her principal practice is massage therapy, she always wanted to include yoga in her studio’s offerings. She shifted gears during the COVID pandemic, adding the Thai Yin Yoga.

“COVID really changed the way that I work,” she says. “I realized that [a client’s] nervous system has to be in a relaxed state in order for [therapies] to be effective. Massage should not be painful. You are asking the muscles to relax. Participants have to come into the studio ready and willing to receive massage.”

Blueberry Sage offers Thai Yin Yoga classes three times a week on a consistent schedule. Students can attend as frequently as they like, either informally or by purchasing packages of five classes at a time. Reservations are a must, though, so that Brennan can manage class size and plan. She hopes these classes attract potential students who are on a tight budget and would not ordinarily be able to afford massage therapy or healing touch treatment.

To view more of photographer Daria Amato’s work, go to dariaphoto.com

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