Rewiring Stress Through Body Awareness

Massage isn't just about working muscles—it's a profound "brain game" that retrains our nervous system to recognize and release tension we didn't even know we were carrying. In this enlightening conversation with returning guest Melissa Kary, we explore the fascinating challenge many people face: achieving relaxation during a massage session but struggling to recreate that state independently.

The most powerful insight emerges when we discuss anxiety not as an enemy to overcome but as valuable information our bodies provide. Through a personal story about navigating a steep hill at a concert venue, Melissa demonstrates how listening to anxiety—rather than fighting it—led to finding a safer path and ultimately greater enjoyment. "Your body shouldn't be working against you," she explains. "It should always be working for you." This perspective shift transforms our relationship with stress, teaching us to work with our nervous system rather than against it.

Ready to stop dismissing your body's signals and start creating the calm you deserve? Subscribe to It Starts at Vegas for weekly episodes that help you soothe your nervous system and reclaim who you are at your core. Share this episode with someone who might benefit from learning to listen to their body's wisdom—because wellness truly does start from within.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Melissa Carey
• 0:39 Massage as a Brain Game
• 3:16 Teaching Clients to Relax
• 5:03 Anxiety, Trust and Concert Hills
• 10:25 Reflecting on Pain and Growth
• 16:32 Episode Closing and Call to Action

Transcript

Emily Feist: 0:00

Welcome back to 'It Starts at Vagus', the podcast where we stop chasing calm and start creating it, one small shift at a time. I'm your host, Emily, and I'm your guide to rewiring stress, restoring calm and giving your nervous system the attention it deserves.

Emily Feist: 0:16

We have a special guest in today's episode my good friend, Melissa Kary. We first met Melissa in episode 21, discussing her healing journey, and today she talks more about how she integrates it with her work as a massage therapist and how she is reflecting and listening to her own body. Let's start by discussing how massage affects the mind and body. Go ahead and take it away, Melissa.

Melissa Kary: 0:39

So I've told it to my clients time and time and time and time again, and I will continue to do so, that I think massage is a brain game. It's a 90, 60, whatever minute brain game. You know and so like does your body respond? Does your brain allow your body to respond to this? Does your brain allow your body to respond to that? Because I feel like the nervous system is the control panel and you have to get through that in order to make those goals of wellness happen, absolutely.

Emily Feist: 1:17

Nerves are powerful, so powerful, so powerful. And I think that's a really cool thing about massage therapy is that just like when we start the beginning of a massage and we just start like, you know, just have some nice gentle glides instantly, most people are like and we're settling down.

Melissa Kary: 1:33

Yes.

Emily Feist: 1:34

You know it takes like a minute and they're already like and I can feel the stress going away.

Melissa Kary: 1:39

Yeah. So, that's like that power of touch is just crazy, amazing. You know, like I've started to incorporate more, like just okay, finding a point where I feel the muscle release or if it's like them just kind of releasing Mentally, mentally, yeah.

Emily Feist: 2:12

It's really powerful when you can feel them just relaxing into it and you're like. Then they're like I didn't realize I was holding on to as much as I was, yeah, as much as I was. When their fingers got like a clenched fist in a relaxed mode and you're like, okay, just open your hands up. And they're like, oh, I didn't even realize that my hands were tight. And you're like, yeah, you're guarding pretty well when you're relaxing and still have clenched hands, open them up, wiggle them up.

Melissa Kary: 2:46

Yeah, and then when that happens, like the theme song just thunderstruck, just kind of, it's right. Here I hear it.

Emily Feist: 2:56

I had a client reach out to me and ask me if I can teach her how to relax her, how to relax, and the interesting thing of this is that I've seen her for at least a year and I can get her into relax mode. She knows she can get there, but it's like she still doesn't understand how to get there herself.

Emily Feist: 3:23

And I find, like the very same day that that she asked me, I had another client. She's like I don't know how to relax. She works all the time. She puts everybody first. She's just I, I was like just, can you like be still for 10 minutes? And she's like no, like okay, we'll start with two, see if you can handle two minutes of just sitting there. And she's like that's going to be hard Because that lady, she is in such pain you don't know what it feels like to feel good and your baseline is pain. And so that is why you say it's a five, because that's just like a constant, steady pain all day, all the time. And to teach them how to feel again, that's a mind game, it is.

Melissa Kary: 4:17

It is because you can get them there. And then, like I was thinking of putting some words on my wall in my massage room saying like I give myself permission to you know. And then I really sit there and I really really think about those words and I'm like why do we have to give ourselves permission to do anything you know? Like, okay, I'm an adult. I kind of know somewhat how to adult Sometimes.

