in west hawaii, i was earning $200 a day, with tips, 2 weeks out of massage school, while i heard girls were working in the midwest hotels for $6 an hour. what race i have no idea...

not that money is everything. in thailand therapists were earning pennies compared to that, and doing work as good as many therapists working here in yurp for $75 an hour. they're also a lot happier!

that might be because thailand has a millennial relationship of respect for bodywork, whereas here it still suffers from a myth that it's a bit of a 'pampered princess by the pool' thing.

they say we only use 10% of our brains, or our lung capacity. maybe we are only using %10 of our wellness potential as well, accepting levels of daily stress that shorten our lives, yet hold us in a horrible grip nonetheless.

modern life is so dehumanising, and the yinyang of this certainly creates a complementary premium on any way possible for stressed individuals to reconnect with their bodies, viz the proliferation of spas in upscale hotels.

the challenge for any therapist these days is not to get dehumanised too, as then all you share with clients depends on pure technique, rather than skill and one's own life force, which gets depleted rapidly when working on many people who are out of balance.

the article, garbled tho' it was, made the fundamental point that fascinates me, ie the cognitive dissonance between the 'work ethic' mentality (devils and idle hands) and the emphasis on 'making it', ie getting others to do heavy lifting while talking on your blackberry.

it's a fine line between relaxing (essential lifestyle for rich), and laziness, (what DFH's do).

pondering...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty