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CONVERSATION LESSON

TRADITIONAL THAI MASSAGE

Dan: Okay, so this month’s topic is massage. Aaron, you studied massage for quite a while, right?

Aaron: Yeah, for a few years. I studied Traditional Thai Massage. I started back in 1997.

Dan: And you did that in Thailand, right?

Aaron: I did that in Thailand. I attended a massage school in Chiang Mai, in the North of Thailand. I also have studied in Bangkok, at one of the main training centers there. I’ve done maybe three different 10-day courses.

Dan: And your wife did that too, with you? All three of those courses?

Aaron: Yeah. Well actually, before we were married. We were a couple. We spent some time in Thailand, several months. Both she and I studied with the same teacher. Even to this day, we continue giving each other Thai massage or various forms of it. That’s been really beneficial in our lives, just having a little bit of knowledge of how to help someone relax, how to relax their muscles, how to release tension. That’s really helpful in our busy lives. It’s been good.

Dan: You’ve told me over the years about your experiences with massage a little bit. One of the things that I thought was the most interesting was how you viewed it as spiritual practice.

Aaron: Well, yeah. At the time in my life as a young man in my 20s, I was very interested in spirituality, so I spent a lot of time doing things like meditation and yoga and Tai Chi. Anything that would help center me on what’s happening inside my mind and body and to get in touch with things that I had not experienced as a younger man and as a child. That’s kind of what led me to study traditional Thai massage, particularly as opposed to other forms of massage because it is a massage that grows out of a tradition that emphasizes awareness. Being very, very aware of your breath, of what’s happening in your body and mind, and applying that in the massage.

Aaron: It’s very important in Thai massage to maintain that awareness of your breath, of your life energy, and of what’s happening in the receiver of your massage. In addition to that, to putting forth some kind of feelings of well-being, which we call loving kindness to the other person. And that has a benefit, not only on the receiver of the massage, but also on the giver. So that really interested me at that time in my life. For that reason, I practiced Thai massage, wow, pretty intensely for two or three years. Then when I came to Kyoto in the year 2000, actually that’s what I was doing.

Dan: So you were practicing massage in other places?

Aaron: Well, not as a professional, but just with family, and friends in Thailand. I spent some time in India where I practiced mostly with my partner at the time, other travelers that we met. I did a little in the States when I would go home to visit friends and family. For a time in my life, it was a main thing that I was doing.

Dan: So then when you returned to Japan, you started doing it as a job?

Aaron: Yeah, slightly in the sense that I did not have any work when I first came to Japan, and that was what I was doing to earn some money. I received payments from people that I gave massage to.

Dan: What did you charge?

Aaron: Originally that when I first started, I charged ¥999 for a massage.

Dan: ¥999, that’s nothing!

Aaron: Yeah, well for some people it’s something, but for most people it’s nothing. It’s very low.

Dan: So that’s, by today’s conversion and back then, it’s about $10. And this is a massage that lasts how long?

Aaron: Two hours.

Dan: Two hours. Okay, so that’s not even the minimum wage in Japan.

Aaron: No, but I told people if they feel like giving more, they’re welcome to.

Dan: And how did that work out? Were people generous?

Aaron: Yeah, some people were generous. Other people I think, it’s not that they weren’t generous, but they just didn’t have the money to afford what you would pay for an actual massage in Japan, which was probably at least ¥5000 for one hour, which is five times, actually ten times the amount.

Dan: And you were doing a two-hour massage for $10?

Aaron: Yeah, that’s true. So it didn’t work out.

Dan: So you were trying to support your family? Did you have children?

Aaron: No, I did not have children. My wife at the time also was working full time. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that this was not a sustainable venture. I would either have to charge much more or I would have to start doing something else. Guess what I decided to do to supplement my income?

Dan: You decided to open up a Burrito truck.

Aaron: No, that was my second choice. Actually, I decided to start teaching English and that began my English teaching journey.

Dan: So you were charging ¥990 or something…

Aaron: ¥999. Nine was a lucky number, so 999.

Dan: And you did that for how long?

Aaron: Not long, maybe 4 or 5 months or something like that. Then I continued doing massage for several years. I taught a workshop, I taught a course at a university here in Thai massage. Then gradually over time as I got busier and busier as a language teacher and I started a family, it just became something that I did with my wife and occasionally close friends and family members.

Dan: But during that period when you were doing it as your job, back to what you’re saying about really trying to center yourself and putting out positive energy to the person you are massaging and getting some of that back, that must have been a really interesting experience to be doing that on a daily basis.

