Marta Phillips, CEO of BlueFit & Massage, opened her keynote by sharing the journey that brought her from Poland to building a practice rooted in hands-on, whole-body healing. After arriving in the U.S. and working as a personal trainer, she kept running into the same problem: clients with chronic pain that exercise alone could not fix. That pushed her back to school for massage therapy and, eventually, toward spinal reflex therapy, a technique that reads the body’s reflexes through the feet and addresses the spine by working the surrounding muscles rather than the bones.

Over the years she added thermal scanning, visceral manipulation, and Pilates rehabilitation to her practice, building an approach that starts with what is happening deepest in the body.

The second part of Marta’s talk got personal. During COVID, while trying to get pregnant, she developed debilitating pain on her left side that stumped doctors for nearly two years. The eventual diagnosis was nutcracker syndrome, a rare vascular compression between the kidney vessel and the aorta. With limited surgical options, she underwent a procedure called ballooning to open the compressed veins and slowly rebuilt her health through Pilates, Reiki, sound healing, and breathwork. That experience, she said, changed how she shows up for her clients.

Every person who walks through her door gets everything she has learned, not just the clinical training, but the hard-won understanding of what it feels like to be unheard, in pain, and searching for answers.