The Naga Center did not become a state approved private career school* with a pre-licensure program because I sat down and my heart told me it was time. No, The Naga Center became state licensed under high pressure, me kicking and screaming (inside my head), in response to a deep sense of obligation and responsibility. This is the story of how this came about, and what is happening now to nourish this little school with love and tenderness.
I left high school after my junior year and began a never ending if unconventional education. I am an alum of the School of Library, having acquired multiple non-existent degrees earned in quiet hushed reading. My post-library education involved some hippie hot spring massage workshops that opened my heart-mind and eventually led to official massage school followed by several thousand hours studying traditional bodywork and health sciences with textbooks and teachers who do not issue transcripts, many of whom were located in the jungles of northern Thailand; the teachers, not the textbooks.
Thailand jungle
When I endeavored to start teaching Thai massage workshops I returned to my original alma matter and checked out a stack of books on how to start and run a business. These books, and couple of free mentorship sessions at my local SCORE chapter led to writing my first business plan. The Naga Center was to start out offering continuing education classes to massage therapists since in Oregon really anyone can do that, and in the 3 to 5 year projection section I planned on turning The Naga Center into a state licensed pre-licensure school in which I would provide a place for aspiring massage therapists to complete their massage school training with a focus on Thai massage instead of the standard Swedish. At the time, nearly 25 years ago, I had visions of large capacity classes full of students.
Those first three to five years were spent building a student community with my workshops while raising a child and when and when I revisited the idea of growing The Naga Center into a “real” massage school I found that to do so would require heaps of money and time, neither of which were things I had in anything resembling abundance. The licensure plan was pushed out to the next 3 to 5 year junction. Time went by, and me and The Naga Center went through an evolution of changes.
The Naga Center, which began in the same basement of the old Common Ground Wellness Center location that East West College of the Healing Arts (my state’s most recognized massage school) started in, moved to a retail street location, then moved again into a big old beautiful building that could accommodate renting out rooms to Thai massage therapists, becoming a clinic of sorts. My continuing education classes in Thai healing arts were known to Thai massage therapists across the country, and even in distant countries. I didn’t have to market my classes other than putting them on my website. The Naga Center was growing and changing, I thought, toward becoming that pre-licensure school. Even as my trainings became more known in the Thai massage world, I was growing and changing too, in a quiet way that was moving in a different direction.
The old Naga Center building (the big old building one)
I moved to Thailand when my husband got a job teaching at an international school in Chiang Rai, returning to the states from time to time to teach workshops at The Naga Center, which I kept alive in Oregon even while living in Thailand. In Thailand, students would come to me one or two at a time. They would live in my house and engage in a different sort of study. An unstructured place of meeting them where they were at. We would go on spontaneous adventures around Chiang Rai, or lazily talk about Thai element theory in the orchid garden in my yard. We shopped at the street market down the way and cooked meals on our one burner propane stovetop outside.
The lovely Mae Kok river down the street from our home in Thailand
When me and my family moved back to the states I found myself not relating to The Naga Center that I had created here. I no longer felt like growing my school into something ever bigger. I had lost any sense of competitiveness with other schools and teachers. I missed the intimacy of having a student or two in my living room drinking Thai fruit shakes. I did not renew my lease in the big old beautiful building; instead I built a yurt in my backyard and started teaching my classes there, limiting class size to about eight students. In this way I brought back the energy of my Thailand teaching experience. Small classes on my home property. Baking muffins for my students. We gather in serious study of Thai medicine, but the small class size leaves room for spontaneity. My classes have ended early because we all spur-of-the-moment decided it was important to join a protest march in Portland, or because we all got last minute tickets to see Krishna Das. More than once we have piled into my kitchen so that I could teach everyone to make Thai curry, or into the herb room to make herbal medicine that wasn’t on the syllabus, because in that moment, that’s what our hearts wanted.
fire cupping class in the yurt
Students gather around the fire pit
I put the original business plan to rest, contented with what I had created. I had downsized into something that fit perfectly.
Then a pandemic swept through the world, killing over 6 million souls
I began teaching online, something I never thought I would do. Things were shifting and changing rapidly.
I watched people say stuff like “I’m not worried because I have a strong immune system” and I realized that most alternative healing arts practitioners, and many modern medicine practitioners, have a very shaky understanding of what our immune systems are and how they work. I realized this included me. So I returned to the school of books and educated myself. The more I learned about our immune system, the more I realized that it is our entire body, that I was studying body systems on a level that went beyond anything I’d learned in massage school. I was loving my deep dive into modern medical anatomy and physiology and I wanted to shout about our incredible, fragile, complicated, amazing bodies to the world.
In the midst of all of this I got a call from the head of the massage program at a local community college. She wanted to umbrella my classes under the college such that unlicensed students studying with me could use their hours toward getting their massage license. Could we really do this? Yes, she assured me, yes.
And so I started teaching a group of students who were working toward becoming licensed massage therapists. It was exciting to teach the health sciences, to share my adoration of our body systems alongside traditional Thai medical theory. And I marveled at how it was only after letting go of the plan to become a licensure school that it just kind of fell into my lap organically. Even the patchwork of Zoom classes created by COVID was organically creating a program that was more accessible to far away students.
