My Path into Massage Therapy

Hi my name is Martin, offering Holistic and Deep Tissue Massage, and I’m delighted to have joined the team at Healing Space.

I would say massage is my 3rd career! I started out in Marketing, but after spending a long time at one big corporate I increasingly found myself feeling disenchanted, stressed and not in control of my own life.

So, inspired by a trip to a New York and helped by a couple of close friends, I left the corporate world to run a bagel shop (quite the change!) The shop was called Unholy Bagels and was based in Leyton, though we also did a few market days on Chatsworth Road – so this feels like a little bit of a homecoming 😊

The bagel business ran for about 6 years and though there was so much to love, there were a few reasons why it too didn’t feel quite right – it was often physically and emotionally draining, and frankly I was always a bit afraid to charge the higher prices that I would have needed to make a proper profit.

Throughout these years I had also been on my own personal healing journey, trying to improve low self-esteem, high anxiety, difficulty in expressing emotion, fear of risk and more. This journey inside really gained momentum during Covid, where I found time to bring more focus to my meditation practice, discovered transformational breathwork, restarted a creative practice, and so on. After a slightly chance first encounter with some LSD, I later ended up on an Ayahuasca retreat, which was an incredibly opening experience for me in many ways, and where I received a clear invitation into the world of massage and healing.=

Though I had always enjoyed massage it was not on my radar as a career and so I took some time to figure things out while still running the bagel business, making sure it was right for me and not just ‘because Ayahuasca told me to!’.

Eventually though, I felt massage made a lot of sense. On a practical level it allows me to have a job that is active and works with my hands, and to retain the freedom of running my own business. But more than that, it allows me to start sharing my own healing journey into the world.

Although I am only starting out, I am so passionate about massage and all of the work that happens at Healing Space. I am excited to share not only my skills as a massage therapist but also some of the things that have helped me become the happiest and freest version of myself that I have ever been, and I really look forward to meeting more of you soon!