“I like puzzles,” Susan Ring explains to me in between massage sessions.
And in its simplest form, solving puzzles is how she explains the work that she has been doing for 37 years as a massage therapist.
“To me, the human body and how people live their lives, how they come out of function and into dysfunction, is a puzzle,” Ring said.
Ring is intent on helping her clients put together those puzzle pieces. She works differently from other massage therapists because of the various modalities she’s studied and is keen to solve problems.
First, she and the client unearth the issues during a thorough consultation. And sometimes the simplest questions yield surprising answers.
She asks, “Have you ever broken a bone? What do you eat? Do you exercise? When do you exercise? Do you drink enough water?
“That’s the type of work that I like,” she said, “and why I do what I do.”
“You come in, you tell me your problems. I have to figure out your puzzle by deconstructing what you’ve done in your life to try to find the root of the issue. Then we reconstruct how we can help you to not feel what you’re feeling.” Because, Ring says, “your pain is not always coming from your body. It could be coming from your brain.
“It’s a learned pattern and habit that you have.”
In the massage, she tests various therapies to see how someone responds to them.
Seven years ago, Ring moved her practice, Body Mechanics Massage Therapy, into a calming space on Main Street in downtown Metuchen, so she could travel more as well as work in Belize part-time. She previously had three larger locations in Edison.
“I like the little community town of it,” she said, speaking of the “donut hole of Edison.” “It’s a walking town, a community town. Metuchen likes to support Metuchen.
“I come from the beach area so we can walk to most things. Edison doesn’t really have a downtown so I was really excited to walk [in Metuchen] and come to and enjoy the different businesses.”
Over nearly four decades, she has worked with people of all ages, performing everything from craniosacral therapy on newborns to therapeutic massages on centennial clients. Her clients come to her for various physical concerns, from just wanting to relax and let go of the stress in the body to wishing to address aches and pains from various physical diseases, maladies, and disorders, including Parkinson’s, frozen shoulders, arthritis, swelling, immune-suppressed illnesses, and cancer. Among her clients are doctors, physical therapists, massage therapists but also men, women, and children.
The work she does the most is therapeutic massage, but doctors and physical therapists often refer Ring for lymphatic massage, craniosacral therapy, and Thai therapy. She also finds herself performing zero balancing therapy more and more. She explains that she went back and trained in it again because when she learned the modality 22 years ago, the general public didn’t understand how it could help the body. Now, she says, “everyone kind of understands energy work more, or they realize that there are different approaches to the body besides Swedish massage or deep tissue.”
When Ring began her journey into massage therapy, it was before Google, YouTube, or Facebook existed. She was in her freshman year at Rutgers University.
“When I started massage, it was not licensed, so you didn’t even have to go to school,” Ring recalled.
Ring was majoring in psychology and biology. In a sculpting class, a classmate from California suggested she learn massage therapy.
After some thought, Ring said, “Why not? I don’t know anything about it and I like to learn new things.”
Her classmate took her under her wing. That’s how she first learned massage therapy. Ring started to build up a client base with fellow classmates and friends. One of those friends played sports at Rutgers.
“He was playing a game and his parents were like, ‘What did you do differently? You seem a lot more at ease,’” Ring remembered, noting after that his parents also became clients.
After college, Ring decided to continue building up that client base. She already had a business sense, having started a cleaning business to put her through college.
When the municipalities started requiring licensing in the 1990s, Ring promptly got her national certification. And then she attended massage therapy school because her analytical side didn’t completely trust that she had all the information she needed and since she couldn’t give herself a massage, she didn’t know for sure if the therapies were effective and felt good.
“I was the only student in massage school that was nationally certified and had a client base,” she said.
When you walk into Ring’s practice, some of the many certifications she has received over the years decorate the wall.
If the state required 24 Continuing Education Units (CEU), Ring was handing in 100 to 200 CEUs at a clip, she said. She could literally wrap her practice in her CEUs.
And what does that all mean?
“What I like to tell my clients is that I like to go to school,” she said, explaining that the units are a sign of her curiosity and desire to learn different modalities, to improve her skill set, and add more tools to her toolbox, not necessarily of her expertise.
Yes, Ring hopes that her clients enjoy their massages, but her mission goes above and beyond – she wants to ultimately solve her client’s individual body puzzle.
“Everyone who walks in my office has to do a two-hour consultation,” she said. “One hour, you tell me what you are feeling. Then the other hour is a massage. The first massage is always Swedish therapeutic.”
In the next sessions, clients can try different types of massages as long as it’s suited for their individual needs.
“This is a therapy office,” Ring explained. “Therapy in a sense of massage therapy. Body work therapy. You are here to figure out what’s going on in your body.”
Ring practices what she preaches by getting regular massage. And even with 37 years of experience, she continues to learn, train and solve human puzzles as she practices the craft she loves. She even turned down numerous opportunities to teach for some of the top names in the profession, because she loves doing massage.
She was instrumental in making massage therapy licensing mandatory in New Jersey. As the chair of New Jersey’s American Massage Therapy Association, Ring educated legislators throughout the state, explaining to them how licensed massage therapy would help the public and the profession. and helped piece together the bill and lobbied for it. She spoke in front of New Jersey’s Senate and General Assembly in hopes of getting it passed. She succeeded, and massage therapy and body work is now a mandatory state-licensed profession.
She also served on the Ethics Committee of the National Certification for Therapeutic Massage Board, and throughout the country and in Belize, she mentors and helps massage therapists improve their skills and their businesses.
For most people, the body, mind, and spirit connection is baffling, but for Ring, there’s something very satisfying about deconstructing and reconstructing these puzzles for her clients.