Melissa Kary: 4:46

I don't want to adult, but like in a massage room. Why do I need to give myself permission to actually be still, except to what you know, what my body needs?

Emily Feist: 4:56

So that's where the anxiety and muscle memory plays part.

Melissa Kary: 5:01

Yes, so about that? Not a couple weekends ago ago we went to a concert, me and the girls, and there it was like at great bear, which is a ski resort, and we were going down one of the hills and to me it was a steep hill. I was not prepared for it, okay, um. So my daughter gave me her arm and so I was thankful I'm perfect. We got down and I was like that was pretty steep, but I was glad nobody fell. It ended well.

Melissa Kary: 5:36

The next night the concert was again, and probably an hour before that I could feel my heart start to kind of go and I was thinking about that hill and I'm like, okay, what shoes should I wear? I don't want to fall. That hill is kind of big, you know, whatever. And then I would tell myself, like stop, you're fine, you didn't fall yesterday, you're not going to fall today. I was creating my own nerves or anxiety and about this stinking hill, and so I wore like canvas shoes so I wouldn't fall, and I. But as we got closer again, my, my heart just started going off and I had to tell myself you did not fall yesterday, you're creating this anxiety, you don't need it, you know whatever. Um, if anything, one of the girls will give you her arm, all will be fine, yeah.

Melissa Kary: 6:33

And we got there and I thought, oh, snapdragon, there it is. And immediately, um, I don't think I really had time, but my eyes looked over to the left, where the hill was not so steep, and we were like we're going that way, and so I was thankful, I kind of like trusted myself that it was not going to fall, that that path was going to lead me to the ground where I needed to be, and not on my face. And it did, and everything went fine and it was a great concert and I did not fall. And so I feel like sometimes you just need to trust yourself.

Melissa Kary: 7:24

Okay, maybe more than sometimes. Every time you need to trust yourself and your gut instinct and even trust your anxiety sometimes, because, like you said, it's got that memory bank in there and we can access it, but only when we need to, and it saves us a lot of the time. But my first instinct is not to go with it. It's to quiet it, it's I don't want it to be there. But if I pause and I take a moment and I listen to what my brain and body are telling me to do and then go that route. Things go much more smoothly and that unnecessary angst about situations or falling or whatever is just not even relevant.

Emily Feist: 8:14

I love it so much because you're realizing that you're able to listen to your body. Yeah, you know, and use it for good and to let those bells and alarms to go off and be like, okay, I hear you, I see you, and I'm not just going to like snooze, you Right, you know, use your superpower for good, use your superpower for good.

Melissa Kary: 8:33

Yes, yes, and it's like it's a little bit of, you know, it's a little bit of nervousness, but it's a lot of mental clarity, because then things go more smoothly. And then, and then I feel like that that bank that you just opened up a couple of days ago it kind of closes itself off and says, okay, we're not going to fall, we can create a new passage to kind of get to where we need to be. So that, to me, was like an aha moment. Sometimes all you have to do is just go with it, yeah, and trust your body with safety. You know, like your body shouldn't be working against you. It should always be working for you.

Emily Feist: 9:13

So Absolutely 100%, that's all input that your body's just giving you. I like that so much because it's not about, like stopping anxiety, it's not about never happening again. It's saying okay, what are you telling me?

Melissa Kary: 9:27

Yeah.

Emily Feist: 9:28

And not letting it like have a death grip on you in the worst ways.

Melissa Kary: 9:32

Right, and you still had a great time. We did. We had such a great time and I would, and I even said okay, 2026, we're doing it again. You know, I was the first one to say we're absolutely doing it again. I would do it in a heartbeat. You know, whatever it's memories and times with our girls and things like that, and so I don't know, it was a really, really, really great time and I got to see TLC. Hey, I know it was great, it was so good yeah.

Emily Feist: 9:59

But now it's not something to run from.

Melissa Kary: 10:02

No.

Emily Feist: 10:03

You know, and I think that's where, like that mind shift goes from angry, annoyance and that death grip of not letting you do what you want to do to saying okay, why is this making me anxious? What can I do? What is it telling me to keep myself safe from Right? So I love reflecting.

Melissa Kary: 10:25

I do too. Sometimes it can be a little bit uncomfortable, but I feel like, overall, when you can reflect on a moment or a time, I feel like you'll learn so much, even if at the time it didn't go in your favor. But you can always learn something from that instance.

Emily Feist: 10:48

Yeah, a thought that comes into my mind is when a client comes into my office and they have like this laundry list of things that hurt, and sometimes I ask them like well, when did it first happen? When was that first domino effect, you know? And when they can pinpoint it off the like right away, you're like that's where we need to start, like what were the motions that you were doing during that time? Other times, when they're like I can't remember and it takes a while, then I'm like well, I probably didn't have as much effect as it could have. But when they can say it just right off their tip of their tongue, I'm like that's, those are the muscle groups that we're going to work on right now.

