Michael McMahon has been a licensed massage therapist and acupuncturist in Portland for 25 years, and is the founder of Moving Mountain Institute. He’s one of the most thoughtful educators I’ve ever encountered and one of my oldest friends and mentors in this work.
Michael came to bodywork and acupuncture through a convergence of many things, including a cancer diagnosis in massage school, a lifelong love of classical Chinese poetry, and many years of leading wilderness programs for teenagers. His approach to teaching is rooted in Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Linda Barry, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, and the simple, radical idea that if you spend 80% of acupuncture school sitting in a chair, you’ve taught people how to sit in a chair.
In this conversation we talk about what it actually means to teach this medicine, flipped learning, backwards design, why safety and fun belong in every anatomy syllabus, and why the institutional status quo is often standing in the way of best educational practices. We also get into the financial realities of running a small business as a bodyworker, including debt, retirement, SEP IRAs, raising your rates every year, and what it means to be scared about your future in a profession that never teaches you to plan for it.
This one is for practitioners, educators, students, and anyone who has ever sat in a chair for four years and wondered if there was a better way.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Michael’s Work
Sign up for Field Notes — Michael’s newsletter, worth every email!
Gil Hedley — the best anatomy resource for bodyworkers and acupuncturists
Financial Tools
The Thriving Acupuncturist Calculator — the spreadsheet Bex and Michael built together
Books We Referenced
Cold Mountain Poems — Han-shan, translated by by Gary Snyder
Pedagogy of the Oppressed — Paulo Freire
Teaching to Transgress — bell hooks (Michael says start here before Freire)
Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor — Lynda Barry
The Undercommons — Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
Workforce and Policy
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