at work with Alexandra
DR: Walk us through the mindful practice of opening up your space and tell us why these steps are important to you.
Alexandra Gilder: When I open my space, I do a lot to clear the energy because I typically work in spaces that have a lot of human energy already in them - a lot of people coming and going all the time. I find it more relaxing for me to cleanse immediately when I get here. This usually involves a lot of Florida Water, and a lot of smoke cleansing with Palo Santo, sage, and even cinnamon. I’ll use cinnamon in my doorways because most of my spiritual teachers do that when they’re looking for abundance and I feel like in a business that’s something you can never get enough of - so I tend to keep the cinnamon lit in the doorway, which seems to be working.
Specifically for me and my tools, I do a Moxa on each wrist before I get started for the day. That helps me feel like I’ve energetically cleansed my palate for my tools specifically with my hands before I touch people. I feel it’s important to cleanse myself before I touch people.
DR: Can you tell us what Moxa is?
AG: Moxa is basically mugwort rolled into a little circular incense. There’s an adhesive side that you stick to an energetic point on your body. I learned about this from an acupuncturist who would do Moxa on certain areas to energetically clear an area before they would work there. I found it to be something very relaxing to add to my own spiritual practice. I do a lot of it on my third eye. If I’m working on someone and they feel stuck somewhere energetically and I can’t break through physically, I’ll I do the Moxa on them. After the Moxa’s burned, it’s a lot easier to get through to that area.
DR: When do you feel most connected to yourself and your community?
AG: I feel most connected to myself and my community when I’m working. This role as a massage therapist doesn’t feel like a job in any sense. It feels like I just take care of an entire community and that’s a big part of why I got into this. I felt like my contribution to my community wasn’t aligning with how I viewed myself, who I thought I was, or the things that I was starting to get interested in spiritually, so this seemed to tie it all together.
It gives me a spiritual purpose and fulfills a lot more of my spiritual curiosities, but also gives me a role in my community that feels like a helper. That felt like somebody I always wanted to be: a helpful person to people that I love … like a nurturing guide for people.
DR: Do you always feel like you are a nurturer in any space with your friends or your family? Do you feel like you’ve always carried that nurturing role?
AG: With being an older sister and being a woman comes a little bit of that identity of being a nurturer. It just makes me feel good to help people or to make them feel good. I was looking at the work I was doing prior to this and at the effect it had on people. I couldn’t really stomach any longer the fact that the work I was doing - or how I was making money - was leaving people drunk and confused and chaotic. That really bothered me for a long time. I see people leave me now and it’s very cool to see the drastic change, especially when people arrive pretty hot. I can see that they’re kind of irritated or stressed out, and then they’re leaving and it’s like a completely different person. I gave them the space to be comfortable and to start thinking about their body in maybe ways that they didn’t for a couple weeks or a month or however long it’s been.
DR: You have meetings with other women who do bodywork - what’s that been like for you?
AG: They're not just bodyworkers - it's open to anyone specifically. I do a lot of manifestation work within my own ritual. And as I was doing it, I was like: this could be so much bigger if I got some other people involved with it. I kept talking to other people about it and more and more people around here were doing it, but it seemed like such an LA thing for a while. There's really not a community like that in Detroit of people who have strong meditation practice or any manifestation practice and I kept feeling like I was just the weirdo.
DR: It didn’t feel as accessible, I'm sure? Not having that safety and circle of people who feel not only comfortable speaking about it, but have a little bit of experience and have had a little bit of history and practice behind the whole thing?
AG: Or even people that are just curious. There's so many people that are curious about this kind of route within self care, and there's not an outlet for it. So, as my practice grew with my manifestation work, I just opened it up to other people and I started posting online about it and people showed up. It's been great.
DR: What is manifestation to you?
AG: Manifestation to me is getting clear about what you want in your life. Manifestation has helped me get really clear about what I want in my life. I think that's a struggle for a lot of people. People don't really seem to know exactly what they want in different areas of their life. Once you know what you want, you’re certain that you're going to receive that energetically. It's an energy work, really. If you’re talking about money, and you start accepting more money or thinking about what you deserve monetarily, it starts to come to you. It's just been very fascinating to change the energetics of what I want or what my life should look like to me.
DR: You realize that you are in control.
AG: Yeah, of everything. And all you have to do is change your mind about a lot of these things. It's been a fascinating journey. There are these modules that I do called To Be Magnetic. It's something that I subscribe to monthly and they give you different modules and journal prompts and meditations to do. They call them DIs or Deep Imaginings, where essentially you're meditating and you're hypnotized. They help you change your mind about things that have happened to you in your life and how to get through to things you feel that you deserve, and let it come to you. It's been a fascinating route. There's so many people around here that are interested in it that have been coming to these meetups. It's mostly women and we all just chat about what we want out of life, what we want to change, and we talk a lot about attachment styles. We talk about love languages - things that feel “woo-woo” until you find a community for them - and it’s not “woo-woo” anymore. These are the energetics of your life and your mind.
