When I wrote one of my first-even bodywork journals earlier in 2024 I celebrated my step into a full-time therapeutic role. In this journal, called The Long-Planned Bodywork Therapy Jump, I expressed my doubts, hesitation, and fears about making my therapeutic dream come true. When I look back onto the year that followed since I published that rather candid text, I can only feel enormous gratitude for how life allowed Advaya to unfold and, of course, myself with that.

Yet, as we know all too well, life surprises us constantly. We’ve all learned that no plan will ever survive contact with reality completely. Unexpected events cross our path, and although it may not look like that at first, they usually herald something positive.

That the Universe has its own mind became yet again glaringly clear last week when it threw me an irresistible opportunity, out of the blue, to contribute to the development of a huge social welfare initiative for New Zealand. There was little room for me to decline the offer and, thus, I didn’t.

My acceptance of this role will have consequences for Advaya Bodywork.

There are three –

Reduction in booking slots

The first significant consequence is that booking slots will become limited from Monday 24 March onwards. Only the most committed of you will apply.

We will be going from the usual five or six daily slots to one or two. We will continue to offer the 4:30PM and 7:30PM slots on weekdays. Sunday opening hours will now be from 12:00PM to 5:00PM, which means that the 10:30AM slot will no longer be offered.

If you already booked ahead for any of the now ‘closed’ slots, we will either honour your bookings at the confirmed times and date or we will contact you to make alternative arrangements.

We are expecting to keep these revised (reduced) booking slots until July 2025.

Revised Treatment Prices

After Monday 24 March our prices will increase for all treatments.

There are a few reasons for this.

As I mentioned many times before, we kept our treatment prices deliberately low over the last few years to give most of you easiest access to our bodywork treatments. As most other therapists continued to raise their fees incrementally throughout 2024 and 2025 to stay aligned with the rising cost of living, we persisted in keeping ours pretty much fixed. That has now resulted in us charging only 60% of what is currently considered ‘standard’ fees.

To put these percentages in numbers, most therapists who specialise in treatments like ours charge between $100 and $135 per hour. Treatments are even more expensive in our larger cities such as Auckland and Christchurch, with hourly fees typically starting at $120 minimally. Compare that with our standard charge of $85 per hour, which we maintained since our inception, without rise, in 2017,

Based on this rationale we believe that after seven years we’ve earned our dues to raise our hourly charges to $100 per hour for standard MFR treatments, and $125 per hour for one-hour specialised sessions.

Our booking system will reflect our new pricing structure from Monday 24 March onwards.

Unfortunately, there is a second reason for the revision of our prices. We have noticed a rather sharp increase in invoices that still remain unpaid, which a saddening development. To give you a flavour of that, I had to write off almost $350 in outstanding fees between December and January alone, expecting that this amount will never be paid.

Although amounts vary, such write-offs are now a common occurrence. By raising our treatment fees closer to what’s charged on average across New Zealand we hope to deter clients who do not intend to fulfil their financial duties to us.

Expansion of our Treatment Portfolio

By now you will be aware that we are working hard on the expansion of our treatment portfolio. We are now formally booked for several refresher courses, with some heavy-duty exams scattered over the first seven months of this year. This will see a significant expansion of our bodywork therapy offers and the gradual introduction of more bodywork treatment types throughout 2025.

The expansion of our bodywork qualifications will enable us to significantly improve our therapeutic work. Practically, this means that treatments can be made more effective and efficient, which should result in shorter treatment plans. Achieving better physical and emotional relief from fewer treatments benefits you financially.

What will absolutely benefit you is our idea to introduce multi-modality treatment plans that we customise for you to help you achieve your physical and emotional health objectives quicker. Currently, the majority of you book Myofascial Release Treatments to do so. By introducing the other treatment types, as listed above, we become progressively better at helping you recover from both acute and chronic emotional and physical trauma.

While completing the listed renewal qualifications continues to strengthen our reputation as a premium five-star bodywork practice, our intentions to provide you with world-class and best-practice treatments doesn’t come for free. As with most other products and services, the charges and fees of the world’s best training and instruction institutes continue to rise and, of course, as therapists, we asked to bear these.

Our intention to be the best physical and manual therapists we can be comes therefore at a price which, we believe, we can share with those of you who are entirely serious about achieving their physical and emotional health goals.

Making Sense of the Changes

We will make some significant changes to our booking system and pricing structure on Monday, 24 March, 2025. While we expect that these changes will prompt some of our financially constrained clients to look for alternative options, we also predict that clients who are most committed to the improvement of their physical and emotional health will continue to work with us.

Questions?

If you have any questions or concerns about these changes, please use the form on our Contact Us page to send us an email.