ITM Thai Massage Level 2 was completed on July 13, 2014. It began on June 26, running close to three weeks across sixty hours of instruction. Thai massage itself was covered in “Completing ITM Thai Massage Level 1 — A First Bodywork Skill,” so it goes untouched here.
What follows concerns Thai Massage School TOMARIGI.
At TOMARIGI, instruction proceeds with two teachers to a single student. The two were Naru-sensei and Kotori-sensei, both with extensive teaching histories, and each with a distinct character. Naru-sensei stayed closer to the textbook; Kotori-sensei’s strength seemed to lie in how the foundational knowledge gets applied. It was a fine school, with a human warmth to it.
Manual technique in massage is learned largely through the body, and personal habits surface in the process. For the one teaching, the point seems to be how those habits are improved without lowering motivation. In my own case, years spent in a workplace that demanded quick results meant the work tended to come out at too fast a pace.
What Naru-sensei and Kotori-sensei did skillfully was to raise these points repeatedly while varying the wording: “This is already quite good. Add such-and-such, and the relaxation effect will register more strongly.” “The flow is coming along well.” Beginning from an affirmation of the person, pointing out strengths, and then indicating how the weaker areas might improve — guiding concretely while making the aim explicit.
There was also this. Asked how she thought about competition, given how widespread Thai massage had become in the area, Kotori-sensei said:
“Pushing others down, competing — that has never entered my thinking, and things have gone well that way. Offer something good, and the clients will follow.”
Inside a company, the thinking runs toward how much share has been secured, what the competitor’s weakness is — raising one’s own revenue while pushing rivals down and working their weak points. Life, too, tends to get thought about through the single value of winning and losing. Stepping one pace outside that world and hearing words like these makes it clear how much rests on oneself.
What became apparent after leaving employment is that life is possible under any circumstances. And that, depending on oneself, there is nothing that cannot be done.
By chance, this encounter with Thai massage brought an encounter with fine teachers. Meeting people, it seems to me, resembles travel.
Tim Brown, the founder of IDEO, in “Connect with people from different backgrounds, and travel,” gives the significance of travel as this: spending time among people whose fields and interests differ from one’s own, seeking out cultures of possibility, unsettling what one assumes to be known, and setting out in order to find something newer still.
And Jim Rogers, the investor who circled the world by motorcycle, writes in Adventure Capitalist that traveling the world taught him this much: a society that grows rich and then swaggers for years, decades, or centuries meets the end of its era. Another lesson: life continues even when all the wealth is gone. And more important still, a dream is to be acted on and made real, because the chance does not come around a second time.
Kotori-sensei and Naru-sensei are the first people met at the start of this journey. Many more encounters lie ahead, and the intention is to have a great many of them.