Aaron: Yeah. And really was, because it’s an intimate interaction between two different people. You can really communicate a lot through touch. Even though you are supposed to be focused on what you’re doing, in terms of giving the massage and focused on the needs of the receiver, as the giver you’re also experiencing emotions and thoughts that come up that can be distracting. Sometimes you might feel some negativity towards the person you are giving massage to in the form of disgust or dislike. Or the opposite: you might feel attraction or some kind of positive feeling.

Aaron: The practice is really to recognize that those feelings are there, or whatever thoughts that are associated with those feelings are there, but not feed them. They always give the analogy of a wild bear coming to your house. If you start feeding the wild bear, then he’ll keep coming back every day. But if you stop feeding him, he’ll still come around, but he won’t come so frequently. And that’s the idea, is that you learn to recognize them and not feed them. Not give them any energy to exist and stay focused on the task at hand. In doing so, you’re able to overcome the distracting factor of these emotions and thoughts that arise in your mind and body.

What I found was that, after repeated practice of this, that I started carrying that practice over into my daily interaction with people. So that if I was talking to someone and I suddenly felt some kind of dislike, I would recognize it. Oh, I’m having a feeling of dislike for this person, and not let that affect me so much in terms of my interaction with them. I could maintain trying to be kind or trying to give some positive feelings of loving kindness or something like that. That helped me as a teacher as well, in the classroom or working with individual students, to not allow my emotions to color so much of what the task is at hand. I think there are real benefits to giving this type of massage, of course not only for the receiver but even the giver. The giver can benefit. The giver can use it as a practice to grow as a human being.

Dan: You know the way that you talk about it, it sounds like a real meditation. I hear a lot of these same themes with meditations, controlling your emotions, controlling your mind, not feeding your ego. Do you think this approaching massage as a meditation as opposed to meditation that you do alone, is more of a challenge or less of a challenge?

Aaron: I don’t know. I don’t have enough experience to say that. I know just from what I’ve done myself in terms of formal sitting meditation and this kind of more active meditation, that the sitting part is slightly easier in the sense that there’s not as much going on and there’s a lot less that’s happening to distract you. But it depends, maybe for some people it’s the opposite. Maybe their minds are really wild and crazy but when they start focusing on something that involves movement and breath, maybe those thoughts disappear for those people. I don’t really know.

Dan: What about your patience to people getting massages from you? What kind of experiences did they have?

Aaron: Well, I think that they had a… I saw so many different things take place in the massages.

For most people, it was a nice, relaxing experience. Some people would react by falling asleep, in a very deep sleep. It was really hard to get them awake again. Other peopleDan: I’ve done that. I’ve fallen asleep.

Aaron: Sometimes with the release of tension, especially psychic tension, you can really go into a deep sleep. Occasionally, I would have people get emotional, either crying or get really sad, that they would tell me about later. I’m not really talking to them that much during the massage. Then occasionally someone might react with a bit of anger, for no reason. Not that I did anything wrong. I guess something got released in that moment.

Other times, I’d have people get really happy, experience a really strong sense of joy after the massage. But other times people would leave kind of feeling low and depressed, and I don’t know why. I’ve read and talked with other masseurs, and some people believe that that’s a good thing.

That can be a good thing. It’s actually, you’re getting rid, you’re allowing the suppressed feeling of sadness or depression to come out. So that’s its way of getting rid of itself. I don’t really know if that’s true or not.

Dan: I think that’s why exercise can have such a profound effect on our mental state. It’s just because we can carry so much emotional baggage in our physical bodies and when we release that, it comes bubbling out. I can see how somebody might get angry or elated from being touched.

Aaron: Yeah, touch is really powerful. It’s a very powerful thing.

Dan: Yeah, I’ve been reading these studies about babies that aren’t touched that are raised in orphanages. They found that some of them, well a lot of them, that are adopted and they’ve had maybe the first few years with very, very little touch. They have behavioral problems and emotional problems that never really get worked out.

Aaron: Interesting.

Dan: Some of them that they found actually die because of the… Apparently touch has a really very clear effect on our hormones. One thing is human growth hormone, and the other thing is stress hormones, cortisol. Of course without human growth hormone, we can’t digest food naturally, we can’t get all the nutrients and it stuns physical growth. Cortisol, the stress hormones, can dampen the effect of our immune system so that we’re not able to fight off diseases and health problems.

Aaron: Wow. It’s really interesting because we often think of, especially babies, as being constantly held and constantly hugged, and constantly attached to the mother and the father and other family members, but I wonder to what extent lack of touch in adults have. Especially nowadays, this day in age, especially in big cities, people leading these very busy lives. They go to work and they stay in the cubicle or in the office and they work all day. And what do they do after work? They go home to yet another small apartment or cubicle and they watch TV. Day after day, week after week, month after month, there’s no human touch for some people of course, and I wonder.

