About once a week someone asks me where they should study during their trip to Thailand, where the “authentic training” is. Here is what I tell them.
Travel - where to go or not go
• First, explore. Go someplace other than Chiang Mai. All of the healing arts people go to Chiang Mai. It’s like there isn’t any other town in Thailand. Chiang Mai is so full of westerners that I have had the experience in recent years of walking down a street there and not seeing any Thai people. It’s a great place to go if you want raw food, yoga, everything in English, and everything marketed just for you. But you can probably get all of that without flying to the other side of the world. I have loved Chiang Mai deeply in the past. And there are still things I love about it, but the changes that have occurred there have turned it into a crowded, intensely polluted, westernized city. Especially the old city section and the surrounding area; which is likely where you will end up staying if you are new to Thailand. I can remember when Thai people had homes in the old city. When there were businesses there that existed just for the benefit of locals. Now walk around the old city and you will not see homes with families living in them, you will only see guesthouses for tourists, shops for tourists, and restaurants for tourists. The community has been pushed out to make room for all of the things that westerners like to buy. If you want to experience Thailand, spend some time someplace other than Chiang Mai.
• Avoid Phuket and Pai as well. Pai was once my favorite town in all of Thailand, but it’s been utterly taken over by westerners (it went from being a sleepy tiny village that you had to take a bus to, that had a handful of guesthouses, to having over 300 guesthouses and an airstrip). And Phuket has been a hard core tourist island for as long as I have known it.
• Get a guide book. An actual book like The Lonely Planet or some such. Rather than reading other people’s reviews, just read about a place, old school style. Find some little town that looks interesting and go there. While you are there talk to other travelers. Hear about places they have liked. Read more in your guide book. Get on a train or a bus and go to another little place you heard or read about. See the country. See Thailand from a slow moving vehicle. Or don’t; it’s also okay to just hunker down in some little town and get to know it well rather than going from place to place. But go somewhere outside of the primary tourist centers. There is tourism everywhere in Thailand, but if you get out of the tourist meccas like Chiang Mai, you get to see Thai culture that isn’t so diluted, and this goes for the bodywork too.
You’ll find yourself in some places you love, and some places you don’t love. No guarantees. This is travel. It’s real and it’s interesting and it’s risky. When you find a place you really love, keep quiet about it. Remember what I said about Pai? It was ruined by word of mouth. Be a little bit protective of things that you hold dear in Thailand. When things are wonderful, excellent. When things are hard, just remember that when traveling, sometimes the worst experiences make for the best stories later.
Learning Thai Massage
• If you have never studied Thai massage before take some classes in your home country. There is almost nothing easily available, in terms of classes, to westerners in Thailand that you can’t get in the U.S. or Canada or Europe or Argentina. So many people go to Chiang Mai, they all study with the same teachers at the same tourist massage schools (and the tourist schools mostly all copy one another), and then a great number of them return to their western country and start teaching what they learned. I promise you, you can learn all that stuff that’s available in Chiang Mai, in the U.S. Or Greece. Or London. Or Argentina. Or Australia. Or you can go and learn it in Chiang Mai (or an island, or Pai, or, to a limited extent, Bangkok). That can be super fun and it’s cheaper in Thailand, but only do this if you have enough time to also do what I’m going to say next. If you have limited time in Thailand, then get your basic Thai massage training in your home country so that you can do something in Thailand that you can’t do at home.
• Learn by receiving. Once you have the basics of Thai massage down there is another level of learning that happens through experiencing the work on our own bodies. Most of us either cannot afford to get a ton of massages, or we don’t live someplace where there are many other Thai massage therapists. And if we do happen to live someplace with a lot of other Thai massage therapists, it’s probably because someone is teaching Thai massage in your town and you all learned from the same place, so there isn’t much variance. In Thailand you can get a three hour massage for about $10-$15. And there are a LOT of people practicing Thai massage, so you can experience a lot of different styles and skill levels. For this reason when people ask me where they should study in Thailand I say go travel around the country. See where this art comes from. Get to know the culture. Enjoy the country. And everywhere you go, get massages. We learn so much from receiving. In fact I would say that we cannot really understand the work if we do not experience it in our bodies. A lot. More than we get in an occasional workshop where we are being practiced on by other beginners.
• Everywhere you go, make friends with your guesthouse owner, tuk tuk driver, tour guide, restaurant owner, all of the people you encounter who know their area. Ask them where you can find the best massage.
• Know that you will get some terrible massages. You will get lots of mediocre massages. And you will get some fantastic massages. Learn from every single one of them; the terrible, the mediocre, and the fantastic.
