Brasstown If eyes are the windows of our souls, then Renee Lamance’s piercing pale blue peepers can see straight into yours to assess your healing needs.
After studying education at Berea College, Lamance knew she wanted to provide healing in some way and soon began a job at a residential treatment facility for adolescent youth.
“They were desperately in need of healing for various reasons, but coming straight out of college and working this job just burned me out so fast,” she said.
“The demands weren’t suited for how I wanted to provide therapeutic healing for others, so I revisited a seed that was planted when I was 16 and began to study massage at CORE Massage Institute in Knoxville (Tenn.), and that was when I found my path.”
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A massage therapist for 17 years, Lamance offers integrated therapies beyond massage with an overall holistic approach to healing not only the body, but the soul and spirit. Her practice, Soul Work Therapy, is inside Kula Wellness Center, 136 Emily Lane.
“Kula is the umbrella for my practice,” she said. “Another massage therapist who was actually a student of mine, and my friends Donna and Robert Forsyth, started it as a community center for wellness, learning and healing arts, so it’s a perfect fit for Soul Work.”
Fight or flight mode
Lamance’s main concern is finding methods for healing both the body from “physical ailments, like an automobile accident or other mishap” to “reconnecting people with their spiritual aspects, when you’ve become unaware of your body because you’ve been living in fight or flight mode for so long and you’re just going through the motions of life when your spirit has become drained.”
She maintains that takes a great toll on not only the body, but the spirit indwelling. To find that healing path takes only a first hour on a massage table.
“You’re just exhausted and you give yourself some pampering, because there is that aspect,” Lamance said.
“But then during that hour, after your body relaxes, you realize you really needed some space, some decompression. Something happens to your spirit, shifts inside your soul, when you take time to let yourself be soothed, to be touched deeply beyond the physical.”
Spirit of learning
Although she started her career as a youth educator, she never considered teaching adults until she took a position at Tri-County Community College in Peachtree as a massage instructor and more of her education began.
“I’d never taught adults, so I had to learn to adapt to different learning models, to learning about each individual’s learning style, and gearing the curriculum toward the individual and their ability,” Lamance said.
“There are so many different ways of touching and each massage student has their own way of approaching both the body and the spirit of massage work. There’s Thai massage, involving the whole body, Swedish massage which everyone is most familiar with for deep tissue stimulation
“Touch is already my love language, so to translate that into teaching others to intuit and to develop their own strengths and gifts for massage was a treat. So much of it is communication, observing strengths and connecting with people on a new level of understanding how we’re all connected and how to convey that through healing therapies.”
No assembly line
After teaching and returning full time to her own practice, Lamance decided it was time to branch out and hone her skills in different areas of healing therapies.
“I’m actually studying acupuncture at the Jung Tao School of Classical Chinese Medicine in Sugar Grove, N.C.,” she said. “It’s kind of a controlled chaos, but I’m loving it and its challenges.”
This study will provide Lamance with various modalities not offered in the area. While she’s already a certified yoga instructor and does cupping and sound healing with Tibetan singing bowls, this study is more in-depth into healing not just the “skin” or body, but more at healing the spirit within.
“I’m working more with the root and the branch, with the spirit as the root to resolve other issues within the individual, to provide pathways to healing whether it’s physical or emotional trauma or situations that create difficulties internally,” Lamance said.
“Learning about the channels of the body and how to treat more systemic issues. A more wholly integrated approach to wellness and well-being, to treat a variety of ailments from migraines to digestion issues from a different lens to look through to see the whole person, the way they need to be healed.”
In offering different therapies Lamance said she can be that branch to help people who may not be comfortable with either massage or acupuncture. She also sees the ways in which these can serve as her own self-care by adding, “Acupuncture is much more generous to my body after 17 years of doing this work and not quite as physically demanding, so it’s like I’m still in the realm of healing as well.”
Idea is to surrender
Another healing component offered by Soul Work is that of sound healing. The idea is simultaneously ancient and modern, and Lamance is excited about it.
“So my husband, Zach, is a musician and loves music, of course. We’d done some gong healing ceremonies where you lie on the floor and the vibrations of the gong travel through your body. Sometimes it’s so freeing just to be with friends in a welcoming, safe space and enjoy this therapy,” she said.
“You let the experience wash over you, as the waves and vibrations move over and through you, and it can be joyous and cathartic. The Tibetan singing and crystal bowls can elicit sounds of childhood, even of trauma you may recall, and that is when you may need to get those things out of your body.
“The idea is to surrender to the sound. Like solfège therapy, which is geared toward using other items – such as tuning forks – to emit vibrations and frequencies and differing hertz which have been proven to heal different issues within the body. It’s a perfect opportunity to step into this parasympathetic state, to relax into letting sound connect that spirit inside, that soul process, allowing the soul to let go of and heal from those traumas.”
Lamance added that sound healing therapy can lead to better sleep through meditation practices and sound awareness.
“It’s a way to get grounded as you lie prone and process those things the soul and spirit hide sometimes,” she said. “You may cry. You may fall asleep. But if you start snoring, I will gently nudge you.”
Lamance’s studies of Chinese medicine culminate with her graduation in 2025. She eagerly anticipates offering these new forms of healing to her clientele.
They told two friends
That clientele has been earnestly cultivated over her many years in practice.
“I practically had to beg people to come in when I started in Andrews years ago. Being touched by a stranger can make you feel very vulnerable and back then I don’t think everyone quite understood what massage therapy was about due to some outmoded ways of thinking, some negative connotations about the industry in general,” Lamance said.
“But now, I’m booked regularly without doing any advertising. It’s like 90 percent of my clients are either referrals or longtime clients. About 90 percent have come because of some sort of physical pain, even some coming in before hip replacement surgeries or musicians who have shoulder strain from playing guitar, but who kept returning.
“My goal is to have conversations about what aspects of the person need healing and go from there to formulate the best therapies for those individual needs,” she added.
“I like to tell everyone we have a body, one body, one spirit and soul, and as long as we have those we will feel, we need to feel and we need to heal.”
Details: Call Soul Therapy Massage & BodyWork at 828-361-1055; or visit soultherapymassage.amtamembers.com, facebook.com/Soul-Therapy-Massage-Bodywork and facebook.com/kulawellnesscenter.