K. B. Sutton

March 2, 2008

Body, spirit, mind. The three are fused in the mind of K.B. Sutton, who is, at this moment, kneeling on the backside of Jon Roth in order to broaden his hamstring.
“The thing I like about you, K.B., is that you have no fear,” Roth said. “Some therapists are timid, they’re afraid they might hurt you, but not you.”
It’s true. K.B. (Kathryn Boss) Sutton is definitely not timid. She’s slim and tan with a long tangle of black hair. At 55, her good looks haven’t faded. She has strong hands and even stronger ideas about how to go about this life.
“The problem is most people think of themselves as humans who are having a spiritual experience. They need to see themselves as spiritual beings having a human experience.”

LIFE AND DEATH
Sutton said that life changed for her when she had a near-death experience about 16 years ago.
She was working as a massage therapist for Cedar Chiropractic and felt out of sorts one summer morning, on the way to work. She asked the chiropractor, Dr. Genna, for a couple of adjustments, but didn’t feel any better at 3 p.m. when a patient showed up for her massage.
“I was kneeling behind this woman, holding her head, doing cranial work and I didn’t have a lot of room. I had a clammy feeling, as if I was going to fall over on my left side. I broke into a cold sweat. There was all this tension in my heart area.
“I could see what would happen in my mind. I was either going to be dead or wake up in the hospital. And then I saw my whole life on film, like watching an old film of when I was little. I had a hologram and saw a hand in a stone, an Indian piece that someone gave me, and I could only focus on that. And then my spirit left my body. I had this thought, ‘Hey, you have a lot of work to do, you can’t leave now!” And then with a clunk, my spirit was back.
“Something happened there, and it transformed me. It left me with a knowing, and that’s different than belief. That’s when you get your gift, when you have a near death experience.”
That experience left Sutton with more energy and more clarity. And it also left her with a sense of purpose. She would share her spirituality openly with her clients and with conviction.
Before getting into massage, Sutton—who taught physical education to mentally and physically impaired children—said she was deeply influenced by Bonnie Prudden, who wrote the book, Pain Erasure. “She was the first, or one of the first, to discover that when you find a trigger point, you hold it. And guess what? The pain goes away. You don’t have sciatica any more.”
Sutton, who works both in Traverse City and Cedar, jokes her nickname is Eagle Claws. Like any good massage therapist, she’ll hit a knot in a “seek and destroy” mission, work it, and move on.
“But I just can’t stop at the knot,” Sutton said. “I want to know why it’s there.”
“She’ll say, ‘Okay, why do you have a stiff neck, what have you been doing? You’re tense, you’re not happy at work,” said Tim Brick, one of Sutton’s regulars. “She’s intuitive and likes to delve into stuff. It’s not a job to her; it’s a calling. I think she sincerely looks at trying to make a difference, not just rubbing your muscles. If you’re looking for a ‘fluff and buff,’ don’t go to her.”

EVOLVING EXPERIENCE
Not everyone likes K.B. Sutton. Some just want a good old-fashioned massage, no chatter, none of this voodoo stuff about chakras and how breath work helps the body heal itself.
“I talk about her with a lot of guys; they go to see her, and tell me, ‘That wasn’t for me. I wanted to feel relaxed, and she got up on the table and started dancing on me,’” Brick said.
Some people begin with massages, and evolve to a more spiritual experience and breathwork, like Annie Lowe, who began seeing her 16 years ago after two different car accidents, both caused by drunk drivers.
“We’ve evolved together, and it’s never the same thing. She teaches you to heal yourself with transformational breath. It’s a kind of breath that gets you into a rhythmic breathing, and you go into an altered state of consciousness. It’s so all consuming, both physical and mental,” Lowe said.
And Sutton dishes out spiritual advice, whether you ask for it or not.
She tells clients that their thoughts lodge in their body knots, so they better watch what they’re thinking. A brain doesn’t know if a thought is coming from a real-life experience or something horrible on the TV screen, she said.
She counsels her clients to “visualize” their disease or injury. A back-injured patient needs to study a healthy, straight vertebrae and think her bones back into alignment.

BREATHING LESSONS
Sutton also holds breath workshops to teach people how to breathe—“It feeds your spirit. You’re supposed to breathe from your diaphragm. It keeps you more grounded; it massages your organs.”
She teaches moms how to breast-feed and how to handle colicky babies. Sometimes she’ll hold a baby upside down to stretch the baby’s spine. “The simplest thing—their head pulls their spine down and the babies feel better. Think about it, the baby’s head is cocked for nine months. They can feed well on the right breast, but change the breast, and he cries. They can’t do it. Their heads won’t drop. It’s that simple.”
She cared for her own father at home in his five last years. “I could write a book about taking care of elders. When they live by themselves, they don’t eat right or get enough to eat even. They forget about eating proteins and eating greens. My father was a diabetic—Louise Hay wrote in her book that diabetes is a lack of sweetness in your life. People eat sweets because something in their lives isn’t sweet.”
She believes ancestors have passed down their hurts to successive generations. “I believe in the DNA of healing. The energy of ancestors follows us down. Maybe you get depressed every October and you don’t know why. You need to look at your ancestors.”
She believes that God listens to your prayers. “There’s power in prayer, but you need to be very specific.”

