Flow: A Neuroscience-Informed Guide to Flow State in Massage Therapy - Paperback

Deery, Christopher: - Christopher Deery, LMT, BCTMB, has spent three decades exploring what happens when knowledge, experience, attention, and skilled touch meet in the practice of massage therapy. A massage therapist since 1996 and Board Certified for more than two decades, his career has crossed private practice, physical therapy, multidisciplinary healthcare, athletic training and sports performance, massage therapy education, and professional leadership.Education has remained the connecting thread throughout that work. Christopher has taught massage therapy at both entry-level and continuing education levels, developed curricula, served as a director of sciences, and presented on clinical reasoning, measurable outcomes, pain, sports massage, oncology, ethics, and the integration of massage therapy within healthcare. Through Anatriptic Alchemy, which he founded with his wife and longtime collaborator Xerlan Deery, he continues to develop education intended to make complex science useful without losing sight of the human being on the table.His interest in research and pain science led to his work with the Massage Therapy Foundation as a subject matter expert on the role of massage therapy in pain management, including work associated with the Samueli Institute meta-analyses examining massage therapy for general, surgical, and cancer-related pain populations.Christopher has also spent more than two decades in volunteer service to the massage therapy profession. He served as president of the American Massage Therapy Association and served as President of the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage & Bodywork.Flow: A Neuroscience-Informed Guide to the Flow State in Massage Therapy grows from a question that has followed Christopher through much of that career: what changes when a massage therapist stops merely performing techniques and becomes completely engaged in the work? Drawing from psychology, neuroscience, education, clinical experience, and the study of expertise, Flow explores that question without trying to turn an extraordinary human experience into a formula. It is an invitation to understand attention, skill, curiosity, and presence as parts of clinical practice that can be examined, cultivated, and continually refined.Deery: - Xerlan Deery, LMT, BCTMB, has spent her career asking questions about massage therapy that rarely have simple answers. What makes touch meaningful? How does experience become intuition? What changes as a therapist moves from learning techniques to understanding the person beneath their hands? And how do we teach that kind of practice without reducing it to a collection of steps?A massage therapist, educator, writer, and continuing education provider, Xerlan has worked across clinical practice and professional education, with particular interests in oncology massage, pregnancy and postpartum massage, aging, ethics, communication, and the ways therapists develop discernment through experience. Her teaching is grounded in the belief that good massage therapy requires more than knowing what to do. It requires curiosity, adaptability, attention, humility, and a willingness to remain present with what is actually happening rather than what the therapist expected to find.Together with her husband and longtime collaborator Christopher Deery, Xerlan founded Anatriptic Alchemy as a place to explore those questions more deeply. Their work brings science, clinical experience, philosophy, education, and the lived realities of massage therapy into conversation without pretending that any one of them holds all the answers. Xerlan's writing in particular often begins with ordinary moments from the treatment room, classroom, or everyday life and follows them toward larger questions about how therapists learn, perceive, connect, and change.That perspective became an important foundation for Flow: A Neuroscience-Informed Guide to the Flow State in Massage Therapy. Flow can be described through psychology and investigated through neuroscience, but it is ultimately experienced by people. Xerlan brings that human experience to the center of the conversation, exploring what happens when attention settles, skill becomes less effortful, curiosity remains active, and therapist and client enter the complicated, deeply human territory of therapeutic presence.Her work throughout Flow invites massage therapists to notice something they may already have experienced but never quite named: those remarkable sessions when knowledge, touch, attention, and experience seem to stop competing with one another and simply become practice.