I just finished the Hands Free course in my Thai Yoga Massage training. It was totally amazing. I’m always blown away by all the tools and techniques available to the practitioner.

I say Hands Free, but it isn’t totally hands free. The idea is that your less powerful hands, wrists, and shoulders can provide more of a supporting role than being the primary tools of use. Instead, you use feet, knees, shins, legs, and hips as the implements. It makes the therapist’s job that much easier.

In the end, my mind is totally flabbergasted by the options. Imagine yourself with a hammer, a drill, wrenches, and screwdrivers. Since that is all you have, its pretty easy to decide on what tool to use when you need it. But imagine suddenly having another 100 tools laid out before you. You don’t even know which one to pick up for a given job. It is really going to take a while for me to realize what my assets are.

I think of techniques I used recently that were my Go-To moves. But that is completely changed now. The teacher would say that he uses (insert hands free technique) 10 to 1 over any other application in his treatments. The energy I used to spend doing something will be drastically reduced. I’ll work with more ease while applying a lot more pressure and focused attention.

But not only did we learn Hands Free, the teacher always goes into little tangents about our current health system. There is a reason these techniques have worked for 2,500 years. And because it looks like magical Eastern Mysticism and largely unexplained by modern science, the medical community has a difficult time accepting the concepts. But this teacher is using science to add to its credibility. Neuromuscular physiology and functional anatomy are a huge part of our training. And it all makes complete sense. It is totally NOT magic.

The take home after all of my weekend was to be creative and thoughtful in design of a treatment. It take a lot of intuition to identify a solution to a problem. There are elements of physical therapy and massage that are useful, and there are related techniques like acupuncture and yoga that contribute, but Thai Yoga Massage puts all of this together neatly. It is a process of gaining trust, allowing the receiver to relax with the breath, case history, assessment, warmup preparation, trigger point identification, specific treatment, and then movement and stretching to get muscle fibers moving again. Other therapies will have a few portions covered, but not everything. And these sequences are often repeated in a different way.

Its difficult for me to imagine a more effective treatment for most pain a person feels. It is helpful for most chronic and acute conditions. And it is invaluable for repetitive use issues whether manual labor or athletics. I realize pain I’ve had for years doesn’t have to be there anymore. I can release the pain and make it never come back. And I want to do that for others as well.