DR: And then you realize we are just kind of searching for the same things.
AG: We all make lists together of things that we want out of a partner and career and we'll all go around and share and listen - it's odd how similar they all are, they're just worded differently. It seems like we all just want to be loved, make a lot of money, and be happy. That can be nice to realize. You're not so different from everyone else around you at all. We all have a very similar goal here. If we're talking energy work, why wouldn't working with other people about your ideas and your energy only enhance your work, and what you believe? These meetups have been very special.
DR: The way that you just put manifestation kind of changed my mind about it in a sense that the perception of manifestation feels “woo-woo” … like you're maybe playing God in a way, but I think it's really about bringing an awareness to yourself to say, “this is what I deserve.” Whether that's love, money, success, or family. And you're paying attention to it when it comes. It's not like it just falls from the sky because you're suddenly manifesting it. It's always there. Is that kind of the idea?
AG: Yes. And I think part of what I have been doing with the To Be Magnetic specifically is there are tests. You don't just start telling yourself, “I'm going to make 100 grand a year,” and then it starts happening. You have to do self work. Once you start doing the self work, and you become authentic to your core being, you start receiving tests. If you get a test that seems very dreamy, but it seems there's like something inauthentic about it, too, where you'd have to sacrifice something that means a lot to you, don’t do it. That's a test. Don't accept that. Start becoming more aware of these things in your life and when they start happening, you’ll be like, “oh, my god, everything's a test.” All these things seem so possible now.
DR: I wonder how that perception translates to your work? Beyond manifestation, you're doing bodywork, you're doing cupping, doing facials, and I think a lot of people would still say that's “woo-woo.” There’s a lot of people that might not understand why you would pay for that service or why would you get into that service? So, do you feel like the manifestation work and the bodywork go hand in hand for you? Or did one come before the other? How did that transition happen if there was one?
AG: Honestly, I feel like it happened so abruptly. My time through massage school was test after test because I was changing so much. It was very emotional, because I kept asking the universe, “am I doing the right thing?” And, “Are you sure?” And I would ask the universe for something very specific. So I was in massage school and I said, “if I'm doing the right thing, play this Whitney Houston song,” and I swear like clockwork, I kept hearing it on the radio every time I had a hard day. “The Greatest Love of All” would come on and I'm weeping in my car - you can't make this up. I was so specific about it and it would keep coming on the radio on The Breeze all the time.
I interact with so many people that are like, “you're supposed to be doing this. You're so aligned with this.” I don't know how this happened. I just followed my intuition and asked for signs and got them. So, the transition from my old life into massage seemed really easy, honestly. But in hindsight, I cried a lot in school because I had to completely change as a person - it's beautiful. With manifestation and bodywork, I hope to inspire people through bodywork and the release of tension to carry out their own manifestations in life. If you don't have to think about your back hurting, imagine what you fill that space with in your mind and in the world. That's all I hope to do.
DR: You had mentioned before that you feel like bodywork has chosen you, or that this career path has chosen you. Why do you think that? Are there certain people that just gravitate towards you and your willingness to meditate and manifest and heal?
AG: I remember receiving a massage and thinking this is what I want to do forever - I feel so good and so clear right now. I'm just gonna go down this road and see what happens - and it's been such a whirlwind since then. I feel so lucky that I get to practice all these things that other people don't really know about or care about. I use tuning forks and sound vibrations on people and they're like, “yes, I love this.”
I think what makes my practice special is that I actually sit down with people and ask,“what are you feeling? What is going on?” and it's just very natural for me to kind of gravitate towards what is going on in someone. Or, if they don't want energy work at all, I can tell right away that they just want an elbow on their shoulder. But those people don't really gravitate towards me. They're all very curious about me and what's going on here. I don't know why yet. It just clicked.
DR: There's a lot of trust in what you do: trust from your clients, trust in yourself, trust in bringing in this new form of therapy … I think that speaks a lot to why you are in the place that you are and why people continue to gravitate towards you.
AG: I had a presence in the bar world for so long being a bartender at Standby and all that. I think seeing me in that role already created trust within my community because being a woman around alcohol is already a trusting thing. Usually, you have more trust with women with alcohol. I think maybe that helped translate some of this because people already felt comfortable around me. I was such a social person. I had so many connections. When COVID happened, I had just started my business. I was like, “Oh great, what have I done?” I just started a business touching people during this time. I never had a lull - ever. I think people needed it so badly at that time that it was actually perfect timing for what I was doing. This all started with people who worked in the bars with me - people I worked with through Deluxx Fluxx were all like, “we need help and we trust you.” That's kind of where the trust started in the community, I think.
