Fun Stuff Coming Up!
Published about 2 months ago • 3 min read
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September is full on here at MMI!
We have a lil somethin for all!
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Fall Courses
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MFR Upper Body + Core: There are three seats in this class. If you want interesting and useful approaches for the neck and shoulder, we got you! This is a one-time-per-year class.
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CST Foundations I Fall: One seat is left for our fall course. Is it yours? We'd love to see you. Early Bird ends Monday, 9/7. Uplevel your practice and step into the mystery! Read below for more on our CST approach and other opportunities to study.
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CST Clinical Mentorship Certification: We've created a unique learning experience within the CST landscape, one that will advance your clinical skills significantly. The highlight is our clinical rotations, where you treat your own patients in a group setting with Michael's real-time, hands-on input right there at your fingertips! We tested this last year, and it was phenomenal.
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Fall Special Events
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Fall Book Club!
Kicks off 9/14. We are reading Fascia and Hypermobility Disorders by Tina Wang, M.D. I am thrilled about this book. Dr. Wang's Bendy Bodies pod helped me immensely translate my myofascial skills when treating folks on the hypermobility spectrum. This book is one of the most clinically relevant texts I have seen in a very long time. Not only will we learn about working with folks on the hypermobility spectrum, but we will learn about fascial properties and fascial bodywork in ways that will support our work with any body.
Join me and colleagues, Kim Christensen, L.Ac. and Bo Campot, L.Ac. Kim and Bo bring so much to the table, I'm thrilled to be cohosting this with them.
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Live Treatment Demonstration
Combining Manual Therapy Approaches in the Clinic on 9/23/26, online and in-person at the Constellation Classroom in Minneapolis. I rarely get to do these, and I love them. It is so fun to step out of more formal class learning and bridge into how we might use these modalities in treatment. Truth is I blend them so much that sometimes (most times?) I am at a liminal space between MFR and CST or IVT and MFR. We rarely get to watch each other work. Yet, we can get so many ideas from this type of experience. I will demo on an actual patient of one of our colleagues. We will then have time for a group debrief after the demo.
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Craniosacral Therapy at Moving Mountain |
We love CST here at MMI. It was my (Michael) first formal study in bodywork, before even going to massage school. CST principles and touch are woven into all of the other work that I do.
And, you might notice I don't write about it a lot. There's a couple reasons for that. The main one is that I find it to be a bit ineffable, it exists in a place where less words may be more. I also find the CST space to be overfull with prescriptive and heavily categorical perspectives.
I think this loses the main point, that we learn the work to serve our clients and patients and we do so within their experiential framework.
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I believe so much in the potency of CST that I try to leave a lot of room for each person to have their own experience of it free of extra concepts. I think the work does a great job of speaking for itself. If I say "CST is..." then I am making a declarative statement that leaves out everything I didn't say. We go to work to serve others within their experiential capacity, so I always defer to that. I could never capture all the ways I have witnessed folks experience this work. Nor, all the various ways I have done the work so that it meets the person where their system is - not where I was told to look for it.
When it comes to CST, I see it as a form of bodywork with potent energetic potential alongside its equally powerful physical impacts. Each body gets to have its own response. Like all we teach, we go to the body itself to learn from it as a way of establishing connection. From here the magic truly does happen. And we can let that just be. Touching into the mystery is enough.
Interestingly, along with the part of the work that touches the mystery it is incredibly tangible. My practice would not be what it is without the clinical results that folks experience because of how I approach CST in treatment.
If you're curious, our 2026/27 calendar is full of CST learning opportunities!
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We are unabashedly against algorithmic communication and love the human likes and shares.
If you like what you find here (at least mostly), please share it with other folks.
Thanks for following and reading!
Michael
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Moving Mountain Institute
Integrative massage therapy and advanced bodywork training in Portland, Oregon.
Thanks for trusting us with a little space in your inbox. We share periodic updates from Moving Mountain Institute and Michael McMahon—upcoming courses and registration dates, new writing, and reflections from teaching and clinical practice.
