Every so often, it’s worth stopping to ask why you do the work you do. Not what you do, or how, but why. For me, that question surfaced during a stretch when I was cut off from my clients and, with it, from the non-verbal channel I rely on most. I’m a massage therapist. So much of how I understand the people on my table happens without words, through what I feel in the tissue and read in their body. Take that away, and all I have left are words. That turned out to be a gift, because it made me dig into why I chose this as my life’s work in the first place, and what my clients actually bring to me.
By David Iler, LMT, CPT. Licensed massage therapist since 2004, certified personal trainer, and founder of Iler Method® massage therapy in Austin, Texas. Updated July 2026.
A friend pointed me toward Simon Sinek’s book Start with Why. She was adamant that I not get stuck on what I do or how I do it, but figure out the why underneath, so I could become the kind of resource I want to be for my community.
Why it’s so hard to put “why” into words
One idea from Sinek’s book stuck with me. He describes how the part of the brain tied to our feelings and our deepest motivations doesn’t have direct access to language. The verbal, reasoning part of the brain is a different system entirely. So when you feel something strongly, and someone asks you to explain exactly why, the words tend to fail you. It isn’t that you don’t know. It’s that the knowing lives somewhere the language can’t easily reach.
His takeaway is that to find your why, you have to look back into your own history, at the themes and patterns that have quietly been steering you since you were young.
So that’s what I did.
Two decades of listening
For the past twenty years, I’ve been driven to learn everything I can about the people I serve, people in pain from an active life. Early on, I’d set up my massage table at running clubs and along the public running paths here in Austin, offer my work to the runners for free, and soak up everything they told me. At one point I was seeing between 140 and 160 people a month.
Sensing someone’s mood and reading what their body needed came naturally to me. And working across all those people is where I started noticing the consistent muscle compensation patterns that eventually became the Iler Method. Our piece on muscle overcompensation explains that pattern.
But why was I driven to study it so obsessively, and why was I so at ease with people, even total strangers? Following Sinek’s advice, I went looking in my own history for the answer.
“I’ll give you something to cry about”
In the family I grew up in, we were discouraged from showing our feelings. Children were seen and not heard. “Stop crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about” was a phrase I heard a lot. The message I absorbed was that I wasn’t allowed to have feelings about being hurt.
My siblings and I shut down emotionally. We couldn’t really be a support system for each other, and I learned self-reliance early, along with the isolation that comes with it.
After high school I stayed close to home for about a year, and then, all at once, I had to leave and couldn’t have told you why. With few resources, I decided the fastest way out was the military. I joined the Air Force, and within six months I was in battle dress under F-15s on a base in North Carolina. Nobody who knows me can quite picture how I ended up on a 110-degree tarmac loading munitions. I was miserable.
The church on base
There wasn’t much comfort in that stretch of my life, aside from hiking on the Appalachian Trail and riding my motorcycle along the beach. That is, until I wandered into the Southern Baptist church on base.
I didn’t go there for religion, or to be absolved of anything. I didn’t talk to the congregation, and I can’t say I took a single lesson from the pulpit. Most of the people there were military or military family, and like me, they weren’t naturally expressive people. But the preacher had a warm, knowing, fun-loving way about him. Each week the choir would build the music until people were moved to let their feelings out. They’d take to the aisles, heads low, clapping, tapping their feet. Some would cry over a deep grief. Some would roll on the floor.
And in an instant, I understood the release they felt, and I found myself crying too. Watching people not just have their emotions accepted but be actively encouraged to express them was something I had never seen. I went back often, and it left a mark on me I’ve never forgotten.
Ask culture and guess culture
There’s an old idea that circulates online every few years about two kinds of families. In an “ask culture,” you learn it’s fine to ask for anything, as long as you can accept that the answer might be no. In a “guess culture,” you don’t put a request into words unless you’re already fairly sure the answer is yes. Instead, you learn to read the room and put out subtle feelers, so the offer comes to you without your ever having to ask directly.
I grew up in a guess culture. And the core survival skill of that kind of household is a high sensitivity to other people’s emotions. Knowing how someone feels the moment they walk into my office is, honestly, a kind of superpower, and it came from that upbringing.
But I also decided, years ago, that I didn’t want to pass the harder parts of that legacy along. I wanted to do something different with it. Which brings me to the why I finally landed on.
My why
To hold a nurturing, non-judgmental space so that others can realize their fullest potential.
In my office, I want people to feel that their body language is heard and that they are met where they are. Over the years I’ve come to believe that part matters as much as the bodywork itself. In my experience, easing physical tension and giving someone a safe, unhurried space often let something emotional loosen too, and I’ve learned to make room for that when it happens, without forcing it or making it the point.
That’s the part of this work that makes it feel like a calling to me rather than a job. I’m here to hold a healing space for people. It took getting quiet, and losing my usual way of connecting for a while, to be able to say that out loud.
I tell more of this story, and where it led, in my book. The Pain Map: Why Being Strong & Fit Isn’t Enough is available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/07LpKbbU
Ready to experience the work? Schedule Now: https://ilermethod.com/
