Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from The Body Linguist, Massage Therapist, PO Box 791780, Paia, HI.
Our vision at Maui Academy of Healing Arts is to provide a passionate, progressive and holistic education that is the foundation for a lasting and fulfilling vocation as a Licensed Massage Therapist. We dedicate ourselves to guiding you in discovery of your own unique expression of healing by integrating core concepts of Eastern, contemporary and traditional Hawaiian methods of bodywork. Training
your entire body to facilitate this work through Thai Massage, Ashiatsu Barefoot Bodywork and other paths to career longevity, we honor ourselves so that we may work in lasting and profound service to others.
04/30/2025
Probably the best massage article ever written. Thanks Dr. Mark. 🙏🙏
Let’s be honest: the tissue-based model of manual therapy is not just inaccurate. It’s boring. It’s a dry story. A story about tight muscles, stuck fascia, knots, and misalignments. A story where the practitioner “fixes” the passive client, and where therapeutic success is measured in inch...
09/02/2024
“Analogous to letters of the alphabet, which can offer no clue by themselves as to how they should be assembled to make a poem, self-esteem, wellness, and positivity are scraps of feelings that cannot be addressed in isolation and assembled in a way that can restore a person’s mind to wholeness or happiness.”
The caring industry’s wellness and positivity products cannot provide self-esteem to those who do not already have it.
08/04/2024
What is a Body Linguist?
Everyone speaks with the language of touch, yet no two dialects are the same. We are able to communicate simply and perfectly through the act of touch without ever having felt the energetic “voice” of another person's body.
Touch never lies, and this should be the very foundation of how we learn manual therapy practices.
The simple quality of our own body movements, the commitment of our techniques, the time and presence we spend transitioning from one focus to the next, are just a few examples of how our clients are receiving completely unconscious stimuli about the therapeutic environment we create for them. If we are not in harmony with ourselves first, we can end up translating confusing and erratic messages about our work. A client may even experience a session that is completely about the practitioner, even as they are physically doing all of the “receiving”.
We would be wise to revisit our obligation to regard simplicity as the foundation of power in our work. We need to learn how to let good enough be good enough, and that the search for positive outcomes can be rewarded with the simplest aspects of our skills. It is not always required to execute complexity to attain superior results.
We often refer to ourselves as “Body Workers”. I propose that we return to our roots of practice, examine our own foundations and identify how we might be doing all the “talking” in our manual therapy work. The answer to a refreshed practice can be an update to what we already do.
Using practical and immediate applications, we can re-emerge as “Body Linguists” speaking the simple and sacred language of the unique individual. I believe this approach will part of change our profession needs to truly elevate and improve standards, education, expectations and ultimately client outcomes in a way that we can all hold integrity and pride with.
I propose -
Bespoke evaluations on our personal physical foundations - How we can improve the way we use our own bodies to expand our touch quality. Using our whole bodies to express technique...hands, arms, feet and more. The whole-body practitioner makes the truly holistic practice.
Concepts of touch-talk - Refocusing on simplicity in touch, the subtle messages we send or don't and receiving real-time feedback on a micro-scale that radically improves our “language”.
Client-centered practices - Adopting new priorities that invite the client to be the navigator of their experience and outcomes, paired with our responsibility to uphold safe and knowledgeable boundaries.
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"By touching a body, we touch every event it has experienced. For a few brief moments, we hold all of a clients stories in our hands. We witness someones experience of their own flesh through some of the most powerful means possible, the contact of our hands, the acceptance of the body without judgement and the occasional listening ear.
With these gestures, we reach across the isolation of the human experience and hold another persons legend."
- Tracy Walton LMT MS, "The Health History of a Human Being" Massage Therapy Journal-Winter 1999 (with permission)
​Our vision at Maui Academy of Healing Arts is to provide you with the most leading-edge educational content available today. Many core concepts and practices that have accompanied massage training over the last 30 years have grown and shifted dramatically. The science and art of critical thinking, research/reasoning and their place in pain management is reaching exciting new ground and we are committed to bringing these concepts into the compassionate classroom of NOW.
​Our philosophy is to support our students in experiencing the social and psychological aspects of the important work we do. While our hands manifest a mechanical expression of our work, our hearts and minds express a presence of love and healing for our fellow humans. Understanding how the science of massage has caught up to the magic of massage is key in developing ethical and honorable habits for both ourselves and those we serve. If someone said you could see love under a microscope, would you want to look?
Our curriculum provides our students a completely unique cross-training in massage modalities that cultivate a "whole-body, whole-practice" career path. An introduction to Eastern, contemporary and traditional Hawaiian methodology is blended with exciting new pain science concepts so that graduates will be successful in multi-faceted employment with private practice, spas, wellness cooperatives and clinical settings both in Hawai'i and across the world.
Our faculty are dedicated, highly experienced professionals. Our local instructors are masters in their field with decades of teaching experience and professional practice. We also provide instruction from internationally renowned practitioners and trainers that are built right into the foundational program at no additional cost. These teachers create and deliver customized experiences in our unique program that cannot be found in any other massage school in the country. Many schools offer "advanced" training above and beyond the foundation, MAHA customizes the advanced instructor to deliver an integrative experience to the new student that is vastly more beneficial to their learning progression.
