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Austin Fashion Week Names milk + honey’s Alissa Bayer 2012 Trailblazer

August 20, 2012

The founder and owner of milk + honey, Alissa Bayer, is now the proud owner of the Golden Boot (pictured). That’s right, Austin Fashion Week named Bayer one of five recipients of the 2012 Trailblazer Award.

The Austin Fashion Awards were held at the Austin Music Hall on Saturday night and brought the week-long celebration to an end.

Matt Swinney, the Austin Fashion Week founder, told the Statesman.com, “It gets bigger and bigger every year, and I get most of the credit, but that’s not fair. It takes the entire community to put together.” Swinney says it’s rewarding every time “designers who have put their blood, sweat and tears into a collection trust us to do it justice here.”

milk + honey special events like hosting a private party at our Hill Country Galleria location showcasing designer Nancy Ferrell. The entire styling team from SALON by milk + honey participated in the final night of runway shows at the Driskill Hotel on August 17. Alissa is thrilled to be awarded the Trailblazer Award.

Massage

Focusing on Your Head, Hands, and Feet

December 11, 2012

Matt is one of our fantastic massage therapists at milk + honey 2nd Street District.

There really isn’t anything like a proper back rub. A quick session on the shoulders and neck at any given time does wonders, too. Some people really do keep all of their stress there, but what about the neglected head, hands, and feet?

After all, these three features all but define our humanity, if not our human form. Only humans have feet shaped to accommodate bipedal motion for long periods of time. Our hands, sensitive and dextrous, allowed our ancestors to shape our environment to our purposes. Over time camp sites became villages, and villages became cities. With these hands we carried and cared for our young, for much longer periods of time than other mammals. Human children require longer periods of dependence on their parents than other mammals, thanks to the size of their brains. We have huge heads relative to our bodies. Starting from within, the eyes are the windows of the soul. Our face carries our past while, to some, our palms describe our future. Many of us never consider these unsung heroes, but they have allowed us to accomplish all that we have, and define us as individuals.

The more poetic expressions of medical practice intuited and explored the importance of our head, hands, and feet, most famously, the doctors of traditional Chinese medicine. They understood the head, hands, and feet are doorways through which they could gain entry to the rest of our body. Here the ears symbolize and relate the fetal body, and acupuncture treatments can focus solely on this area. Furthermore the eyes, tongue, face, and pulse all inform a TCM practitioner’s diagnosis. The aruvedic traditions of India privileged the hands and feet with special importance. They understood that the minor chakras embedded in the hands bore a special relationship to the heart, and those of the feet related to the root chackra, almost like ambassadors. Other wellness practices, such as reflexology, have grown from a similar synecdoche. Reflexologists treat the entire body, focusing on major body structures and organs, by manually manipulating the feet and hands.

Relying on a more direct connection, Rolfers and structural integrationalists target the hands and feet for some of their most significant fascial interventions. These body workers avail themselves of the collagenous network that forms the warp and weft of our body, connecting us from tip to stern. The arches of our feet contain fibers that connect, blend, and piggy back all of the way into the reaches of our diaphragm, our pericardium, and the inside of our heads. The hands too, share a fascia that stretches inward, relating wrist to elbow to shoulder before diving inward toward the torso.

One of the strongest connections these extraneous structures have with the rest of the body resides in our brain itself. Our bodies show an enormous degree of enervation and sensory intelligence in our head, hands, and feet, disproportionate to the rest of the body. Nervous tissue arranges in a series of one way streets, motor neurons travel from the central nervous system and sensory neurons travel toward it. Sensory input goes back into the brain, the greater detail of which, is the greater effect. Therapeutic, supportive, and sympathetic touch in these areas will go far to calm the mind, and thus the body.

The common image of the sensory homonuculus anthropomorphizes the sensory motor cortex, basically correlating the devoted sensory cortical space of our brain to the size in those structures in the human body to the homonuculus. Photo by Beth Scupham

In short, one cannot avoid affecting the entirety of the body when only working the head, hands, or feet.

Often we neglect these in practice and in memory. I find that most people are unaware as to how much tension they hold in their hands, feet, jaw, scalp, and so on, until another human works those areas.

I find it intriguing that, regardless of whether one favors a physical, structural relationship, or a more poetic and energetic one, that the very structures of our bodies that help us relate to and alter the outside world, in turn have the richest relationships to the core of our being … our hearts and minds.

If you find your curiosity piqued, or simply want to verify or deny my ramblings, know that milk + honey offers the distinct service of focusing on the head, hands, and feet. You can also request your therapist to spend more time in these areas yourself, wherever you enjoy massage.

 

Wellness

Do: Sanctuary and Refuge

January 20, 2014

Written by guest editor and milk + honey licensed massage therapist, Matt W.
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With the holiday season behind us and February in our sights, let’s review our efforts and the fruits of our labors.

Consider taking a moment of refuge and asking for sanctuary.

