If you value questioning over obedience, quality over quantity in education, and adaptation over set-sequences, you’re in the right spot.
In choosing Navina for your manual therapy education, you will experience more than just the physical shapes of Thai massage. Touch becomes more than just a tool – it becomes a language that you step into learning, practicing and refining. It becomes a social value rather than something you keep isolated to treatment times.
This work takes on greater significance than the techniques alone when you learn the biological importance of human contact. The way you interact with people on a daily basis changes, as you move throughout a touch-deprived society with a growing vocabulary in the language of touch.
Your classroom experience will be guided by the following:
• Positivity and inclusivity
• A balance between theory and practice
• A mixture of teaching styles to meet all learning styles (lectures, visual aids and hands on – give and receive massage)
• Collaboration, group discussion and time for questions
• Deductive thinking to develop your ability to apply the theory covered in class
• Meticulous division and release of information with a focus on understanding and retention of content before moving on
• Repetition to enhance retention
Touch is a tricky language
And safe spaces are difficult to come by.
Careful curation of the classroom environment creates the opportunity for you to; express challenging ideas/feelings that may come up as a result of manual therapy, question past learnings (and the learnings we present you in class), and vulnerably explore this language that we have so often lost fluency in – with support, understanding and compassion.
Being present in an environment such as this also helps you to reproduce such a safe space for others, which is incredibly important.
A need existed in Thai massage to take education to the next level. After studying with various teachers and institutions, Navina was built to fill gaps in the industry. This is why you can expect your training with us to have a carefully organized division of information designed to maximize retention and proficiency rather than trying to teach you as many postures as possible. It’s also why you’re encouraged to explore and question in class, rather than simply accepting our word as dogma. You’ll also notice a deeply interwoven foundation of human anatomy and physiology, giving you not only a universal language with which to communicate, but also providing the knowledge to take your treatments from “feeling good” to therapeutic.
To give you a little behind-the-scenes look into our process in curriculum development, the overall steps look like this:
• Honouring tradition – an exploration of not only the teachings that were passed to us, but also a deeper investigation that goes further back in time and geography to Thailand, in an effort to not only express the accurate history of this practice, but also to extract the elements of historical practice that will serve you the best, with the greatest relevance in our modern climate.
• Bridging contemporary science into the equation – with a huge volume of information available to us nowadays, there are no good reasons to avoid studying the anatomy and physiology of the body, especially when this work directly influences the tissues of the body. It fuels the refinement of your treatments – making every touch more and more targeted towards what each individual needs, backed by science.
• Questioning the norms of the Thai massage “world” – have you ever learned something and then years later someone has asked you “but why?” when you’re describing that thing? Well, that’s what we’ve been doing a lot of. And if there are no good answers, and if there are no logical answers that can be deduced to support a continuation of that teaching, then it has been left behind for more reasoned and logical approaches to work.
• Understanding the scope of the topic – research is our middle name and in an effort to structure your learning environment well, many hours of background research go into curriculum development before we then break it down in the next step.
• Building a knowledge foundation – starting from the start, we understand that you (we all) need certain foundations of any topic before it can be explored deeply.
• Dividing information into stages – one of the most time-consuming steps in the building of quality curriculum (that contributes strongly to your classroom experience) is the organization of information into a format that is logical, cumulative and progressive. You’ll benefit from this by having an appropriate degree of repetition, especially on more complex ideas, you won’t be rushed, and there is a storyline that progresses and builds on itself throughout training.
• Course testing and adaptation – the courses you take have been trialled, feedback gathered and modifications made (not just once, this is an ongoing process) in an effort to continuously provide coursework that can have the greatest impact possible.
The language of touch:
Ready to step into the future of this practice? Our course calendar is over here. We’re looking forward to meeting you!
Did You Know?
Did you know touch is the only sense that we cannot live without? There are some pretty amazing biological reactions that happen when you make physical contact with another person. It’s also the first sense to develop. These are some of the conversations you’ll start with in class. You can read about them in advance though, over here. That’ll also give you more insight as to what your learning experience with us could be.
