I do not teach Thai massage and I do not offer sessions. What I can give you is an honest account of what learning it in Thailand involves, because that is how I learned it, and where I would send somebody who wants to start.
Most Thai massage taught outside Thailand is taught as a sequence, and the sequence is the part of this that matters least.
Thai massage is neither licensed nor regulated in Arizona, so anybody may advertise it, and a great deal of what gets taught here is a set of moves in a set order. There is a plain reason for that. A sequence can be written down, learned over a weekend and handed on, and the person handing it on does not need to have spent years in Thailand to do it.
A sequence is a floor rather than a practice. It shows you roughly where the sen run and it gets your hands moving, and then it stops. What it cannot tell you is what the person lying in front of you needs today, which changes from body to body and from hour to hour. That judgement is the work. Everything else is furniture.
The way I was taught, you start with your own body. Self massage first, the basics of the sen, meditation and chanting, and a long stretch of undoing whatever you have already done to yourself, before you go anywhere near anybody else. A practitioner who is unwell passes that on through their hands. A practitioner who is clear can do work that looks like more than it is.
Only after that does any of it turn outward, and by then a sequence is beside the point. What you are learning is to find where energy has stopped moving and to move it, and the session takes whatever shape that asks for.
Two different things go under that name and it helps to separate them. There are the schools, which teach a foundation in a fixed number of hours and hand you an exam at the end of it. And there is studying with a teacher, which has no hours attached to it at all.
I started at the Old Medicine Hospital in Chiang Mai, on a 90 hour course that gave me a real foundation in the Northern style. Back lying, side lying, front lying and seated, the sen worked with steady unhurried hands, and two full two hour massages given under an instructor’s eye before they would let me out of the room. It was thorough and I would do it again.
It is also where the sequence question surfaced, because the final exam is a sequence several hours long and you are graded on hitting its points correctly. I hit them. I walked out still not feeling ready to give a Thai massage, and most of the people I trained with there never went on to practise.
Then I found myself at Ajahn Pichest Boonthumme’s house in Hang Dong, south of Chiang Mai, and that was another thing entirely. The days there were dharma talks, long stretches of chanting, and hours of practice on each other. He taught with the body as the teacher, your own first and everybody else’s after that, and he held that a student has to heal themselves before they are any use to anyone. His reading of a body went past anything I have seen from a doctor.
It was unconventional and it was hard. He took people apart, and a lot of students did not last long there. The commute out to his house carried excitement and dread in the same measure, because you never knew whether today was the day he worked on you or the day you watched him bring somebody else to tears.
What you are given in exchange is the thing no course sells, which is the ability to work with no plan at all.
Most of the day at a place like that is spent working on the person next to you and being worked on in return, which is how the two halves of this get learned at once. You feel a technique from the inside before you are any good at giving it, and the corrections come while your hands are still on somebody rather than afterwards.
Western money has produced a lot of Thai massage schools in Chiang Mai. Some of them are serious and some of them exist to separate visitors from their cash, and the check that filters most of it is licensing: a school should be licensed by the Thai Ministry of Public Health. The Old Medicine Hospital, the Sunshine School and Wat Pho are. Others are too, and it is a fair question to ask before you pay anybody.
Pichest’s house was not licensed and that was deliberate. He had no interest in paper. What he cared about was whether a student understood what they were doing, and whether they practised, and no piece of paper has ever made anybody a healer.
The fees in Thailand are modest. The real price is time and a willingness to be wrong in front of other people. Several trips, months at a stretch, no schedule to hide inside, and long enough in one room that the teacher stops being polite. Everything I know about this that is worth anything came out of that house, and none of it could have been posted to me.
People write to me asking where to start. I answer that question, and the answer is usually a place in Thailand, or a teacher who is not me. Write to me about training
I do not run trainings, and I have no schedule, no program and nothing to enrol in. Sound is the work now, and it lives on the rest of this site.
How I got to Chiang Mai, what the practice actually is, and where it sits in the rest of the history.
A northern practice worked with a wooden mallet, and the one part of this that is not done with hands.
Why my teacher rebuilt the practice so that it benefits the person giving it as much as the person receiving it.
The other half of the history, and where it meets this one: ayahuasca, huachuma, and the work I still do in Peru.