DEALING WITH DEATH
Cancer surviver Jayne Sleder said that Sutton helped her cope after receiving treatments.
“She did the deeper body work,” said Sleder. “One thing about K.B. -- she tailors every session to your personal needs.”
And that’s why Sleder called her to the side of her dying father, Julius Sleder.
“I had the understanding that she was able to look at things from a different perspective. My dad’s mind was great—there was just a physical ailment, and he was very accepting of it. He saw what I’d gone through cancer wise and how K.B. had helped me.”
Near the end, a hospice nurse was attending to her father’s medical needs.
“Serendipitously, just as the hospice nurse was leaving and closing up her black bag, K.B. came in, and my son, Jake, followed her. She put down her bag and it looked remarkably the same.”
Sutton opened up the bag, and took out colorful scarves, feathers, frankincense, aroma therapy bottles, and a smudge stick. “She told my son, the things in the nurse’s bag will make it easier for his body. ‘What’s in my bag will make it easier for his spirit to pass over.’”
K.B. asked her son, who was nine at the time, to join her in the room while she worked with his grandfather.
“That was profound for him. They performed a ritual, where she laid the colored scarves, and my son anointed my father’s head with frankincense to open up the third eye. It was a really neat experience for my son and for my father. He loved every new experience—he didn’t want to die, but he went into it with an open mind.”
Sutton also helped Betsey and Bruce Price, when their 39-year-old son Bruce died of lung cancer seven years ago.
“She helped him when the doctors couldn’t. He was dying, there was nothing more the doctors could do. Without K.B., it would have been a lot tougher. She helped him with his spiritual life, gave him a massage when the medicine would do nothing. She helped relax him.
“I just can’t say enough about her. He was more at peace. He only saw K.B. a couple of times toward the very end after I found out about her. He must have been terribly afraid, and somehow she got through to him and made him feel more relaxed and peaceful. I just know she did the most good for him than anybody did. He seemed in less pain and wasn’t even taking morphine the last few days of his life.”

POWERING UP PERFORMERS
Sutton was recently in the paper—not for her healing abilities—but because her nephew, Kevin Boss, played for the New York Giants in the Super Bowl this year. “I told him before the game, ‘Have fun. What do you have to lose? No one thought you’d get there anyway.’”
In fact, Boss, a rookie, made a phenomenal catch that turned the game around, Sutton said.
Sutton is flying to New York at spring break to show Boss and his teammates the Yamuna technique of deeply massaging the body by rolling on exercise balls.
Sutton’s specialty—besides her spiritual work—is sports massage, and she’s been a fixture at sporting events for decades. Her fondest memories are her years of work in the Special Olympics.
Brick, owner of Brick Wheels, said she was immensely popular with the mountain bikers during the elite competitions that were held in Traverse City from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s.
“The races were on ESPN. We had the very first World Cup here at Sugar Loaf, and someone suggested we have sport massage. Cyclists are the one group of athletes, who, for a long time, have recognized the benefits of sport massage. If you’ve ever seen coverage of the Tour de France, the winner being interviewed is usually being massaged by a soigneur –- they get all that lactic acid worked out of their system after the race.
“When we did the race here, most of the guys recognized the benefits of that. We’d do three or four days of racing back to back. They’d seek out massage therapy, so K.B. would pull together the teams of massage therapists. She developed a really good relationship with a lot of them—“Gawd, what’d you do to your shoulders? Did you crash last year?’ She got to the point where she developed a rapport, they’d call her up—‘I’m having problems with my IP band ( cluster of muscles around the knees). Can you help me?’ Guys would have a hard time holding onto their handlebars because they crashed and hurt their neck. It seemed totally unrelated and K.B. would get to the heart of that.”

INJURED ATHLETES
Sutton has worked pro volleyball tournaments, the VASA races, and the Bayshore marathons.
Even now she helps injured athletes with their nagging injuries at Glen Lake and Suttons Bay high schools. And she talks to the coaches about the importance of warming up muscles before a game and thoroughly stretching afterward.
“I can go from babies to the New York Giants. I’ve been massaging people at Glen Lake since I started my practice—we do it right at the game. I want kids to know it’s not some taboo, silent hidden thing you can only do at the spa,” Sutton said.
Mike Kalchik wrote a paper last year about how Sutton helped him with knee tendonitis three days before his baseball team, St. Mary Lake Leelanau School, faced off with St. Francis. He knew he could play, but he wasn’t sure how long he’d be able to stick it out. Sutton massaged the injury just before he went in.
“It helped out a lot. It wasn’t perfect, but I was able to move a lot more effectively than I thought… We ended up going all the way to the quarterfinals for the first time in school history,” he wrote for a school assignment.
Sutton even gives massages in the gym during lunch recess at St. Mary’s school.
Sutton’s life isn’t perfect and she’s had to work through her own trials. “God has thrown me some curve balls lately. I know there’s a lesson in it for me. … I believe your teacher is usually the one who is causing you your greatest pain.”
Her work is her refuge, and Sutton said that she’s learned through hundreds of massages that it’s important to do what you love. Many people are stressed because they’re working in jobs for the wrong reasons.
K.B.’s long-term goal is to work as a full-time massage therapist for her NFL nephew, Kevin Boss, six months out of the year. But she’ll wait until her son graduates from high school next year. “That’s the pillar of success for massage therapists,” said Tim Brick. “These athletes have incredibly well developed muscles. Quadriceps are actually quadriceps. Not a pillar of Jell-o.”
Sutton said she’s worked with NFL players for 14 years, but she never thought it would be for her nephew. “I tell you, once you find your service on the planet, the money comes … and then happiness comes.”