Today, we continue our author interview series by speaking to Paula Bassanese, lead therapist and director of Energya Ltd. and author of Keep Calm and Pay Your Debts and Confessions from the Massage Couch.
We’ve already reviewed Confessions from the Massage Couch over on the main site after Paola was kind enough to send us a copy, and so we jumped at the chance to interview her and to ask some follow-up questions. Listen to what we talked about below, or read on to find out more…
“Having five million pounds in the bank
will not make you immune from pain…“
We speak to with author Paola Bassanese
It’s the Saturday after I got back from Glastonbury, and I’m sitting at my computer and speaking to Paola Bassanese, a couple of months after she first got in touch with me. We were going to have this interview earlier, but we postponed it so that she could send me a copy of Confessions from the Massage Chair to read and review it ahead of our conversation.
The book came about after a conversation that Paola had with one of her clients - “He he was the one who encouraged me to share what I’ve been discussing with people,” she explains. “People tend to open up when they’re receiving a treatment and it can vary from the mundane to the meaning of life.”
But writing has always been a passion for Paola - “I’ve been writing for several years,” she says. “Even as a kid I was dreaming about becoming a writer, it’s just that life takes you around in different ways. I wanted to explore a career as a therapist first to test myself and to learn a new skill - then that served as a launch pad for the book.”
Paola Bassanese
“I’m going through life in a roundabout way,” Paola confesses. “I just stumble across things without any precise trajectory. I know so many people who’ve got very clear ideas – they’ve got their five year, ten year and twenty year plan. I admire them, but I’m not one of them.”
Some of those people, no doubt, are featured in the book, but Paola did an excellent job of keeping their identities anonymous. It wasn’t an easy task, though - “you end up editing out more than you put in,” she reveals. “When I talk to people who are considering reading it, they’re more interested in juicy gossip, which is exactly what I didn’t include in the book.”
For Paola, it’s important for her to distance herself from the celebrity gossip pages of the glossy magazines.“You can read a trashy novel, that’s fine – be my guest, entertain yourself – but that wasn’t the purpose of the book. It was more about distilling all of the conversations, and maybe even combining a few case studies together to build extra layers of anonymity. The main purpose was to try to draw some conclusions, to spot any lessons that can be drawn from those conversations and case studies.”
Paola Bassanese - Confessions from the Massage Couch
Before working on her books, Paola did some work as a journalist, writing for sites like the Huffington Post. Working on a full-length book is “pretty much a natural continuation,” she says. “For example, I like walking, and I would go for a little walk just for exercise. You can use the same technique to turn it in to a longer session and you can take it anywhere, you can go trekking or you can do a marathon. It’s a matter of using that experience and just giving it a different form and shape.”
But while it might be a natural progression from writing articles to writing a book, it wasn’t all plain sailing - “I struggled with word count and structure,” Paola admits. “And I never felt that it was long enough because I was taking material out. It was a struggle to be diplomatic and to get the right balance in the content, but there weren’t any issues in terms of the writing in general.”
Paola works with all kinds of clients with different social backgrounds and different income levels, from “the jetsetters to the people with very normal jobs who are holding a family down”, but she says that the struggles and the triumphs that people face are similar. “We all make assumptions about people before we get to know them properly,” she says. “And once you get to know them you realise they’re just the same as you.”
Paola Bassanese
With that said, Paolo does admit that with the jetsetters, “the first emotion which is triggered is envy – you want their lifestyle, you wish you could go on their exotic holidays. But when they speak to you, they tell you about their frustrations, their self-doubt and sometimes their depression.”
“There’s a whole range of emotions,” Paola continues. “And the human element is fascinating to me, because we are a species and as such, we all stem from the same genetic make-up. We’re all human beings that function the same way, and our thought-processes are quite similar. Yes, social and cultural backgrounds can change, they can shape the way we behave but in the end, we’re all in this together.”
“Having five million pounds in the bank will not make you immune from pain,” she says, and she’s got a point, too. “That was a big lesson to me because we make assumptions – think about our current obsession with celebrities, where we think that their life is better than ours, and it’s not. There’s a lot of boredom, for example, that we don’t take in to account – it’s not always exciting.”
Paola Bassanese - Keep Calm and Pay Off Your Debts
Confessions from the Massage Couch is Paola’s second book - her first was a book about debt-related stress called Keep Calm and Pay Off Your Debts. Her career as a writer is far from over, though - “I’m in the process of writing my third one,” she reveals. “And again, it’s based on conversations but of a different type.”
“Many of the people that I speak to are obsessed with losing weight,” she explains. “And so the next one will be about achieving weight-loss in a more natural way because, just like we’re obsessed with celebrities and their figures, we’re also obsessed with quick fixes, quick results and fad diets. I’m going to take the holistic approach to weight loss, instead of saying ‘you need to get these results by week seven and those results by week eight’.”
That sounds like a noble mission - to me, it seems like planning to lose weight is a bad idea, and that a better goal is to aim for a healthy lifestyle. After all, the weight that you lose can easily be put back on again. Paola says that, in an ideal world, she’d like to release the book in January of next year to coincide with the New Year.
Paola Bassanese
Of course, any non-fiction author is inevitably influenced by the other work on the market, and Paola is no different. “I’m reading three or four books in one go at the moment,” she explains to us. “Including Arianna Huffington’s Thrive. I know that I’m biased because I write for the Huffington Post, but I was fascinated by the reviews and she did a book tour as well. Her presentations, which I saw online, were hilarious and charming. I can’t remember how many books she’s written but she started really young, in her twenties.”
When it comes to fiction, though, Paola says that she hasn’t read it for a while. “I’m always drawn to non-fiction,” she explains. “So if you were to ask me about fiction then I couldn’t even remember the last book that I read. I’m also reading Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, which is always really helpful.” You can see why it might be worth reading, in Paola’s profession!
See, Paola’s job is about a lot more than giving massages - on top of this, she councils her clients on how best to balance their mind and their body, whether that’s through massage, exercise or meditation. “If you don’t have the budget or the time to go and see a professional,” she says. “You should take up meditation. You can search for free online resources, and you can set aside between five and twenty minutes in the day to calm down. It’s almost like tuning out the noise in your brain - it can be distracting and it can also cause anxiety and stress.”
Paola Bassanese
“Secondly,” she continues. “I’m a big fan of walking, and in an ideal world you should go for a walk every day. It’s just like meditation, and it helps to clear your mind. Thirdly, I know that cooking is time consuming but I’ve noticed that when people complain that they’ve put on weight, I often find that they tend to rely on ready meals or takeout. I know that it’s boring but making your own meals from scratch and choosing the right ingredients is the key to a long and healthy life, because you’ve got control over what you’re eating.”
Besides, as Paola points out, “when you’re not relying on someone else to make your food for you, it makes you more aware of your body and how it works, because sometimes we’re a little bit too disconnected from our food. It’s almost robotic the way that we eat watching telly or in front of the computer. We need to remember that it’s a natural process and that our body needs the food.” I guess it’s time for me to learn some new recipes, then!
Paola Bassanese
Paola Bassanese is the lead therapist and director of Energya Ltd., as well as the author of Keep Calm and Pay Your Debts and Confessions from the Massage Couch. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter, or you can click here to visit her website!
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