He broke his own body first
Pichest started out practising the same Thai massage that is done all over the country: a general sequence of palm pressing and thumbing, working from the feet up through the head. He did it for years and he did a great many of them in a day.
Two things came of that and both of them are the reason his style exists. His own body became stiff and damaged, which he described, in the word he used about everybody, as terrible. And he noticed that what he was doing to his clients was not lasting, and that some of it was doing more harm than good.
Ten years putting himself back together
So he left the ordinary massage world to heal himself, and he said it took him ten years. What he built on the way out is a practice that benefits the person giving it as much as the person receiving it. He had, in effect, taken Thai massage apart and put it back together so that it stopped costing the practitioner their body.
Almost none of what you would expect
Palm pressing is not the main technique in his style and thumbing barely appears, except for precise point work. What he used instead were things he worked out himself: sitting on a part of the body, and the exact use of feet, knees, calves, shins and forearms to deliver the right amount of pressure with almost no effort from the person giving it.
A lot of a Pichest massage looks like nothing is happening. Long, still compressions, held far longer than most people would hold anything. That is what lets somebody relax without bracing against you, and it gives the time an energy channel needs to open. Warming the body is done by sitting on somebody to stop and release the blood flow rather than by pressing up and down the legs.
There is no set routine anywhere in it. The massage follows the person in front of you and nothing else.
What he taught me is written across the rest of this history.
The body is the teacher, and yours comes first
Over years of practising and teaching he became able to assess and diagnose nearly anything a person brought him, mental, emotional or physical, and to build a treatment for it on the spot. He taught by sending you to the body rather than to a technique. Your own body first, then everybody else’s.
That is why students got told their bodies were terrible. He held that you have to be well and open in yourself before you are any use to anybody, so the first thing he did was show you what was wrong with you. It landed hard on most people, mine included.
But he never left it there. He would follow it, almost every time, with the same line.
“Don't worry. I was terrible before you.”
AJAHN PICHEST BOONTHUMME
He asked me for a massage, and he fell asleep
The last time I saw him, he asked me to give him a massage. He fell asleep during it.
That was worth more to me than any piece of paper. It was his way of saying two things at once: I trust you now, and your technique is good enough for my body. Nobody hands you that. You wait years for it and you only get it once.
He was a master of Thai massage and a genuinely interesting human being. I am grateful to have known him, and I always will be.
The rest of this history
Thai massage
How I got to Chiang Mai, what the practice actually is, and where it sits in the rest of the history.
Learning it in Thailand
Why learning this the way I learned it is nothing like taking a course, and what going to Chiang Mai actually involves.
Read about training in Thailand
Tok Sen
A northern practice worked with a wooden mallet, and the one part of this that is not done with hands.
Plant medicines
The other half of the history, and where it meets this one: ayahuasca, huachuma, and the work I still do in Peru.