PORT TOWNSEND — This story of Ananda — which means “bliss” in Sanskrit — is as romantic as it gets.
Dari Lewis, a decade into her life as a massage therapist, took a group of students to the American Massage Therapy Association’s state convention at Semiahmoo resort in Blaine.
It was spring 2003, and Lewis was running the massage training program at Renton Technical College. At the convention, she visited the seated-massage room, where a harpist was playing.
Lewis and a cluster of women friends slipped around a corner so they could continue “gabbing,” as she puts it.
The harpist, however, also walked around the corner, “to see what all the noise was about.”
So they all met. They all talked. Turned out the harpist was David Michael of Port Townsend, and he had recorded CDs of his music to go hand in hand with massage therapy sessions.
“Then David excused himself” and turned to go, Lewis recalls.
But “he turned back around and looked at me; then he stroked my hair, from the root to the tips.”
As Michael walked away, Lewis thought: I’m going to marry him.
Some time later, Lewis accepted Michael’s invitation to visit Port Townsend and pick up some CDs for her program at Renton Technical.
Following that second meeting, their romance bloomed throughout the summer. Michael proposed in October, and they were married in June 2004, a year after they met.
So how did each know this was the right one?
“You just know,” Lewis says with a sigh.
It was like that with her massage vocation, too. Lewis, founder and owner of Ananda Massage Training in Port Townsend (www.AnandaMassage
Training.com), was once a manager at Puget Sound Energy in Pierce County. When a major storm hit the Tacoma area in the early 1990s, the American Red Cross sent relief workers, including a team of massage therapists for the linemen and other power-company staffers.
Lewis received the first massage of her life, and the experience lit her up in body and mind.
She made a total career switch and enrolled in Alexander’s School of Natural Therapeutics in Tacoma; after earning her license in 1994, Lewis joined Pacific Massage Associates, a firm that contracted with the Boeing Co. to provide seated massages for employees in the Auburn, Renton, Bellevue and Everett plants, while operating clinics in places such as St. Francis Hospital in Federal Way.
Lewis was responsible for recruiting and managing Pacific’s staff, which grew to 49 employees.
“Suddenly,” she recalls, “I wasn’t doing massage anymore.” Instead, she was bogged down by what she calls “administrivia.”
In 1999, she left the company. In 2000, she began teaching in Renton Technical’s massage program. There, she found that working with students energized her all over again.
This profession is about “seeing the light come on,” Lewis says, “and helping others find their joy.”
After moving to the Peninsula in 2004 and teaching at the Port Townsend School of Massage, Lewis wanted to branch out. She began thinking about an apprentice-style program to serve a particular kind of student: those who needed additional hours toward licensure in Washington state.
By 2007, Lewis was ready to start a business in her home — and around the same time, Michael lost his primary source of income. Washington State Ferries officials, citing security concerns, banned him from the MV Klickitat, on which he had played — and marketed his recordings — for years.
Michael performs at other venues, and his Purnima Productions company promotes Port Townsend concerts by a variety of traveling musicians.
But busking on the ferry was his main livelihood. Without that, the couple needed something new.
And so Michael’s ban propelled Lewis forward. She created Ananda’s curriculum: both a 510-hour program for beginning massage-therapy trainees as well as courses for transfer students who need, say, 200 hours to meet Washington’s requirements.
At Ananda, Lewis has spaces for up to 22 students and works with them one on one or in small groups of three to six. She offers flexible scheduling and encourages each pupil’s exploration of the type of massage he or she is interested in, from prenatal to Asian.
In her living room, Lewis holds discussions of the ethical issues a massage practitioner is likely to encounter. She brings in “practice clients,” including many from “the huge network of people” Michael knows. And she invites guest speakers, such as Sheila Bailey of Port Townsend, whose practice includes myofascial release and lymphatic drainage techniques as well as Swedish massage.
Ananda is doing well and “growing organically,” Lewis says. Enrollment has increased at a pace she can handle. And her work environment, well, it seems that couldn’t be any better.
This spring, there were many days when Lewis taught while Michael played his harp in the next room.
And when other musicians come through Port Townsend, they too come over to practice, and Lewis’ students may observe them as part of their kinesiology coursework.
Michael, meanwhile, is Lewis’ greatest admirer.
“I get to see the love she pours into teaching close up,” he says.
The pair also make music together. Lewis had always wanted to play a stringed instrument, so Michael gave her a hammer dulcimer; she learned that as well as the bowed psaltery.
In 2008, the two of them made a trip across Europe, performing in plazas and castles.
“I didn’t know I was a musician,” says Lewis. “David brought it out in me.”
Back in Port Townsend, Lewis embarked on yet another kind of trip: remodeling and painting their house in the woods. They started out with a flower garden and a fence behind a house painted gray.
But the resident deer kept injuring themselves trying to get in, so the fence came down and “deer resistant” plants were put in. The deer ate all of the blooms anyway.
So Lewis decided to stop worrying about the garden and instead make her house vivid. She painted it a rich pumpkin gold, much to Michael’s delight. The color is “Mexi-navian,” he jokes.
The couple believe they have been rewarded: Each spring since the repainting, a doe has given birth to twin fawns in their backyard.
Surrounded by the woods, the deer and music, Lewis is in her element.
“I’m jumping out of bed at 5 in the morning,” she says. “I haven’t ‘worked’ a day since this all started.”
The most important thing to give her students, Lewis adds, is the ability “to tune in to their inherent talent and to develop trust in their work and in their intuition.”
She believes the demand for massage therapy is on the rise, due in part to the increase in work-related injuries; her friends who are licensed practitioners are quite busy, Lewis says.
Lest a student wonder if the field is saturated, she offers encouraging words. If this is truly what you want to do, your desire will make it happen.
“If you have a passion for it, it will come through,” she says.
Lewis does not, however, have a lot of her own clients. Her days are full with teaching, running the business and running the household, now that Michael has gone to Winthrop to work through the tourist season.
This is the third summer Lewis and Michael will be apart.
“It’s hard, but it gives each of us a chance to reclaim and renew our own rhythms,” Lewis says.
“How I react is a choice. I can either ‘whine and pine’ as my Grandma used to say . . . Or, conversely, I can make the most of my time.”
So Lewis chooses to think: “It’s only two more weeks, and I get to see him,” as opposed to “It’s been forever since I’ve seen him.”
“The first option is filled with joy and excitement; the second one is filled with woe. I’ll take joy and excitement over woe any day.”
And as always, Lewis will keep busy teaching, not giving, massages.
“If I have any energy left over,” she adds, “my husband’s got first dibs.”