About

✧ ABOUT MELISSA ✧

Long before I had a name for healing, I had the forest.

I grew up listening to trees sway, watching light move through leaves, learning the quiet language of soil and root. That was where I first understood that everything alive is speaking, if you know how to listen. Tarot found me not long after — another dialect of the same language, another way of paying attention to what wants to be seen.

I’ve hitchhiked the open road with nothing but instinct as my compass, competed in powerlifting where strength becomes its own kind of prayer, and moved through decades of daily walking and cycling as a form of communion — always feeling the same current of light running beneath my skin, the same electric pulse that has carried me through what should have been impossible.

Bodies are miraculous — quiet archives of everything we’ve lived. They carry our stories of love, loss, and betrayal the way rivers carry silt, the way trees hold rings of drought and abundance beneath their bark. Nothing is lost; it’s only folded inward, waiting to be witnessed. To place my hands on a body is to touch a living book — and I’ve learned to read it with reverence, not judgment, honoring every chapter it holds.

I know this reading firsthand. I have walked my own passage — through domestic violence, through homelessness, through the long unraveling that trauma leaves behind — and found my way from the story I was born to, to the story I was born to live. What I offer you isn’t theory. It’s the map I made by walking it myself.

That reverence didn’t begin in massage school. It began years earlier, in the counseling room — as a Washington State Registered Counselor working frontline with survivors and children through The Women’s Referral Center, Seattle Children’s Home, and YMCA Foster Care Services, and as a volunteer with Seattle Rape Relief and the King County Crisis Line. I carried that same attunement into Reiki, into HeartMath, and into Tarot, where I now hold space for the parts of a story that are ready to be witnessed. Massage, Tarot, energy work — each is a different dialect of the same conversation: you are safe here, and every part of you is welcome.

Art Therapy taught me that meaning rarely arrives directly — it comes through image, symbol, metaphor, the things we make or draw when words run out. Tarot works the same way. Both ask the same question: what does this image want to tell you about yourself? I read cards the way I once helped others read their own art — not for a fixed answer, but for what surfaces when you finally let the symbol speak.

Studying art taught me to see in ways that never quite left me — how to notice positive space and negative space as equal partners in a story, how light moves across a surface and changes everything it touches, how to sit with an object long enough that it stops being an object and starts being alive. I learned to feel for what makes a thing luminous, singular, worth pausing for. That way of seeing became the way I read synchronicity — the small, uncanny alignments that ripple through a life if you’re paying attention. A card that surfaces at the exact right moment. A shadow that falls just so. The universe speaks in composition, the same way a painting does, and I’ve spent a lifetime learning its visual grammar. This is the eye I bring to every reading: not searching for meaning, but noticing it, the way you’d notice light finally catching the edge of something that had been there all along.

My massage work moves fluidly between therapeutic precision and unhurried indulgence — deep tissue and myofascial release alongside Swedish, hot stone, reflexology, prenatal care, cupping, scrubs, and wraps. Each session is shaped around what your body is asking for that day, not a fixed script.

✧ CREDENTIALS & TRAINING ✧

Washington State Licensed Massage Therapist — MA60684548

NASM Certified Personal Trainer — certified 2002, with a 15-year focus in bodybuilding and training

Level 3 Reiki Master

HeartMath Inner Resilience Certified

Trauma Informed Tarot Advisor, drawing on 35+ years in the esoteric arts

BA in Family Psychology & Art Therapy — the academic foundation beneath this entire practice

Discovery Point School of Massage — 850-hour program, graduated 2015

Former Washington State Registered Counselor — frontline work at The Women’s Referral Center, Seattle Children’s Home, and YMCA Foster Care Services; volunteer service with Seattle Rape Relief and the King County Crisis Line; trained addiction counselors at Free & Clear

30,000+ clients served across these healing modalities since 1998

✧ ABOUT THE SPA ✧

This space is quiet and dim by design — soft light instead of bright, shadow instead of glare, the walls holding images of trees and wild places that make the room feel like its own small world apart from the street outside. A makeshift apothecary lines one wall,- shrouded in dried herbs and flowers hanging above bottles of essential oil, and a vintage mirrored tapestry — hand-stitched in Bali — catches what little light there is and scatters it back into the room. It’s built for the nervous system to exhale, not perform. Tucked on the fourth floor of the Valhalla Building, it sits among a hive of quiet practitioners — massage therapists, estheticians, acupuncturists and other business professionals — each one doing their own version of careful work.

Grab a coffee next door at Anchored Ship, then find the entrance to Valhalla to the right of the coffeeshop – tucked in the alcove of the red brick building- and make your way up to this serene little haven made just for you.