Thai Massage as a Mindfulness Practice

Of course — when giving Thai Massage you don’t actually “become one with your client.” However, what can happen during a treatment session is a temporary discontinuity of judgment, in a way like what is taught in Vipassana Meditation.

When that happens, properties disappear and appearances become fluid. Things are just there. And in that particular sense, individual persons, personalities, and identities can “disappear.” Temporarily.

Yet, it certainly doesn’t happen every session. And it doesn’t happen a whole session necessarily. To be honest, most of the time it doesn’t happen at all. There are just “these moments.” Shorter or longer.

It can happen to both the receiver and practitioner simultaneously, or only to one of them — or to both at different moments. One cannot predict it. One cannot say when it’s going to happen.

But when judgment is suspended, and I would say that it happens despite of everything — there is this experience which is not an actual experience at all. It is what it is. Just something there without any judgment. Without properties accordingly.

But how and why it happens seems to be wrapped in some kind of mystery. It’s a non-volitional phenomenon. It happens. Despite of. It’s perhaps best described as something like a trance or highly meditative mood and it shows resemblance with the aims of Vipassana meditation.

Maybe it’s just born out of some profound intuition, or out of many years of massage experience. Maybe it’s the firm conviction of equality, or even of absolute non-equality for that matter. Or the fact of a myriad, a million of different appearances without judging them good or evil, right or wrong, better or worse.

But whatever I say, finally indeed, we’re blind, blindfolded like Lady Justitia and obliged to admit that we don’t really know anything. But when judgment halts — and that’s just my own practical experience — anything is possible, especially healing.

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