I thought long and hard about leaving this review. It wasn't something I initially wanted to do…read more However, after being alerted to and reading Mark's response to Maria, I can't ignore my need to speak out any longer.
As a preface, you should know that I attended this school for roughly 2 weeks at the beginning of January 2019. I dropped out early so as to not lose the bulk of my tuition money.
The main reasons I left were because of a) the delicate emotional boundaries I felt Mark crossed and b) the complete lack of hygiene and failure to take normal massage protocol seriously.
A: During my brief time there, the MAJORITY of our time was spent on activities meant to cultivate "awareness" (a very vague term, and how exactly it's measured I don't know). They felt like expensive time-fillers (some of them literally involved us just staring at each other to the point where you either laughed or had to look away), and often made other students very emotional. Classes started to feel a lot more like group therapy sessions even though Mark insisted they weren't. In my opinion, he sent very mixed messages about this, as he would often encourage students to "go further" into their emotions when they were clearly experiencing distress. It felt like a precarious line to walk, especially when dealing with students who had very obviously experienced trauma in their lives.
As I said, the bulk of our time was spent on these emotional exercises. I felt they were excessive and overshadowed the more technical aspects of our curriculum.
B: As for hygiene, we were encouraged and supposed to wash our hands before practicing massage. However, we would also do some activities that had us outside on the grass, barefoot, rolling around, etc. NO ONE washed their feet or clothes after such activities, potentially contaminating tables and bodies with the abundance of chicken feces that lay on the grass outside.
As far as I saw in my two weeks there, none of the official rules on non-perfumed (essential) oils were enforced and some of my classmates added them to massage oils enthusiastically. The ground rules about deodorant discussed on day one were never addressed again. In this regard, it was a free-for-all.
When I dropped out, I was contacted by Mark a few times. He wanted to make sure I was making the right decision, and asked if I needed more time. In retrospect, it all felt like a means to make sure no money was lost on me. I wish I had taken a screen shot of this, but I thought it was also suspicious that after having dropped out, Mark posted on our class's FaceBook page that he had made a tax mistake and that everyone was going to have to pay an extra $200 or so. While I can't be certain this was a means to recuperate money lost on me by shifting the burden onto other students, I CAN be certain that a business should and MUST eat the costs of their mistakes. I am a business owner myself, and this is completely unacceptable and shows a lack of respect for your customers. If you can't afford to make mistakes, hire someone to ensure that you don't.
Mark reached out to me even months later, noting that I had liked Maria's negative comment here on Yelp. He described her as a very "disgruntled individual," perhaps in an effort to sway me in coming back.
If anything has deterred me from coming back, it's Mark's response to Maria.
Before you throw a whole bunch of money to study at this school because of it's ideal location, ask yourself if you want to support the character of someone who retaliates against a dead person, someone who can no longer defend themself, on Yelp. Whatever Maria's issues were in life, her suicide doesn't negate her opinions or experience. You would think that someone who claims to be "trauma informed" would perhaps be more sensitive to the privacy, reputation and dignity of a human being and the family and friends she left behind, instead of trying to use it as a means to showcase his own generosity and virtue. If anyone I knew committed suicide and then I later found such a despicable response to one of their old comments by a BUSINESS OWNER, I would never patronize that place again. It's mindblowingly disrespectful and selfish.
Even if the statements you've made are factual, it is simply not your place to announce this kind of information to the world in order to make your business look better. Also, no where in her review did she refer to you as "new age-y."
Mark, instead of focusing on the ONE negative review by bringing to question the emotional and mental validity of the person who wrote it, you would have done better to encourage your more recent graduates to write positive ones.
