Barefoot Bliss...Ashiatsu massage takes a stroll down your spine

If there’s anyone you wouldn’t mind walking up and down your back, it’s probably Michelle Kuffer.
Michelle, 25, weighs in at a petite 110 lbs. and knows just where and how to plant her feet as a practitioner of Ashiatsu Oriental Bar Therapy (AOBT) massage.
“It is just like a relaxing Swedish style massage; however, done with the feet makes it a wonderfully deep tissue experience,” she says.
Using a pair of bars mounted in the ceiling of her massage room, Kuffer can balance and adjust her weight to the client’s needs. “I can be pretty heavy or as light as a feather,” she says.
As a new massage therapist in town practicing at the Living Light Holistic Wellness Center on W. Front Street in Traverse City, Kuffer is one of a handful of AOBT practitioners in the state and the first in Northern Michigan. She was also the first practitioner in East Lansing, the town she left behind.
“Although there aren’t a lot of people practicing Ashiatsu in Michigan it’s really popular out west in places like Colorado and California,” Kuffer says. “It’s only been practiced in the U.S. for about 10 years now, but it’s probably been in Asia for 3,000 years.”

BEST FOOT FORWARD
Kuffer’s petite size put her on the path to Ashiatsu. “With my body size I’m able to provide a lot deeper, broader pressure using my feet,” she says.
She adds that Ashiatsu offers a good transition for massage therapists who are literally worn out from years of upper body overuse injuries. “You can develop carpal tunnel syndrome and problems with your wrists and thumbs when you’ve been doing massage for awhile,” she notes.
She started working as a certified massage therapist about a year and a half ago and then studied Ashiatsu in Denver with the discipline’s founder, Ruthie Piper Hardie.
Hardie’s website, www.deepfeet.com, says the word Ashiatsu breaks down as “ashi” for foot and “atsu” for pressure. “Ashiatsu is an ancient form of bodywork brought to us by Buddhist monks and has been associated with traditional Shiatsu (bodywork) with underlining dynamics in the study of Traditional Chinese Medicine.”

VIVE LA DIFFERENCE
Some people refer to Ashiatsu as plain old Barefoot Shiatsu, for which there are probably a number of practitioners in Northern Michigan preparing to write letters to the Express protesting that they’ve been kneading backs with their feet for years.
But Hardie maintains that her trademarked Ashiatsu Oriental Bar Therapy is different from other forms of back-trodding massage.
For starters, traditional Chinese Ashiatsu takes years of study and examines the client’s breathing patterns, emotional state and diet. “The work was done with the recipient clothed and on the floor while the practitioner would use hand and foot pressure to balance the basic princi-pals of change,” according to Hardie’s literature.
By contrast, Ashiatsu Oriental Bar Therapy can be learned in a series of four courses at a fee of $2,500. And it draws more on Western techniques, “using foot compression to deliver Swedish massage.” Then too, the client is sans clothes, draped in a sheet and lies on a comfy massage couch in a scented room, rather than a matt on the floor.

WHO BENEFITS
“This modality is for people who come home from work and ask their kids or spouse to walk on their back,” Kuffer says. She adds that Ashiatsu is beneficial for those with low back or hip pain. “It tends to elongate the spine and reach into the deeper layers of muscle and connective tissue that manual therapy sometimes cannot.”
The idea is to eliminate “trigger points” in the muscle, coaxing stress from the body.
Kuffer offers sessions from 30 minutes to two hours in length at a fee of $70 per hour. She notes that 80% of her clients request the AOBT treatment.
Walking around on peoples’ backs all day isn’t just therapeutic -- it’s fun. “I love everything about it and the freedom it allows me,” Kuffer says. “People value and appreciate you and I get to work with a lot of nice people.”


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