This week’s travel dream: Personal healing in northern Thailand

Northern Thailand offers folk healing techniques unlike those in any other part of the world, said Anthony Chase in Condé Nast Traveler. Though difficult to cross, the mountainous region acted as “a superhighway of civilizations” more than 1,000 years ago when the first Thai peoples migrated south from China. Buddhist and Taoist ideas thus flavor the practice of massage and folk medicine in the area. Five years after I began studying yoga, I decided to visit. My hunch was that I’d find a connection between Thai practices and their birthplace, a “rugged landscape of peasant farmers and back-roads traders.”

I receive my first massage one evening in a village near the Myanmar border, “in the faint light of paper lanterns and moonbeams off the river.” In Thai massage, the therapist stands or kneels above the receiver and often uses his or her full weight to stretch and knead tired or tense muscles. This makes for a thoroughly relaxing initiation, and readies me for my trip to Chiang Mai, the provincial capital, where I’ve enrolled in an introductory course at the International Training Massage School. Massage students the world over come to study in this small city of temples and shaded boulevards, where massage stands and parlors are as plentiful as cafés in Paris. My classes prove revelatory. “The difference between getting a massage and giving one is like the difference between going to a concert and being a musician.” The massage becomes a “form of mutual meditation” in which the giver and receiver “share the same trance, one slow metabolic dance.”

During “the final phase of my Thai healing,” I’m introduced to a guide who’s willing to take me to Thailand’s highest mountain, Doi Inthanon. The day is cool, dry, and sunny as we start out, and “the wind rubs the trees like sand paper.” It doesn’t take long before we exit modern Thailand and find ourselves inside a separate forest ecosystem that contains scattered hillside gardens of strawberries, coffee beans, and oranges. Standing at the 8,415-foot summit, I am happy. I have learned to breathe “in a deeper way.”

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At Chiang Mai’s Mandarin Oriental Dhara Dhevi (mandarinoriental.com), doubles start at $506.