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 Matt Hsu
In high school, I told my friends that the day I can’t play hockey is the day I die.
I was a goalie at the time, and my body felt great: quick, fast, balanced and sometimes clairvoyant. By the time I was 22, though, I could no longer play goalie due to injuries and chronic pain and instability in various places in my body.
I experienced Rolfing® Structural Integration at 25, and it made a big difference to the way my body felt. Rolfing is a hands-on soft-tissue manipulation modality focused on changing a person’s posture to help relieve the symptoms of pain and discomfort in the body and, like Egoscue, it can be quite effective.
After one session of Rolfing, my body was starting to feel closer to upright than it had felt in years. My posture was changing, and it felt good. I was able to breathe better. My shoulder felt like it was trying to find its way home. My feet stopped hurting. Three sessions in, I was thrilled with the results and was determined to start studying Rolfing so that I could do for others what my practitioner had done for me.
But I found that Rolfing had its limits in how far it could take me, that my body still wasn't back to where it was supposed to be, and that my clients were seeing those very same limits in their own bodies. By the time I was 26, my feet ached all day and I had hips so unstable that they popped every time I got into and out of the shower. These things were all conspiring to keep me from playing any hockey at all. When Charlie Reid introduced me to the Egoscue Method and showed me what a huge difference one hour of exercise could make, I was hooked. I completed PAS2 training earlier this year.
 At my clinic here in San Diego, Upright Health, I blend postural bodywork with a healthy dose of e-cises. The hands-on work helps solidify in people’s minds that change can happen, and the e-cises take them the rest of the way home. I understand what a pain pain is, and these tools help nix the fear of pain that so many people enter my office with.
I recently teamed up with another Egoscue affiliate and postural bodyworker, Isaac Osborne, to teach posture-reading classes so that other manual therapists can better see and understand the postural dysfunctions that underlie the "really tight shoulders" or the "weak knees" that limp into their offices every day. We've held one very fun, very successful Seeing Made Easy class so far (www.seeingmadeeasy.com) and plan to hold more on a regular basis in the future. Our goal is to raise the level of knowledge of all postural bodyworkers so that those suffering from pain can find the help they need.
I didn't believe that 22 was a good time to be feeling "old age," and I also didn't believe that 26 was a high enough number to simply surrender myself to a tortuous and torturous death. I'm glad I was too stubborn to listen to my doctors and physical therapists. I'm glad I'm stubborn in general.
I'm 28 now. I love my work, and I love my clients. I play goalie no less than twice a week at a high level of performance (so I say!), and I've recently become the official goalie coach of the La Jolla Jaguars Squirt A travel hockey team here in San Diego. That means I'm on the ice no less than three times a week. If you had told me in high school that I’d be on the ice this much as a "grown-up," I would've kissed you. Heck, I might still kiss you.
I do still plan to die when I can’t play hockey, but as long as I keep up with my daily dose of Vitamin Egoscue and remember to look both ways before crossing the street, I think it's going to be a long time before I have to don the mask for a game on the big white rink in the sky. |
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