Melissa Kary: 11:29

Yes, that's very helpful. Thank you for remembering that.

Emily Feist: 11:33

Yes, yeah, fix, fix the root of the problem and everything else just gets better. So, yeah, that's why reflecting is so helpful.

Melissa Kary: 11:43

Yes, I agree, yeah, yeah.

Emily Feist: 11:47

Sometimes it can feel icky, but it can be very helpful, right? Yes, yeah, I don't know. That's really neat that you recognize that, though.

Melissa Kary: 11:56

You know, sometimes I give myself a finally, you know, but then I think about it like that's not fair, why, you know, that's not fair to me to be like, well, finally you trust yourself. You know what I mean. You know, like, why can't you do it all the time? Well, because it's not meant to be that easy. Sometimes people are very complicated. I'm a I think I'm a very complicated person, like I have to complicate everything and but it also gives me fulfillment. Trusting yourself does not come for me anyway. It does not come naturally, I guess. I'm not sure why, but at this point it doesn't matter.

Emily Feist: 12:42

It's that I can do it when it needs to be done. I don't know if this is a blanket statement or just kind of how I feel at the moment, but it's like the more we have pain, the more we can love, the more light, the more darkness. It goes back to those opposites where we need one so that we can enjoy the other. Don't take it for granted all those things. I was thinking about it the other day. If you could choose to be happy all the time, would I or would you? That was the time, would I or would you? You know, like that was the reflective question. I don't remember what I was listening to, but that was a question that they brought up. And the guy was like, no, I'd hate to be happy all the time. And the guy's like why? And he was like could you imagine going to a funeral and being like I am the happiest person? This is a great idea. There's appropriate times not to be happy.

Melissa Kary: 13:36

And it's funny that you said that, because her quote was you can never be truly happy if you've never been hurt.

Emily Feist: 13:42

And so we do need to be able to feel different feelings, yes, and so I think that's just part of it. Like you got to learn something about yourself, you know, because you had that anxiety moment. You were able to come back the next day and be like hey look, I did it, you know, yes, yes, and now you've, now you're like I know something more about myself now.

Melissa Kary: 14:07

Yeah, it's very powerful, but it's very like I don't know what the right word for it is. It seems silly, though Silly it seems. It seems silly like a silly statement. I can trust myself.

Emily Feist: 14:20

Oh, OK, I see what you're saying. Well, I think it's because most of our culture says don't trust yourself. You got to use this app to trust yourself. You got to use this product to trust yourself. You've got to support all the things and all the ways so that you feel like you could take care of yourself. We're not a very empowering culture. We're really taught against it. We're not a very empowering culture. We're really taught against it. Like, we're not taught how to grow a garden, you know, or even how to budget going to a grocery store. It's not a skill that they really teach. No, it's not.

Melissa Kary: 14:52

But buy this app and then you'll know, you'll know, you'll have all the answers, and then the goal is to trust yourself.

Emily Feist: 15:01

Yeah, Versus, just be like, hey, I think I can grocery shop by myself and stay within that budget, you know, Right. And again, the more practice you get, then you're like, hey, look, I did it. So that's probably why it feels silly that we don't. At first I didn't understand what you were talking about. I'm like silly that just that wasn't the word I was anticipating. But now I see what you're talking about, because why don't we just automatically trust ourselves? Oh, no, like when you look at little kids, they do trust themselves very well, they do feel confident as a natural default.

Emily Feist: 15:34

But again, it's just looking at life and seeing okay, what are the things that life has given me for me to grow from? True, so I can be better? Because I always think of, you know, the Bible story, david and Goliath, and they're always like oh, david, good job. You know which I totally like. Yes, right, that makes sense. But like God gave him a whole bunch of practice before that, like he fought lions. You know, if I fought a lion, I would probably feel more comfortable. Guys would be taller than me, you know. I'd be like who are you? You're not going to eat me, right? So I think, just throughout life we get, you know, the little bite size problems, so we can get better Right.

Melissa Kary: 16:20

So yeah, I love that actually, right, so I love that actually. I really do. To me that makes sense. Yeah, like the try, try, try again, you know. So, yeah, yeah, I like that a lot.

Emily Feist: 16:31

All right friends. Thanks for hanging out with us today on the 'It Starts at Vagus' podcast. New episodes are released every Tuesday to give you tips so that you can soothe your nervous system and reclaim who you are. Make sure you're subscribed and share this with someone who you know could benefit. And until next time, remember wellness starts at Vagus.