New Zealander Kay Evans Enhances US Holistic Course
New Zealand native Kay Evans is director of the Holistic Health and Massage Therapy programme on the Trinidad Campus in Colorado. Evans, who thinks stress and unresolved pain are probably the root cause of more people seeking alternative health care, discusses with local publication the Valley Courier the normalising of massage and how she came to be in the United States.
“That’s how we serve our community,” Evans said. “In the time I have been here massage has gone from this weird touching thing to a mainstream form of therapy. That’s a significant jump in the last 15 years. You don’t have to explain to every single person what massage is. They know.”
“Everybody has a unique story,” she continued. “That’s what you feel when you work with a human body on your table. For me, it’s the most exquisite magical thing, to work with another person on an energetic touching level.”
Her story is certainly unique and reaches from New Zealand to China to the United Kingdom and then to Colorado. In all her stops, she has picked up tools to help people deal with pain and stress.
An advocate for life-long learning, Evans recently taught a community class in Qigong, an ancient Chinese healing art involving meditation, controlled breathing and movement exercises. She said, “It adds the mind and emotion part too. It’s so much broader than just the physical.”
Evans’ interest in things natural was evidenced at age seven when she announced to her family in New Zealand that she was joining the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society. She said her dad very bravely joined her and they learned about the native species in their area and grew plants together.
“Plants have always been important to me; they help me evolve,” she said. “Because we lived rural, we always had a big garden and grew our own food.”
She said in her generation everyone had to leave the country for at least one year to complete an OE. “New Zealand with its three islands is so small that you have to leave there to see the world,” Evans said. “But America is so big you go to New Mexico and it seems like you’re in a different country.”
“All my jobs have been creating something that hasn’t existed before. Training was very good at home and I never felt out of my league. I have always asked myself, ‘How can this be done?’”
Evans has applied that attitude to Holistic Health and Massage Therapy and has helped to create an entirely new programme in an ever-evolving alternative health care industry.
Original article by Margaret Sanderson, Alamosa News, Valley Courier, November 11, 2017.
