Shunyata Healing Arts Philosophy
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
Before founding Shunyata Healing Arts in 2015, Anita Poushan, LMT, was a social justice organizer in Washington, D.C. where she began studying the relationship between social systems and health. While working as an organizer on environment, anti-nuclear weapons campaigns, documentary film, and volunteering with Black Lives Matters, she started studying herbalism, food systems and yoga therapy.
Continuing from Anita’s work in social justice, community and environmental organizing, she founded Shunyata Healing Arts to approach massage, bodywork, and wellness as empowerment by activating the bodies’ self-healing capacity. She works within the community to build health confidence, a term she encourages her clients to use to build self-awareness and feel empowered to understand their individual healing process, focusing on bridging the mind body gap while rooting in education and self-awareness. Integrated treatments help us to understand blockages through acupressure, acupuncture, shiatsu or jin shin do, imbalances in our muscular or internal harmony with Swedish massage, calming of the nervous system with hydrotherapy and aromatherapy and intakes help us think through the relationship between our food systems, mental health, environment, personal history, recent life changes and socio-political state.
Anita studied at Crestone Healing Arts Center, where massage is a spiritual as well as a technical discipline, focusing on understanding the nature of disease and the structural and functional changes produced by these dysfunctions. She trained under Dan Retuta and Sue Beck in Swedish massage, acupressure, reiki, hot stone massage, aromatherapy and reflexology with a foundation in kundalini yoga, chi gong, tai chi, Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine systems. In addition to training in the specific modalities, her coursework spanned unified quantum field theory, basic cell biology, biochemistry, human musculoskeletal, nervous, digestive, respiratory, cardiovascular, circulatory, lymphatic, renal, hepatic, immune, reproductive, integumentary, endocrine systems and the indications and contra indications to massage and bodywork to build a safe and ethical professional practice.
During her B.A. in political science, Anita focused on gender studies, community organising, international policy and non-profits. She was a member of S.D.S., students for a democratic society, and worked across issues from animal rights, domestic violence, the military industrial complex, Food Not Bombs and environmental justice.
Anita is conversationally fluent in French and Farsi and is passionately learning Spanish.
Present & Past Experience: Licensed Massage Therapist ; Colorado. Kundalini Teacher Training; Crestone Healing Arts Center. Film & French Studies; Arts du Spectacles, Université de Strasbourg. B.A. Political Science & Gender Studies; Non-Profit Management; University of Central Florida.
Anatomical Imagery : Human Anatomy © 1978 Rodale Press Inc. Original Paintings by Thomas C. Quirk, inspired by 15th c. Chalk Drawings of Human Anatomy by Leonardo da Vinci. Acupuncture Imagery : An Outline of Chinese Acupuncture © 1979 The Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine. U.S. Reprint : Monterey Park