Dan: I think it’s really culturally dependent, too. I’ve read about studies where waitresses get higher tips when they lightly touch the customer on the arm, or salespeople who seem to do better selling cars or whatever when they lightly touch the customer. Even doctors when they touch the patients, they’ve done surveys with the patients and they rate their experience much higher. They feel much more care or trust with the doctor.

Dan: But I’m sure in some cultures where that’s not the norm, a light touch on the arm could create the opposite effect. Back to what we are saying about babies, what we think about babies being touched all the time and being held and cuddled and given all this love, but that wasn’t always true, at least in the US in the early part of the 20th century. There was a big movement that you shouldn’t touch your baby too much. You shouldn’t cuddle your baby.

Aaron: Oh really? I didn’t know about that. Really?

Dan: I remember when my daughter was born, my wife was reading up on ideas from the 1950s in the US saying, “You better touch our baby!” And I’m saying, that’s really old, that doesn’t apply anymore.

Aaron: Oh my.

Dan: One interesting thing I was reading about recently was touch in sports and how athletes are famous for patting each other and high-fiving, fist bumps.

Aaron: I just watched the volleyball game the other day and volleyball players are really, they have a high frequency of touch. After every single point, whether they win the point or lose the point, every single team member touches every single other team member on court. There’s five other people on court, you do five touches, every time, every time. It’s amazing how often they touch.

Dan: I was reading about one of the NBA stars and he said, after taking a shot within 600 milliseconds, almost less than a second, almost half a second, he has, on average, touches four players. Four teammates in half a second.

Aaron: Oh, you mean after a shot is made?

Dan: Yeah, he makes a shot and then before a second it finishes, he’s touched four members. High fives or whatever.

Aaron: I bet a lot of that touching is totally unconscious. People, they’re not saying, “Okay, I have to touch this person.” It’s just a natural thing. You’re playing as a team. You need to be connected. You need to be communicating on a non-verbal level.

Dan: So there’s this study that was tracking all these high fives and chest bumps. They found that the two teams that at that time, I think this study was done in 2012, it was the LA Lakers or maybe the Celtics who were at the top of the league at that time, that they had the most touches on average between players, both as teams and in individual star players.

Aaron: Wow. That’s pretty interesting correlation.

Dan: I think it probably connects to those same kind of hormones that we’re talking before. Also, touch stimulates oxytocin.

Aaron: Right, the cuddle hormone.

Dan: Yeah, the cuddle hormone or also known as the trust hormone. With the team, teamwork is so dependent on your feeling of trust and your connection with the other players.

Aaron: Interesting.

Dan: That’s what they think is behind the connection between hormones and sports, and touching. I imagine it’s the same with what they’re finding between doctors and patients, salespeople and customers, and waitresses and diners.

Aaron: It begs the question, what can we do, or what can you do as an individual in your livelihood or in your daily life to maybe consciously start thinking about or being aware of the kind of touching that goes on in your life? To what extent are you being touched by others, or to what extent are you touching people? And are there any situations that might arise where a touch might be the right thing to do that you wouldn’t otherwise have done? I think it might be interesting to start being more aware, like keeping a ‘touch journal’. At the end of the day, I’d be counting how many touches have happened and what the nature of the touch was and what it meant. I think that’d be really interesting.

Dan: Or just trying to push the envelope, just trying to push our comfort zones. Probably the best way that would work on any culture is with your family. Just try to increase the amount of touch, the amount of hugs that you’re giving your family members.

Aaron: Or when you meet your friends, rather than just saying, “Hey, how are you doing? What’s going on?” give them a hug or give them a good handshake or something.

Dan: But if that’s not part of the culture—

Aaron: No, of course it’s culturally dependent. Of course, yeah.

Dan: Even within you, there’s subcultures within cultures. I have certain friends that I hug and then other friends that I stay in that mode, when I see them and I give them a hug and I can see it makes them uncomfortable. I’m wondering maybe, that’s just raising–

Aaron: Obviously it’s very contextual. Even the same person, touching them in one context is totally okay and good, and in a completely different context could be totally inappropriate. So yeah, obviously that’s something. But I think, to end, going back to massage, just learning some very basic massage techniques, very basic. You could probably even learn some stuff in YouTube. But the best is to find a teacher, take a community course at the community college or something. If everybody did that, if all husbands and wives, if all brothers and sisters, if all friends knew just some real basic techniques and applied them in their daily lives, think at how or think of what kind of effect that might have on our well-being.

Dan: I think it can really bring families together. If that brings the love and connection within your family together, for sure that will ripple out into all your interactions.

Aaron: Yeah, totally. So when are you going to give me a massage, Dan?

Dan: Well, you’re the pro. Anytime you want to rekindle your spiritual practice, I’m here for you.

Aaron: Okay, I’ll keep you in mind.

Dan: Alright.