While travel is one of my favorite forms of wellness, I now try to pair other forms of wellness on my travels. This worked really well in Iceland because there are hot springs everywhere and it felt like the least stressful trip we ever took, even though I remember being completely overwhelmed by driving a manual car again at the beginning of that trip. It’s a little harder for me to find wellness in other places because I want it to be indicative of the place I’m traveling in, but I gave up and went with a Thai massage in Rome. I needed a massage, it’s a form of wellness, and Thai massage is something new to me.
I’ve seen advertisements for Thai massage before, usually on interstates which makes it kind of scary, but this was true Thai massage in Rome. Let me tell you, going into something completely blind can be fun. And I had no clue what made a massage “Thai”. I figured it was a different way of manipulating the muscles like Swedish massage. I was pleasantly surprised by the large bed in the room because I feel like if you’re a larger person, the thin massage table can be intimidating at times. It didn’t mean anything else to me at the time. You would think that the tiny woman who was going to be conducting the massage would have made me wonder how she was going to stretch her arms over that big bed, but no.
So, when she hopped up on the bed in order to really get into the muscles on my back, I have to say that it was a total surprise. I’ll tell you what though, when you can put your entire body into pushing into a muscle, it’s going to give up and let loose. Thankfully, she was tiny. Even as small as she was, I was pretty sure that she could have snapped my neck easily with the strength in her hands and the weight of her body behind her. Julie and I both came out of the massage like noodles. Good thing that it was just a few meters back to the hotel from the massage place. I don’t think we could have walked much farther. I have to say that it reset my body for the next bit of walking on cobblestones and traveling home from a foreign country though.
It also made me more cognizant of how dependent I am on my massage therapist that I see weekly. I count on my ability to tell her what is sore that week in English, which I speak poor Italian and no Thai, so that couldn’t happen in this massage. I also count on her knowledge of my body and knowing where the knots are going to be every week, what needs more attention and how my body holds in tension. It’s fun to step out of your comfort zone, but there’s also a reason we call it a “comfort” zone.