Parker smiled when I lowered him from a modified bridge pose stretch in Thai massage. He smiled when he realized the top of his head was pushed right up against my genitals. I went on with my work, moving him into a seated position in which I fitted my body behind his and, reaching around his chest and over his folded arms, pulled him back onto my body in another stretch. Time and time again in the massage our bodies were in strange and intimate connection. At the end of the massage, which is done fully clothed and on a mat on the floor, Parker said, “I must really trust you.” I asked if that was because of the intimacy of the massage or the stretches that occasionally feel like they are going to disconnect some limb from the rest of your body. He said, “Both, I guess.” Also, Parker told me, he let me rub and work his abdomen, a part of his body he has rarely allowed anyone to touch.
I had given Parker conventional, western massage several times prior to our switch to the Thai style. During what turned out to be our last Swedish massage, he asked if energy enters the body through the feet. I told him about Thai massage in which such a belief is expressed through a technique that opens channels on the soles of the feet and asked him if he would like to try it. I was looking for more people to receive this kind of work. After experiencing it once, Parker decided he never wanted to go back to the Swedish-based work with which he was familiar.
Parker’s comment about trust came after we had been doing Thai massage on a monthly basis for nearly a year. It is intimate. I commented on this to my teacher when I was studying her advanced course. To me, Thai massage felt much more intimate than Swedish, in which clients remove their clothes and the therapist rubs oil all over their bodies. The practitioner’s hands, and occasionally an arm or elbow, touch the client. But in Thai massage, Yoga-based poses bring the client’s body into contact with the therapist’s body in often unfamiliar, intimate relationship. The poses are held from five seconds to several minutes while the client relaxes into them to receive the greatest benefit from the stretch. Often the therapist adds compressions or traction to the Yoga poses to provide more stretch and stimulate the movement of energy in the area.
It seems to me that intimacy in massage is based not only on its physicality and the proximity of the partners, but even more, on the fact that two people are working together with great intensity to stretch the body, to increase circulation and energy, and to bring muscular and psychic relief. This is basic to all massage and contrasts vividly with the ways in which good usually is imparted in our society. Typically, we receive discipline, badgering, power plays, bitter medicine, stress, sermons, assignments, observation, criticism, and finally the message, “You’re on your own, and it’s a game of the survival of the fittest.” By contrast, massage makes a community of two persons intent on change with necessary, loving, and continuing support. Thai massage goes further by fostering a community of paired meditation that benefits the practitioner as well as the client. Trust and compassion are at its root.
The meditation goes far beyond saying a prayer or mantra as is the common practice when beginning Thai massage. It involves more than the shared greeting of the divine in the bodies of receiver and practitioner at the end of the work. It is characterized by a growing awareness of the increase and movement of energy as the therapist stimulates energy channels over the surface of the client’s body and by a commitment to healing that is expected to result from the free flow of life energy. The meditation focuses on the connection of the whole body to the abdomen. It concentrates on the ability of joints to move, muscles to empower, and breath to cleanse.
Parker trusts me. He trusts me not to move my work from an act of massage into an act of sex. He trusts me not to take advantage of his feelings. He also must trust himself to feel whatever he is experiencing. He has to let me touch him in a way that may seem implicitly, though not explicitly, sexual. He has to trust in order to experience his and another person’s bodies working together in loving, therapeutic, and meditative interactions characterized, not by sex, but rather, by mutual compassion. Surely that’s enough to make anyone smile.
I feel like I ought to pray something to the smiling Buddha or to his physician Father Doctor Shivago. I’ll settle to say,
“Divine love, teach us compassion and the trust that can arise from it as together we meditate through massage.
Amen.”
Mantra, mixed media by Phillip Hoyle
In learning Traditional Thai Massage I was introduced to Father, Doctor Shivago, the Budda's physician. I was taught to chant a rather long mantra as part of the preparation for this meditative work. Body work in Traditional Thai medicine comes from the part of the practice that emphasizes meditation and magic. I seemed a strange candidate for such work. My teacher taught us Yoga that we needed to practice daily in order to understand the poses be able to sustain them in the work. She also encouraged us that if we don't feel the energy, we trust the practice. So I practiced Thai massage until all my clients who wanted it left town. Also I stopped at one point because my old knees began to ache too much! Guess then I needed a healer to work on me. The memory of the ancient healer helps prepare the practitioner for the work which is always a holy interaction.
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