Think of lineage the same way as we view our family tree. Who is your teacher? Who was your teacher’s teacher and so on? Most Western practitioners will find that tracing their lineage back will lead them through the Old Medicine Hospital in Chiang Mai. 

When you teach Thai Massage, you necessarily teach in your style. This style combines your experiences and development as a practitioner and later as a teacher and the things you learned when you were a beginning Thai Massage student.

The Thai Massage methods and techniques we have learned are a collection or style that belongs to a particular Thai Massage lineage. One reason it is important to know our lineage is to account for differences in our approaches to the treatment of specific problems. We may be operating from a general heritage, such as Northern Thai Style Massage or Southern Thai Style Massage, or a very specific lineage, such as Jap Sen Nerve Touch Massage, founded by the late Lek Chaiya, also known as “Mama Lek.”

It is important to explain to Thai Massage students beforehand that the style and type of Thai Massage we will teach them belongs to “such and such” lineage, and more importantly, what they will learn is only one way of doing Thai Massage. It’s crucial because it will keep the mind and spirit open, avoiding dogmatism and prejudice about wrongs and rights with respect to partitioning Thai Massage. Too often, I have met Thai Massage practitioners who are quite rigid, focusing too much on “the only right way” of doing Thai Massage.

As Thai Massage instructors, we know that even the Thai Sen (lines) are said to have different trajectories (depending on the lineage) and that other Thai Massage techniques and solutions may successfully resolve health issues.

Thai Massage is a vast set of integrated Thai healing practices, techniques, and methods spanning centuries of development throughout Thailand, also with somewhat contrasting types of implementations.

Well, just a reminder to keep Thai Massage what it is — a vibrant and continuously developing Thai healing melting pot. There is no wrong or right here, but as the Thai people like to say, things are “same same, … but different”.