Nurture the Moon offers massage therapy with focus on women's health 

The human experience can be chock-full of tensions and stresses, fears and apprehensions, and traumas and illnesses that try to bring our spirit down. 

A vital question for healing from those experiences and patterns is, where in our bodies do those disturbances manifest?

Local massage therapist Miya Tischler says they like to hide in the abdomen area.

“The center of the body is so vulnerable,” Tischler told New Times. “It’s one of the most vulnerable areas of the body. Neurologically, we have this sense that it’s where all the most valuable organs are. There’s no bones protecting them—it’s just this open area.

“What we tend to do is develop guarding patterns in the musculature,” she said.

Tischler recently opened a private practice in SLO, Nurture the Moon, where she’s offering her expertise in the “Arvigo Techniques of Maya Abdominal Therapy” (ATMAT), a rare and ancient Mayan form of massage therapy.

Tischler discovered ATMAT while living with indigenous communities in Belize when she was 19.

“There’s all this traditional wisdom on manual therapy and therapeutic abdominal massage, but it’s not something that we really have in our culture at all,” Tischler said.

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• PHOTO COURTESY OF MIYA TISCHLER
• ANCIENT TECHNIQUES: Miya Tischler is an Arvigo Therapy Practitioner in SLO offering her services in the traditional Mayan healing practice of abdominal massage therapy. Tischler works with women who are seeking help with fertility issues, pregnancy, and pelvic health. She also helps women who are coping with miscarriages and disorders like endometriosis, in addition to providing professional postpartum doula care.

After some years of practicing Western forms of massage, Tischler decided to switch gears and go down the path of studying ATMAT. The opportunity to specialize in this form of massage therapy brings her the fulfillment that she’s providing a healing service to women that is scarcely available.

“When I started working in SLO, I was also doing other forms of massage, but ATMAT has really been calling to me more and more because it’s something that women don’t really have a lot of access to.”

Tischler works with women who are seeking help with fertility issues, pregnancy, pelvic health, and improving their spiritual vibrancy. She also helps women who are coping with miscarriages and disorders like endometriosis, in addition to providing professional postpartum doula care.

“Endometriosis is something that’s very hard to treat,” Tischler said. “Even with surgery, it often comes back. Many of my patients really wish they had known about [ATMAT] before they have had all their surgeries. They didn’t really know that it was an option.”

ATMAT therapy helps to “decrease scar tissue and adhesions” enabling the “lower abdominal organs to realign themselves in the body,” Tischler said.

In addition to administering the therapy, Tischler teaches patients how to offer themselves an abbreviated version of the practice, which they are tasked to do at home as part of “daily self-care.”

“By doing that, she is helping to every day bring the uterus more into the central position in the body, helping increase the circulation, flushing out old lymphatic fluid, and raising the organs of the body into their proper positions,” she said.

Nurture the Moon is an endeavor where Tischler sees the beneficial impact of her work.

“Helping women to just really reclaim that part of their body, it’s so powerful,” she said. “It’s why I do this work.”

To learn more about her practice, visit the Nurture the Moon website at nurturethemoon.com or call Tischler’s office at 776-3280. 

Fast Fact

On Feb. 6, celebrate the California Western Monarch Butterfly at the Pismo State Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove where California State Parks will lead an event featuring kid-friendly learning opportunities and refreshments from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. 

Staff Writer Peter Johnson wrote this week’s Strokes. Contact him at [email protected].