Where does the idea of “sanctuary” come from?
Sanctuary as a Western concept arose from an older (ancient Greek and Roman) recognition of sacred spaces, and the right to use these spaces to make contact with the divine, or at least to seek refuge within that holiness. They chose places of natural beauty, quietude, and awe to represent their sanctuaries. The Catholic church later adopted the notion of sanctuary, the dominant characteristic of which was protection from civic and criminal persecution. It was meant as an opportunity to repent, and to take refuge in the higher laws of God, thusly enjoying a reprieve from the sometimes unjust lower laws of society. A similar concept of higher law pervaded serious Buddhist concepts. To take refuge in Buddhism ultimately means making a commitment to practices of wakefulness, thereby taking refuge in ultimate truth.

What does sanctuary or refuge mean now?
When I turn the words, “sanctuary” or “refuge,” over in my mind, notions of security, protection, but also humility and sacredness arise. This doesn’t have to have religious connotations my scientific friends. The sick day is a perfect example of taking refuge from ordinary life. To take refuge is to remove oneself from outside influences, and sometimes to remove oneself as an influence to others. It is to temporarily escape the laws of noise by taking refuge in the laws of quiet.

So, how do we do it?

For many of us, the refuge we enter must be a place whereby we can drop off our preoccupations before entering. We must access provisions that separate us from the storm. A powerful refuge, one worthy of being called a sanctuary, will take this to the next level. It will provide refuge from the the more aggressive aspects of our own personalities.

You need to recognize the need to step back. Set aside time to do so. Find a place to go, and go alone. Don’t make demands on any sanctuary or refuge, but give thanks and be respectful to it. Make agreements and allowances. If you seek refuge in nature — say, on the Green Belt in Austin — take water and put your phone on airplane mode. Refuge can be portable. A yogini takes refuge in her breath. A child takes refuge in play and imagination, or in the arms of a parent. We all need refuge, and the good news is that most of us can access it somehow.

We need pauses and rests, and we do so by taking refuge.

Source: zug55/Flickr

News, Wellness

How Are Those New Year Resolutions Coming Along?

March 3, 2014

Written by guest editor and milk + honey licensed massage therapist, Matt W.

New Year's Resolutions

Hi everyone. I  wanted to check in and see how those New Year Resolutions were coming along.

I know, New Year Resolutions were so three months ago, but if life got in the way, and we didn’t follow through, we may just forget that we wanted something different for ourselves in the first place. Don’t wilt if your “New Me” hasn’t completely hatched yet. Often we begin things without realizing there’s also a middle and an end to them. These things take time, about three weeks according to some, or a life time according to others.

Changing often requires a lot of hard work, faith, and support. In the beginning, it can be difficult. In the end, it will ideally be second nature. Yet we are constantly changing in between those two poles. We can change what we habitually do, and by doing so, we can change, at the very least, our experience of ourselves. There’s some science behind this for sure, and a lot of it is very exciting.

As the mechanisms for brain change become better understood, the implications seem to grow. The enormous generalization I would like to make here is that the things you do in your daily life change you. I would add that the way you do things in your daily life also changes you. We can all take advantage of the brain’s adaptability in creating new habits by, well, doing new things. Every activity you undertake affects the physiology of your brain, the neural networks, and the body. The more you do a thing, the easier it is to do it. This goes for habits of mental action and feelings as well as for physical action.

The double edged sword inherent to the brain’s nature for change and engraining will conjure arguments for free will, and this is where you’ll find the best results. Frustration and one’s ability to tolerate frustration seems to play a key roll. Something about just barely succeeding (or failing) sends all kinds of urgency cues to your brain that you really want to improve your skill, or your effort, or your will power right here specifically.

Weightlifting provides the obvious analogy whereby the weight you almost cannot lift is the very weight that will increase your strength the most. You can fine tune and take advantage of other components of the equation to get the most out of your efforts.  Collectives of individuals striving for the same excellence, expert coaching, goal affirming environmental cues all contribute to this phenomenon. I find it interesting that, under the right circumstances, you can change your habits of thoughts and feelings as well.

If you have a strong sense concerning what you want to change, and why, you can get some great advice on classic goal setting and accomplishment. You can change your basic behavior and there are some great tools to help you with that. Take advantage of a service like HabitForge or simply follow the wholesome and common sense advice available regarding goal setting.

Humans are complex, no doubt, and this brings me to the paradox of self-initiated change. We are who we are. Not liking who we are can provide enormous motivation for change, but ultimately provides your inner saboteur its greatest monkey wrench. It is what Buddhist nun Pema Chodron describes as “self-aggression.” We all have pieces of ourselves we’d rather not see, let alone show to others, and yet these are the very aspects of our being that require the most love. Change that ignores this, or skips over this step, will only provide incomplete results.

Working with this habit, the habit of seeing oneself as not good enough, or the habit of seeing success and failure in absolute terms, can be pretty interesting. Working in this way requires a new habit, and that habit is compassion, for yourself and others. So you didn’t make it to the gym today, and aren’t going to. Maybe tonight you give yourself some love in a different way, and support yourself for going back tomorrow. Cut yourself some slack.

Now, you have a couple of options. You can agree to forget, or agree to remember that you made your resolutions. Should you agree to remember, then you can notice where you fail. You can be gentle with yourself when you do. You can gently but firmly pull yourself back up, and put yourself back on that horse. Good luck, and enjoy the rest of 2014.

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