Bodywork Education and Massage Therapy in Portland, Oregon
The body is the book. We listen and respond.
Whether you're searching for integrative massage therapy in Portland, Oregon or looking to deepen your work as a practitioner, Moving Mountain Institute offers care and training that goes beyond the standard approach.
Here’s what we know about bodies:
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They’re intricate, magical, and mundane constellations of tissue, fluid, fascia, and nervous system— all interconnected, all communicating.
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They're not machines to be fixed but intelligent systems with their own insight.
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They are influenced by social, emotional, and environmental contexts that shape their lived experience.
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They express themselves (sometimes painfully or mysteriously!) through patterns and sensations that we may not immediately understand.
Attentive presence, curiosity, and genuine care—not force, protocols, or rigid diagnoses—can create the conditions for change.
Where skillful care bridges the gap between medical theory and embodied experience
Massage Therapy and Continuing Bodywork Education
Clinic
For Individuals
Bodywork in the Moving Mountain clinic integrates rigorous anatomical knowledge with deep embodied listening, creating care that adapts to your unique patterns and needs. We work collaboratively with your body’s own intelligence, attending to not only your muscles and tissues but your nervous system as well.
This approach is especially valuable for people with complex and chronic conditions, including Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, post-COVID symptoms, nervous system overwhelm, and pain that doesn’t fit neatly into standard diagnostic categories.
We take time to understand not just what's happening in your body but how you experience it. Together, we look for shifts that matter to you, and make our way down a path towards whatever “better” might look like.
Education & Courses
For Bodywork Professionals
Moving Mountain Institute supports touch-based practitioners through hands-on, inclusive, and creatively combinatory continuing education programs. Through courses in craniosacral therapy, myofascial release, and integrated visceral techniques, we guide professionals into deeper, meaningful, and highly personalized relationships with this work.
Our approach emphasizes flexible processes that adapt to what emerges in the moment. You'll learn to work as a collaborator with the body's intelligence, creating possibilities that neither rigid technique nor intuition alone can access.
We’re guided by the belief that bodywork education should honor rigorous knowledge and technical precision as well as the wisdom inherent in every body, and every practitioner’s unique way of sensing and responding. (And we also believe that learning should be engaging and fun!)
Supporting patients and practitioners since 2001
“While massage, acupuncture and all sorts of body work have always been part of my wellness and body maintenance program, Michael is the best I have ever experienced! He brings great passion and depth of knowledge to his work.”
“I am in awe and deep appreciation of the way that Michael and his teaching assistants show up in the space to provide individualized support.
Michael’s enthusiasm for teaching and learning is contagious and I am ecstatic to have found this quality in a teacher as an adult. It’s a blessing!”
Get to know Moving Mountain Institute
Your Portland, Oregon home base for massage therapy and bodywork that really listens to what bodies have to say.
At MMI, we live in the questions that are too rarely asked about bodies and the way we all make our way through the world:
What if bodies aren't problems to solve but teachers with their own deep intelligence?
And what becomes possible when we honor the body’s individual wisdom while also inviting clinical expertise to the table?
In this way, we’re not fixers but collaborators with the people we treat and the professionals we teach. We believe in the power of curiosity, experience, and genuine relationship—between practitioner and patient, between what we know and what we're still learning, between the precision of anatomy and the knowledge that lives in tissues themselves.
In both the clinic and the classroom, we create containers where bodies can tell their stories, be heard, and make meaningful shifts in response to that attention. (And the community that has emerged from all of this is pretty rad, too!)
Read the blog
Notes from the field
Field Notes is the spot where our clinical interests meet genuine curiosity about how bodies work, heal, and change.
On the blog, you'll find book reviews that connect bodywork to neuroscience, philosophy, and social justice, personal reflections on what it means to be present with bodies in a disconnected world, and explorations into clinical topics that spark our attention. Let’s contemplate, imagine, and learn together!
