There has been a lot of recent discussion on various Thai Massage Facebook Groups about what is the most important principle to Thai massage practice. By far, the most popular answer has been the use of loving touch in your massage.

While I wholeheartedly support this answer and the use of loving touch in any form of massage, I have found from my own experience that loving touch isn’t always the answer.

I have treated people who have a deep mistrust of love, born of many years of being hurt, neglected or abandoned, so much so that when I treat them with loving touch in a massage treatment, I can actually feel their body freeze or recoil. Their bodies hold a very strong, subconscious mistrust of love, so the only way to make the initial connection is through a non-loving touch.

Sometimes, however, a client who has been neglected by one parent is only mistrusting of the energy of the gender of the neglecting parent, but not the gender of the other parent. Say, for instance, a client who was abandoned by their father. In such a case, it is possible to connect to this client by using only your female energy in your loving touch in the massage. You may have to hide your male-side energy entirely during such a healing session.

Additionally I have treated adults who have had no real experience of love in their lives. They are children of strict, authoritarian, loveless up-bringing and their bodies only know how to respond to a disconnected, authoritarian touch. Their bodies are simply unable to respond to loving touch as they have no subconscious experience or understanding of what loving touch is.

Finally, I have also treated clients who harbour deep, sub-conscious beliefs that they are unworthy of love, whether in receiving or giving love. Such beliefs in unworthiness are usually rooted in a childhood experience whereby an important person in the clients life told them repeatedly that they are unworthy of being loved.  Since childhood the client has held this belief in unworthiness in their body until it becomes a sub-conscious belief in adulthood. Such a client needs to be treated with an investigative touch embedded with spiritual energy so that it can quickly uncover the root of the unworthiness and then challenge the person who planted the energy of unworthiness in the body of the client. The perpetrator of the belief in unworthiness needs to be healed before the victim of the belief in unworthiness can be set-free.

So, although love and, by extension, loving touch is indeed the answer to the question of what is the most important principle in Thai massage treatment, please also be aware that sometimes you might find your client’s body sub-consciously protecting itself from your loving touch. And I hope that in sharing my own, personal experiences here, the reader might gain some degree of understanding of why this happens.