The Schankin System
Biography
| In order to really tell you who Cynthia Schankin is and why I choose Massage Therapy as my profession I will need to tell you a story of how I got to today, 7/4/08. |
| I like most high school students in the 1985 are asked the question, “What do you want to be?” And like most high school students I didn’t know what profession I would like to do for all my life. I just knew that if I had to do something that it was going to be something I loved doing and was naturally geared for doing it for a long time. After some thought I decided that I had two options. Art Teacher because I always love creating art and had gotten A’s at it without much effort which filled both of my goals. The next was that I thought I would be a good Doctor as I loved science classes, had gotten A’s & B’s with a little more effort than art class and had a persona of wanting to help people stay healthy. The wanting to help people stay health was more a feeling part of me then having any logical reasoning, as I was in high school how was I to know the world or want doctors really do. |
| Ok which one? They both drew me in so I decide to take more classes geared for both professions. Double up on Art classes which lead to a lot of Art awards and scholarships. And started a co-op program for a Nursing Assistant program which brought me in my senior year of high school to working at a local Hospital as part of the grade. With which the first day on the job, I saw too much pain, suffering, and well things a 16 year old girl should never have seen. I that first day said with eyes wide open no to being a doctor and really embraced, “Art Teacher”. |
| Yet that inner feeling of wanting to help people be healthy still lingered and well I still had the job for a year maybe there was still hope to be a Doctor. So I worked on a variety of different services and floors within the hospital and the sadness of what life’s ends became more and more shadowing in that 16 year old heart. On the medical floors just the thought of going into work would make my nose bleed yet I still watched. I watch the first year doctors come in with such passion for healing and then looked to the third year doctors on how they seemed to be robots with a look that equaled to me a loss of heart for what they were doing. I watch the doctors that over saw everything and heard about them and how they lived. I will say I did meet a few doctors that seemed to have been able to embrace the trails and still have their Hearts and souls into helping their patients yet they were the rare ones. So I asked myself could I be part of this rare group, NO I thought this passion I have to help people would be taken out of me and I was not strong often to hold on to it though all the trails of becoming a Doctor. |
| So to Art school I would go? Well I did sign up for Art School and was already to go when my Mother opened a paper in front of me and pointed to an Advertisement. I don’t recall what the Ad said, yet I do remember a little voice saying “Yes I want to learn that.” It was an ad for Health Enrichment Center and the Massage Therapy program. |
| Ok so it’s like 1988 and like Massage Therapy was not a profession as it is now. Let me explain, I was 17 years old, no one I knew was a massage therapist, no one I knew of knew a Massage Therapist yet I still wanted to do it. It’s completely illogical the reasoning I had to keep my job at the hospital and go to Massage school instead of Art school yet that’s what I did. |
| I felt like I was a dry sponge that finally found water. I found the learning of all the Massage sciences to be a fountain of learning that inwardly I had always longed for. I studied and am still studying the art of movement, the way of the body, physical, emotional, and energetic. Really there are too many topics to list all of them, as the hours of class study right now are above 14,000 hours. I can tell you I have been in practice for almost 20 years. This is what I do, this is what I love doing. This is the path I found from what that 16year old girl was looking to be in life. |
| The Art of Massage has made it now as a house hold name coming along way from where I first began with it in 1989. As a professional within the profession I have learned you must maintain personal growth within yourself and within your profession in order to be that rare professional like the doctors I saw when I was first starting out to find a profession in life. Really I have become that rare person and I can say that my heart and soul is still in art just a different profession of art. SMILES |
| The Universe at Work, |