Episode 111: David Lobenstine – Falling in Love with Massage (Again and Again)

There’s a difference between doing massage and living massage. For most therapists, that line blurs early on—we discover the work, we fall into it, and then we keep showing up day after day, year after year. Somewhere in that rhythm, the spark can dim. We don’t mean for it to. Clients still come, bodies still arrive on the table, the work continues. But inside, we know we’re not as present as we once were. The joy becomes thinner.

For David Lobenstine, that realisation came slowly. It wasn’t one bad day, or even the shutdown of his New York practice during the pandemic. Instead, it was the choice he made afterwards—the decision to move with his family to Vermont, while keeping his beloved New York practice alive—that reshaped everything. It was in that new rhythm of commuting, of long days with stacked clients followed by stretches of space and reflection, that David discovered something profound: that falling in love with massage isn’t a single event. It’s an ongoing practice, a return we must keep making, again and again.

Redesigning Work, Not Walking Away

The pandemic was brutal for bodyworkers. In March 2020, David, like so many of us, had to close his doors. His Manhattan practice, built over years, went silent. For 15 months he stayed away, living in Vermont with his family. And although there were blessings—time with his children, life in the woods, the grounding presence of nature—there was also loss.

“I was utterly destroyed to have to close my practice,” David recalls. “Even though I knew it was the right thing to do, it felt like I wasn’t fully myself for those 15 months. I was just part of myself, not all of myself.”

When restrictions eased, David stood at a crossroads. He could rebuild in Vermont, start fresh in a small community, and let go of New York. Or he could hold onto what he had created—his practice, his space, his people—and figure out a way to make it sustainable. He chose the second option.

Now, he travels to New York every other week, fitting his practice into three intense days of ten to twelve hours of massage. Then he returns home to Vermont for family life, teaching, writing, and rest. It’s a rhythm that sounds extreme, but for David, it works.

It’s all in Posture and How You Move

Ask David about his influences and he’ll take you back to a year spent studying Tai Chi soon after massage school. It wasn’t a plan or a career move. It was curiosity. But the slow, deliberate practice of Tai Chi movement is now how he works sustainably – deep posture, slow purposeful movement. Gravity doing the work, rather than the force of muscular movement.

“That has completely shaped how I give every session,” he explains. “All of my massage work—and a lot of my teaching work—is basically adapting principles of Tai Chi into the massage session so that we can work with our breath, so that we can work with our body weight, so that we can avoid overworking ourselves. That’s how we work in a way that’s effective for the client and effective for us as the therapist.”

“Pour, don’t push.” It’s the principle that lets him sustain marathon days in the treatment room while still wanting to show up again the next morning.

The Dyad of Therapist and Client

Massage, for David, isn’t about fixing people. It’s about relationship.

“Our work is a dyad,” he says. “We’re giving something to the client, yes—but they’re also giving something back to us. It’s that engagement of two people together that makes the true wonder of our profession.”

Instead of forcing outcomes, David has learned to be present. “When we try to make change happen, it just doesn’t work all that well. But when I let go of the need to fix, when I simply stay with them in that moment, that’s when the real shifts happen.”

Body, Brain, Breath

When therapists burn out, it’s easy to think the solution lies outside ourselves: a new job, a new niche, a new technique. David suggests otherwise. His framework is refreshingly simple: body, brain, breath.

“Our path back to loving this work happens in three parts,” he explains. “It happens through our body, it happens through our brain, and it happens through our breath.”

• Body: sustainable mechanics. “The way we love our work again is by making the work easier on us. That means paying exquisite attention to body mechanics.”
• Brain: silence the critic. “A huge part of our work is accepting that we don’t always love this work—and that’s okay. Some sessions are just going to be crappy. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad therapist.”
• Breath: the great reset. “The more we can slow down our breath, the more we can shift into presence. Our exhale is the doorway back to loving this work.”

It isn’t a one-time cure. It’s a cycle you run every day. And over time, it becomes a habit.

Falling in Love with Massage (Over and Over)

David quite grounded about the reality of our profession. Love isn’t permanent. It waxes and wanes.

“It’s never like we reach a moment and every massage after that is amazing,” he says. “Most of the time it’s neither absolutely perfect nor absolutely awful. It’s somewhere in between. If we can accept that reality, then we can continue to nourish our love for the work. We can continue to fall in love with it over and over again.”

Instead of waiting for the spark to magically appear, David invites us to tend to it in the ordinary. To see love not as a constant flame, but as something you can keep relighting with presence, forgiveness, and breath.

You too can learn these principles through David’s courses like Give a Great Massage Again and the Love Your Work Again. Rather than learning more “secret” techniques and piling on more strokes these classes are about rediscovering the foundations of massage, something we all often stray from.

“I wanted to create this course in part because of the pandemic,” he says. “I realised how central massage was to my life, and I saw so many therapists who were burnt out or on their way there. There’s a lot we can do to shift that course—to help therapists feel that love again, to feel that enthusiasm in their bodies.”

A First Step

For therapists who feel flat, David’s advice is beautifully simple.

“My first step, and one of my most abiding steps, is to focus on the exhalation,” he says. “Right now, where you are, whatever you’re doing. Just feel your feet on the floor. Just feel your hands. Just notice the most mundane parts of life. If we can inhabit even one breath more fully, that’s where love begins to return.”

The Privilege of the Work

As David reflects on his journey—from English major to book editor, from Manhattan to Vermont, from pandemic shutdown to a life of rhythm and balance—one theme keeps surfacing: gratitude. Massage isn’t perfect. It doesn’t always give us the careers we imagined. But it gives us something rare: the chance to connect, to be present, to be changed alongside another human being.

“I think we’re pretty lucky,” he says, “to be doing the work that we get to do.”

Find David:
Teaching & courses: bodybrainbreath.com
Private practice: fullbreathmassage.com