Massage Therapist Branches Out In Face of Pandemic

Reston, VA — When she was 40 years old, Meg Donnelly shifted her focus, leaving behind a career in hospitality for one in massage therapy.

“I had known for a long time that I was itching to do something new and different, but I didn’t quite know what that was,” Donnelly said. “When I turned 40, it seemed like the perfect time for me to take a sabbatical and figure out what that was. During that time, I had taken a leave of absence, and we did the cliche ‘let’s go to the mountains and find ourselves.’”

On the last day of her trip, Donnelly fell and later found out that she had sustained a bad break in multiple places. The recovery from her surgery led her to a massage therapist, which started her down a path to becoming one herself.

“Prior to the past year, my business as a massage therapist, my job is working with people in person,” Donnelly said. “Everything I did was in-person. Prior to the pandemic, I had started working towards my personal training certification to become a movement and mobility coach. And of course, then came the pandemic, and that certainly kicked everything into high gear.”

Faced with a suddenly virtual environment in an industry that demands physical, in-person interaction, Donnelly prioritized her personal training certification and added a new type of client.

“I was able to add movement-based therapy for overall well-being to address everyday aches and pains,” Donnelly said. “We have lots of movement mobility we can do, and so we were able to do that online, which was pivot number one, I will say. With that, I decided it was time to change my business slightly.”

Donnelly separated her business into what are essentially two sub-units. Beneath the umbrella of Meg Donnelly, LMT, LLC, is Meg Donnelly Licensed Massage Therapist and Nova Weekend Warriors, which is more focused on movement and mobility exercises.

“It seems a little cumbersome, but I like having the separation between the two because certainly, I want to make sure that everyone understands where massage ends and where movement and mobility begins,” Donnelly said. “That was the first growth that happened. The second thing was, I noticed early on that there was a huge socio-economic disparity between small business owners and the population in general. I was fortunate enough that I had the ability to know that I would have a roof over my head regardless of what happened with the business. I felt it was important to make sure we were doing what we could to address that disparity.”

In that vein, Donnelly hosted several podcast and video-style sessions with epidemiologists and other pertinent figures in order to provide valuable advice to members of the massage community. That avenue led to work with another massage therapist, doing continuing-education courses, which led to work as an adjunct professor at a local community college, instructing the next generation of massage therapists.

“My primary focus is always going to be my business, my in-person business,” Donnelly said. “I think that’s one of the things that the pandemic was able to give me — the ability to branch out and look at these other avenues. It’s been really interesting to find my voice in education in my field.”

And even as the prospect of in-person therapy grows more legitimate, these alternative branches that Donnelly has found won’t be going away anytime soon.

“I think it gives me a much better understanding when I do refer out to my physical therapist friends, my psychologists and mental health professionals,” Donnelly said. “I feel I have a much better understanding of why their jobs are so important. It helps me keep a definitive line between where my scope of practice ends and where others begin.”

Now, Donnelly is once again seeing clients in-person, albeit with vaccines, masks, air purifiers and deep-cleaning in between sessions.

“I think early on we had this misconception that being vaccinated meant that we were unstoppable, and now we know it is possible to spread,” Donnelly said. “I work in an industry and I work with clients that are immunocompromised. That makes it even more important for both me and my clients to be masked right now.”

Throughout the last year-and-a-half of virtual work and branching out, Donnelly turned to local small business-owner communities.

“There’s a group of local women business owners and we got together once a month to talk about what we’re doing, what we need help with, brainstorm,” Donnelly said. “That was extremely helpful. Having those communities helped me to stay in touch.”