Self-awareness is one of those things that we have the responsibility to keep working on – always. Constantly evaluating our choices, our movements, movements of others, and an overall consciousness of the world at large and our role in it is something that we can always keep refining. It’s not something that we can ever really say “I’m aware enough…”.
There are many ways to cultivate awareness in your everyday, from formal meditation practices to more situational responsiveness. Thai Massage can have a pretty significant impact on your practice of awareness in 3 main ways:
Evaluation of body mechanics
The saying goes “Thai Massage is as good to give as it is to receive” and part of that is continuously paying close attention to where and how you are positioning yourself in space. In order to optimize on bodyweight transfer (for the application of massage pressure), you need to spend time finding the small, nuanced adjustments to your body mechanics in order to create ease.
Reusi Dat Ton
Reusi Dat Ton is an age-old part of being a practitioner and is essentially a daily movement practice of your own. It could be likened to yoga asana in the way we pay close attention to how we move throughout space. Not only does this increase our spacial awareness, it also helps us to understand, from experience, how the body moves, is connected, and therefore how tension can travel throughout the body.
Meditation and the cultivation of Compassion
The more time we spend contemplating our emotional state, the more in-tune we become with it. As the first Foundational Principle of Thai Massage, Compassion is at the very core of all that we do. The mind is like a muscle – the more we train it in the directions we would like it to go, the easier it becomes to do that work, and so the more we practice becoming conscious of compassion, and the more time we spend trying to cultivate that warm feeling, the better we get at it, giving us a greater capacity to choose how we’d like to feel in any given situation.
This all feeds back into the conversation of Thai Massage being part of a life-practice and not just a professional one. The benefits of studying and continually working on these skills continue to spread throughout all that you do in life.
This is the true power of our wonderful art.
Drew.
If you want to know more about the influence of this wonderful practice on your life, please continue reading with “How Thai Massage Can Change Your Life“, or “Thai Massage is For Everyone“.
I concur…!!!! ?