DR: I wonder how you separate the ritual practice here that you bestow upon people as well as yourself … do you have different practices that you don't bring into this space for others? Or do you share all the rituals that you practice? How do you distinguish what's for Alexandra and what's for everyone else?
AG: There are some things that I do not bring here because I feel like that keeps me where I am energetically and I can't share all of that in this space. I think one of them being the Florida Water where I mop my entire house with it. I usually can't do that here but the spray bottle is enough. I had to really create a safe haven at home in massage school. They really do a very good job of teaching you grounding work, and how to do that when you're leaving work. They even have this ritual where you fill a ball with salt and when you leave work, you're supposed to put your hands in the salt to cleanse them from any energy coming through you. I don't do that every day.
My home has a lot of trinkets and weird jars and stuff for protection. I like to make Venus water where you take all of the elements of Venus: copper, certain crystals, and you boil water with all of them in there. It makes this water with it and I put them in these jars in my house. I just love Venus, I’m a lover. There's some things I do at home that are really “woo-woo” that I don't really bring here because I don't want people to see my weird jars and be like, “what is she doing now?” You can’t share it all.
DR: Walk me through the facial massage, and why do you think that's special?
AG: The feedback I've received about it is so positive. I do a lot of research. I get a lot of massages around here and I think there's no bridge between a facial and a massage at this point. You have to choose one or the other and often facials are kind of product pushy scenarios. I went to esthetician school because I was really gravitating towards facial massage. It would be so interesting to learn more about the face, to feel more confident about working on the face, and I made it like three quarters the way through and I was like I hate this so much because it's product pushy. You have to learn waxing and all that and I was just like wow, I really didn't research this - I just want to do facial massage and I can and I should and I can be creative about it - just as I've done with my massage business. Once I did, people from all over the place were like, I have never seen anybody offer this before, like people with TMJ that really struggle. There's a style of massage that you can get where they actually stick their hands in your mouth and I don't do anything like that. I think that's for more serious discomfort but I've had such good feedback on the facial massage. People really like to feel touched there. It's something that gets overlooked entirely in a massage. Typically, you get your head massage, there's some scalp, there's some forehead usually but I've never had a massage where someone's touching my face and people love it. I think it really encompasses the entire massage because if you think about it, your entire body is getting touched except your face. How good would it feel if that was included and you felt all of that was worked on?
I think it feels really good for people especially during sinus season.
DR: You do facial cupping, too?
AG: I'll usually do facial cupping and then put an ice mask on you and keep working in the décolletage. I went to school for this and was like I don't need to do that. I just need to be creative about this. There's nothing that I can’t start doing here and ever since then, every face massage is different. I don't do the same thing to everyone.
DR: Do you feel like there's a balance between the education that you received and the intuitive response that you have?
AG: Not really, no. It’s more intuitive than anything else. The coolest thing I learned at esthetician school was how to use a facial steamer - everything else was intuitive. You chat with people and see what they're looking for. If someone's like, “I'm having all this sinus pressure. I'm getting migraines,” then, ok, I've studied the face and different pressure points in the face, so, if you're experiencing migraines, then I know that I'm going to start using cold therapy on you and I'm gonna get into your eyebrows.
DR: Can you tell if that person is holding too much tension where you're trying to get it out?
AG: I don't think enough people have experienced that. It's one of those things in massage as well with the body where I‘ve asked people, “How are you? How are your hips?How is this?” And they say, “Oh, they’re fine.” Then I start working there and they're like, “I am not fine! Oh, my god, I needed that so badly. I've just been existing this way and managing it. And now that you've gone there, I'm feeling so much relief that I had no idea what I was carrying around.”
DR: What would you tell someone who is wanting to build a ritual into their every day practice?
AG: I would say be playful. Be really playful. There are no bounds to what your rituals can look like. You can change them - your ritual is your ritual. I think the most important thing for me and my ritual is that I do it every day. I set aside time for it, but it looks different each day. My ritual is sometimes journaling and a face mask. But, that's the time I've carved out in my day for myself, regardless of what I'm doing with it. That feels really fun to be able to play with as my mood changes. I think ritual, though, is just about carving out that time for yourself. That's the most important ritual for me. I gotta take time out to journal each week at least, to read, to do something for myself … get a massage. Be be playful, be intuitive. Play and be curious too. If you're curious about something, give it a try and lean into it. There's a reason why you're gravitating towards it. It could change your mind about your career or what you want to wear the next day. Lean into your curiosity.
Learn more about Alexandra’s offerings and book a service at her website, www.alexandragilder.com.