• When a therapist employs a technique that you particularly like you can ask them to do it again, and watch what they do (kŏr èek kráng/ขออีกครั้ง/please do that again) . Or, if they are full of new moves and skill you could ask the therapist if they would teach you. Rather than go to schools created for westerners, why not travel around the country getting massages and getting the good therapists to spend an hour or a day or 20 days teaching you?
Here are some phrases to help you to get the massage you want (finish all sentences with kha if you identify as female, and khrap if you identify as male)
• kŏr bao bao noi/ขอเบาๆน้อย/could you please be very gentle
• por-dee/พอดี/perfect, just right
• kŏr nak noi/ขอหนักน้อย/could you please work stronger/harder
• kŏr nak nak noi/ขอหนักๆน้อย/could you please be very very strong/hard
• bpùat têe nêe/ปวดที่นี่/I have pain here (you can point)
• jèp/เจ็บ/pain (to inform massage therapist that what they are doing is hurting too much)
When Looking for a Teacher, Some Random Things to Consider
• In really touristy areas the locals know what the healing arts tourists want and they will give it to you. This is especially true of Chiang Mai. They will tell you that their mother/grandmother was the village midwife and that their father/grandfather was the village medicine man. This may or may not be true. But ask yourself this “if I tell you my father is a lawyer, does that make me someone you want representing you in court?”. Just because their grandmother was a midwife doesn’t mean they are. Be discerning and try to look past the romanticized story that they are offering you that will be fun to tell your friends. Try to seek out real learning, not a story. Unless you are really there for the stories, in which case, go for it.
• Does the teacher have an actual healing arts practice? Are locals coming to them for healing? Or is all of their time spent teaching westerners?
• Trust your instincts. A lot of the time when people are in such a completely foreign place they stop trusting themselves. If some part of you is thinking “this isn’t right”, it probably isn’t right.
• Just because a Thai person said it/did it, doesn’t mean it’s traditional, ethical, or culturally correct. Not every Thai person studies Thai healing arts. Not every Thai person teaching westerners Thai massage has really studied Thai healing arts.
• When seeking a teacher, dress appropriately. Knees and shoulders covered, clean, modest. It’s a different culture, and even though you will see Thais who dress in carefree modern ways, many of the teachers of Thai healing arts are from an older generation and will take you more seriously if you present yourself appropriately.
• Tok Sen traditionally is a technique used spot specifically to treat certain conditions. It’s meant to be taught with initiations and a lot more information than most people are getting when learning it in tourist schools. It is a technique, it is not a massage modality. Please be careful as tok sen can break bones if used incorrectly. It’s a fantastic technique when used skillfully, but it’s not a frivolous tool. If you are seeking traditional teaching, look for a teacher who does an initiation ceremony before teaching you, and who teaches it as a treatment technique, not as a whole body massage kind of thing.
• Yam kang, the stepping on the hot metal and then putting your feet on people, comes from spirit medicine, which requires many years of training with, and initiations from, a Thai spirit doctor. It’s meant for driving bad things out of people, it is not a massage modality. In recent years Thais have started to teach it to westerners as a massage modality, without any of the traditional training that is supposed to go with it. Because money. And so a specific healing art form is being diluted, mutated, and potentially lost. This one I would recommend simply staying away from unless you speak Thai and can work with a real Thai spirit doctor.
• If you ask someone to teach you and they say no, you can ask them again (politely, gently). Sometimes you have to ask a few times to show that you are serious. But if you ask three times and they say no, let it go.
• If it’s all about acro-yoga style stretches, it’s probably not Thai bodywork as Thai bodywork has historically been practiced. It’s probably heavily influenced by western culture. If that’s what you want, that’s fine - but people ask me a lot how they can find “authentic” training, so ….
• If it’s yoga and western anatomy terms mixed with Ayurveda, it’s probably not traditional Thai.
• If it’s Chinese meridians and reflexology, it’s probably not traditional Thai.
• If it’s osteo, dynamic, chi nei tsang, acro, circus, hanging from scarves, “energy work”, done by half naked people, using fancy clearly modern tools, using just the feet, using crystals and essential oils, etc. etc. etc., it’s probably not traditional Thai.
Again, to all of the above, if that is what you want, that’s okay, I’m not saying it’s bad or ineffective. I’m just being clear about what is and what is not the historical practices of Thailand, because again, what people ask me is “where can I learn the real traditions”. And I like crediting sources correctly whenever possible. And it does seem to be my role in the western Thai massage world to clarify what is and what is not traditionally, historically, Thai. Okay, the half naked would be historical, but you’d have to go back a long ways, and I promise you, it’s not appropriate in Thailand now.
I wish you all genuine, inspiring, wonderful learning experiences. May you receive skillful bodywork, may you find excellent teachers, may you learn things that help you to alleviate suffering in this world, may you prosper and thrive.
gratitude to Joshua Mackintosh for checking and correcting my Thai