Today we’d like to introduce you to Margaret Selva.
Hi Margaret, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Teaching middle school math is rough. It completely drained me and I needed something recharging and fulfilling to do (with adults) during the summer. I took a Swedish massage community education class and I was hooked. Who knew something as simple as touch could be so transformative. Plus, the body is a perfectly designed, efficient machine. I was fascinated by the mechanics of the body and couldn’t wait to share with others how the body moves and functions. I completed my massage program at CenterPoint Massage and Shiatsu School and Clinic and the rest is history.
In massage school, we learned the healing power of heat and cold. After an especially intense summer of doing massage, I used hydrotherapy by putting my hands in ice water, then hot water, and back again, over and over. At the end, my hands and wrists felt brand new. The idea that something as simple as extreme cold and extreme heat could be so rejuvenating blew my mind. How can I make my whole body feel like this? For a Minnesotan who had never been in a proper sauna before, sauna finally made sense. About a year later, the 612 Sauna Society was setting up month-long residencies around Minneapolis and I tried it out. Again, I was hooked. I signed up immediately to be a volunteer and learned to prepare, operate, and clean the sauna. Soon after, I designed and added the Atacama Sauna to my massage practice.
Following my curiosity for simple, potent healing modalities I signed myself up for a sound bath. I surrendered to the perfect tones and the wind chimes fed my mind candy, coaxing me into a deep trance. I loved that it was accessible and effective at turning down the chatter in people’s brains.
Shortly after my sound bath training I finally found a space to expand my practice where I could offer these three, simple modalities: massage, sauna, and sound bath.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Growing a wellness business can be hard. Massage requires vulnerability and trust and both the client and practitioner know within the first ten minutes if it’s the right fit: comfortable bolstering on the table, pressure, pace, proper technique, amount of lotion, communication, etc. When you find the right match for someone who values routine massages, you almost want to exchange high fives as you make the next appointment. But that doesn’t happen all of the time in the first few years.
Plus, I struggled with marketing. It didn’t feel right or good asking people to blindly trust me and pay me what I was worth. I also don’t have the personality to use targeted language to peddle my wares in a conventional way. I can’t just say a trendy health claim like “helps you sleep” and walk away. Everyone deserves information and transparency, especially when it comes to their health. Overall, I have since learned a lot about myself. I gained more confidence in my abilities as a bodyworker, the quality of the services I offer, and being my introverted, compassionate, authentic self in all aspects of my practice. Social media and website SEO is still the bane of my existence but I’m finding genuine ways to present myself and the brand to call in the right people who want what I have to offer.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
My first passion is massage and I have spent the most time identifying where the tension lies in the body (which, 60% of the time it’s NOT where the client is feeling pain) and practicing techniques to release fascia and calm trigger points (“knots”). My second passion is sauna and using my knowledge of thermic bathing culture and mental health, I designed sauna spaces for those who need maximum calm: fewer people, more bolsters, more adaptations, more opportunities to turn the brain off. As I develop as a sound bath practitioner, I get to use my third skill set of education. Care is for everyone but many people who need rest and care don’t want to try a new modality because it is to “woo woo”. I want to make self care easy to understand. I want to explain the how and why of each modality (with a Western perspective), reiterate that it’s best to approach each modality with curiosity and self compassion, and provide tools for adjustment, if needed.
This new space in Burnsville opens the door for some great magic to happen. By themselves, massage, sauna, and sound bath are three primal modalities that are effective at bringing your attention to your body, calming the nervous system, and allowing the body to rest and recover.
But to do them in combination? Now we’re talking. Sauna before a massage softens the tissue and makes trigger points easy to get to and massage. Massage before a sound bath opens the pathways for blood and lymph to travel to previously stuck areas so your body can spend the next hour in deep rest, repairing. Sound bath before a sauna puts you into a deep meditative state so you can step into the hot room ready to follow the instinct of your body instead of the clock on the wall. If you follow your curiosity and see what your body says, you build a better relationship with your body and find the singular or combination of modalities that is going to give your body the most care.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
If we continue to value whole-person wellness and practitioner expertise, we can match people with accessible, sustainable health practices so they can attain their health goals. But first we have to look at what we have right now. Big Wellness is a booming market and a trending topic that’s tricky to talk about. Because of varying regulations, misinformation and information taken out of context all over the internet, and the impact of influencers over true experts, anyone who needs a side hustle and has the intention of helping people can take a company’s short online training and become a certified expert on a wellness modality. Add a breathtaking website, dreamy social media pages, and catchy health claims like “improves immunity” and “supports heart health” and people with little knowledge about how the whole body works are led to believe that their ideal health has one answer, regardless of ALL of the following: their age, sex, stress levels, sleep, nutrition, fitness etc. Politics and regulation play a huge role in what will and will not be allowed so I am anxious to see how this plays out broadly in the wellness industry.
Speaking of local politics and regulation there is one major shift that I can only hope happens and that the effects are immensely positive. Minnesota is one of four states where there’s no state licensure for practicing massage therapy and cities are the ones who regulate licenses. Surprisingly, many of the cities in the metro don’t require proof of a completed massage program from an accredited school. A version of a bill for state licensure has been hanging out in the senate and the house since I was in high school and every year nothing happens. The shift I’m hoping for is that massage therapy in Minnesota can earn the respect of some regulation so we can raise the bar of quality and expertise in this industry.
Now, the sauna industry is a particularly interesting case if we’re speculating what the future holds. Sauna exploded in the United States over the last five years for its health benefits utilized during COVID (even though it has been a part of cultures all over the world for centuries). If we can revere at least some of the thermic bathing tradition, sauna will be here to stay. If we continue to Americanize sauna by optimizing biometrics and remaining glued to our phones while we’re sitting on the bench, the sauna trend will cool off quickly. Making promises like using sauna and cold plunge will burn such-and-such percent brown fat may sound great, but for the general population those statistics will be felt if everything else about your health is doing great (sleep, nutrition, fitness, stress). When people don’t see the miraculous physical results from just doing sauna, people quit doing it. That’s why I’m more interested in the mental-emotional aspects of sauna: getting people reacquainted with their body’s natural signals, getting people outside in nature in the winter, and most importantly, getting people to practice the art of conversation and building relationships. Highlighting these aspects of sauna meets people where they are at and honors the role mental health plays in improving physical health.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://forestfloorwellness.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/forestfloorwellness/
