Bodywork students who start learning Reusi Dat Ton — aka Thai Yoga Self-Massage and Self-Stretching — often don’t realize that the type of Reusi Dat Ton they are about to master depends very much on the background, training, and lineage of the instructor.
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That is, students will typically learn a distinct style, one that’s usually closely related to the goal the Thai Yoga instructor thinks or feels that Reusi Dat Ton has.
Prospective students will often first get to know about Reusi Dat Ton through a Thai Massage course. As it is, quite some Thai Massage trainers start each day of a course cycle with a session of Reusi Dat Ton (which usually takes about twenty to thirty minutes), simply in order to stretch and warm-up the body and/or to get into the right mood for studying Thai Massage.
In these type of warm-up sets, the student will commonly learn one of two general Reusi Dat Ton sequences, either the 18 Wat Pho Exercises or the 15 ITTM Exercises. These exercises are basic, simplified, generalized, so-called “safe” sets, specifically designed by the Thai government (Thai Ministry of Health) and the Wat Pho Medical Massage School to be suitable for anyone, young or old.
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Now, if a student would really set their mind to studying Reusi Dat Ton, they would opt for a specialized Reusi Dat Ton course or training, in which they would learn many more exercises — sometimes up to 200 exercises — than the 18 or 15 from the Wat Pho or ITTM Ruesi Dat Ton sets. Nevertheless, the style, way of performing Reusi Datton, and the techniques they’d learn in a specialized course are still quite different depending on the teacher/instructor.
The main reason to that is that the teachers themselves commonly have learned through a certain Reusi Dat Ton lineage. For instance, you have lineages (and hence teachers) that focus on the meditative and spiritual aspects, or by contrast on techniques closely aligned to and as a preparation for Thai Dance, or rather on self-massage and relaxation, or breathwork, or alleviating/curing a broad range of common ailments, on general fitness and cardiovascular health, or even as a supporting technique for flexibility and endurance in the Thai martial arts.
But there’s more to learning Reusi Datton than just the differences in style and applications. Training courses are often of short duration: one, two days up to a week to a maximum of two weeks about, and as a rule not more than two to fours per study day.
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Depending on the duration of a training cycle, students will learn a number of techniques. That is, how to perform them and what they serve for according to the instructor’s ideas. It means that to actually master the techniques and exercises a student will need to practice them regularly after having taken the course, which can take weeks, months, or even years depending on the difficulty of the technique or exercise.
In fact, just like with practicing Yoga, it’s not just about learning how to breath or do a certain technique or Yoga pose — the latter called Asana in Yoga — it’s actually rather a lifelong continuation of understanding, adding to, and perfecting what you’ve learned.
Hence, my idea is that it’s better to gradually add Reusi Dat Ton exercises to your repertoire and not a dazzling number of 200 exercises in two weeks’ time. It means that I feel that it’s better to study in “chunks,” practice those set of exercises for a few months, and then continue adding more techniques, poses, self-massage options or stretches, and so on, which is a way of teaching Reusi Dat Ton that some instructors indeed offer.
Moreover, I think it’s good for the development of a Reusi Dat Ton student to study with different teachers from different lineages and styles, hence understanding different applications (and often differently performed techniques), which can make for a much more allround understanding of the Reusi Dat Ton practice.
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