About
Back In Touch Academy provides continuing education for licensed massage therapists who refuse to settle for mediocre courses. We believe your professional development shouldn't feel like checking a box—it should inspire, challenge, and grow your practice. Our courses are designed for therapists who want meaningful education they can apply immediately, both in the treatment room and in the business side of their work. We combine credible instruction with a grounded, encouraging learning environment that respects your experience and supports your next level of growth. Whether you join us online or in person, you can expect education that is practical, thoughtfully developed, and rooted in real-world practice. At Back In Touch Academy, we’re committed to helping massage therapists build confidence, expand their skills, and create careers that feel sustainable, successful, and deeply aligned.
Michael
I came to massage therapy through caregiving — two years as my first wife's advocate through cancer treatment taught me what the body needs and what the medical system does not have time to provide. After her passing, I retired from thirty-two years in education, discovered massage therapy, and opened Back In Touch Massage and Yoga in 2007. Twenty years in, the core of the work has not changed: one practitioner, one client, full attention, skilled contact.
Catherine and I built Back In Touch Academy because practitioners deserve continuing education that is clinically rigorous, culturally grounded, and built as a professional investment — not a compliance checkbox. My role tends toward the practical and the direct: scope-of-practice clarity, clinical decision-making, evidence assessment, business sustainability. Catherine carries the philosophical depth. We are complementary, not interchangeable. The courses reflect both.
Catherine
I came to bodywork education through occupational therapy, yoga, and Ayurveda — and then, involuntarily, through the patient experience that none of those trainings prepared me for.
My background spans adult physical rehabilitation, an E-RYT 500 yoga certification, Ayurvedic training at the Ayurvedic Institute, and study at Sivananda Ashram. In 2022, a shingles vaccine triggered an autoimmune condition that collapsed my health into three years of prednisone and a shattered ankle requiring full surgical reconstruction. I rebuilt through the practices I had spent decades teaching — no longer from theory, but from inside a body that had stopped cooperating.
That experience changed how I teach. Every course I develop holds evidence to explicit tiers, treats scope of practice as structure rather than disclaimer, and teaches modalities within their cultures of origin. I do not teach about yoga or Ayurveda from the outside. I teach from inside decades of daily practice and lineage-based training.
Why Us?
Back In Touch Academy is a provider of continuing education for licensed massage therapists and allied health professionals. We built Back In Touch Academy because too much CE in this field is clinically thin — modalities stripped from their cultural contexts, evidence overstated or absent, scope of practice reduced to a disclaimer rather than built into the teaching itself.
Every course we develop holds itself to three standards. Evidence is tiered explicitly — what research supports, what is plausible, and what belongs to traditional knowledge are never blurred into a single claim. Scope of practice is structural, woven into the content architecture. And modalities rooted in specific cultural traditions are taught within those traditions, with the context that makes the technique intelligible rather than merely reproducible.
Our courses pair online modules with in-person hands-on instruction. We teach practitioners who want to understand why the work works, where it comes from, and how to sustain a career doing it well.