Charlotte Knowlton offers a session called Seasonal Herbal Bodywork: therapeutic massage and reiki with a handcrafted seasonal body oil. Nothing else on the directory looks quite like it.
It makes more sense once you know they studied herbalism at the Gaia School of Healing in 2017, four years before qualifying as a massage therapist at the Pittsburgh School of Massage Therapy. The two halves of that training have been braided together ever since.
A regular hour with Charlotte isn’t one modality start to finish either. It’s Swedish, trigger point therapy, myofascial release, dynamic stretching and reiki, blended and modified as they go, responding to your body in real time. If you’ve ever had a massage that felt like someone reading from a script, this is the opposite of that.
Charlotte works mostly with people in chronic pain — hypermobile EDS, fibromyalgia, scoliosis — and with people through pregnancy and postpartum.
Their practice is body positive, LGBTQIA+ affirming, trauma informed and client centred, and they’re explicit about wanting the table to be somewhere queer clients can show up in their entirety. The phrase they keep coming back to is a safe and nonjudgemental space.
The studio is at 124 South Highland Avenue. Paid street parking, close to a lot of bus lines, one flight of stairs to get in — Charlotte says so up front rather than leaving you to find out on the day.
Therapeutic massage is $100 for the shorter session and $150 for the longer one. Seasonal Herbal Bodywork is $175.
If you’ve been meaning to book something like this for a while, consider this your nudge.