Teaching kinesiology
Three months in, I drew the tower card from my beautiful wild mushroom tarot deck, representing destruction, chaos, upheaval, the destruction of the tower. The next day the Oregon Higher Education Commission Committee (the “HECC”), the governing agency that licenses private career schools, called me up and let me know that no, we couldn’t really do this. I had to immediately stop teaching my pre-licensure students. The only reason I wasn’t being fined was because the community college made clear that I had not knowingly broken any rules, that they had assured me it was all above board. And yet, I had 9 students who had paid for a program and were 3 months invested in it who I had to break bad news to, as well as having to pay back.
The next day they gathered for their anatomy class on Zoom and instead I told them about the HECC call. I told them that we couldn’t have classes anymore, and that all the studying they had done with me so far could not be transcripted. I told them that if they wanted to wait, I would stop everything and work tirelessly to get my school licensed so that we could return to our studies, but that if they wanted to go elsewhere and be refunded I would do that. I was shaking as I told them I would go for a walk while they talked about this. I assumed they would be angry and sad and might want to vent with one another about me.
When I returned every single one of them said they would wait. They wanted to keep studying with me even if it meant a year pause and starting over. My heart did a bunch of incredulous thunks. I had been handed in that moment so much grace, tangible appreciation, so much love, and also, a tremendous responsibility. I was now obligated to turn The Naga Center into a state licensed school. I still didn’t have the money to do this, and it wasn’t even what I really wanted at that point in my life, but I felt the incumbency of my commitment to deliver to these students what I had promised them as an imperative.
I stopped all teaching. I did nothing but work on my application to the HECC. The amount of work this took is hard to put into words. I had to get my property re-zoned, I had to write a 300 page business plan that explained how every hour of a 629 hour program would be spent in five different ways and dug into my business financial records with a fine toothed comb. It was an arduous process and I went deep into debt. The state is not a cheap date. Along the way I learned of another small school (not massage) that had just gotten licensed by the HECC after a team of 8 people spent two years on the application. I had no idea how long it would take, I just dug in and worked. There were times when I was sure I would quit, that I did not want to be doing this, but then I would think of those students waiting for me, and I would continue. In the long run I did it by myself in 9 months.
My HECC application; it was sent with chocolate bars
At the end of those 9 months my 9 students were reduced to 3. The others all had life events come along that changed their plans. They each expressed that it wasn’t upset with the process with me, time had just led them in different directions. So I had done all of that for 3 people. We dove in and I spent the next year taking those 3 through their pre-licensure training. My plan was that in the spring, as we approached their graduation, I would start marketing my new little massage school, but come spring my mother had a heart attack, immediately followed by a stroke, immediately followed by emergency gall bladder removal and having to move in with us. My 3 lovely students graduated and I found myself with two months to try to market my school before the fall cohort was scheduled to start.
I started scrambling. I had not had to market my school for the last 15 years. What did marketing even look like now? Massage therapists who take continuing education classes in Thai massage are not so hard to find, but how do you find someone who is just thinking about becoming a massage therapist?
Also, my continuing education classes were suddenly not filling. Between COVID and taking two years off to get my school licensed and my 3 students trained, I had lost touch with the western Thai massage community. Everything I had been building for the last 25 years felt fragile, barely existent (hello tower card), and I felt like I had been working without stop or breath on something I wasn’t even sure if I wanted, ever since that call from the HECC.
But because of that call, I now held this precious thing full of incredible potential. I have a state licensed school with a curriculum focused on Thai healing arts through which aspiring massage therapists who know they are passionate about Thai massage can become licensed without having to go to a school that is focused on Swedish massage.
I just hadn’t fully chosen this precious thing. And for it to shine, it needs to be chosen with love and hope, not chosen from a sense of being backed into a corner. This I know. I talked with a beautiful wise business coach. I thought about pausing my program efforts so that I could sit down and clearly make that choice, knowing the choice would be yes, but taking the time to make space for that yes. I drew the Star card in my mushroom tarot deck, representing hope, inspiration, creativity, calm, contentment, renewal, serenity, spirituality, healing, and positivity.
And so in the 11th hour, I canceled my fall cohort that had only so far gotten a few enrollments. I also canceled my long in-depth Thai massage specialist program that I’ve been teaching for the last ten years. I decided to take a year to reconnect with my roots and community. I scheduled (and am still scheduling) a year’s worth of stand alone continuing education Thai healing arts classes here in my yurt, in my herb room, and in spaces hosted by Thai massage friends around the country. I am pausing the frantic. I am breathing and remembering what I love about teaching. I am striving to reconnect. And I am taking this year to look at the pre-licensure program that I created in a state of stress, holding it now in calm moments in which I can breathe in its preciousness and dream of how I can recommit to it from a place of joyful choosing. I’m taking some time to infuse it with any changes that my learning curve first encounters with it have taught me. I’m taking time to place it on my altar and let it meld with what I had come to love about teaching from my home; mentorship style classes, one room schoolhouse, muffins and breaks because the sun outside is calling.
I hope to see you in a workshop this year. And if you are dreaming of becoming a licensed massage therapist, I hope to see you next fall. The pre-licensure program will be open for registration in the spring. It will be re-birthed from a place of calm and consideration of the preciousness.
Come lay in the hammock in my back yard.