June 10, 2026

What Thai Massage Taught Me About Listening

What Thai Massage Taught Me About Listening The first time I received a proper Thai massage in Chiang Mai, the practitioner did something strange — she placed ...

What Thai Massage Taught Me About Listening

The first time I received a proper Thai massage in Chiang Mai, the practitioner did something strange — she placed her palm on my sternum and simply waited. Nothing happened for what felt like a long time. Only later did I understand: she was listening, and I had never been listened to like that before.

The Question I Keep Returning To

How did we come to believe that listening is something we do with our ears?

I ask this not to be provocative, but because the more I sit with the question, the less certain I become about my own answer. In my work as a CEO, I spend most of my day in conversations — calls, meetings, one-on-ones. I thought I was a decent listener. Then hands began teaching me otherwise, and I am still trying to understand what they were saying.

What the Hands Know That the Mind Forgets

There is a moment in Thai massage — the tradition calls it nuad boran — when the practitioner is not yet pressing, not yet moving. Their palm is on the body, and something is being read. My teacher in Chiang Mai called this fang — literally "to listen." She used the same word for hearing a friend speak and for placing her hands on my abdomen. This puzzled me for months.

I began to notice that in Polish, in English, in most of the languages I move through, we have separated listening into a narrow channel. Sound enters an ear and becomes meaning. But in older traditions — and I say this cautiously, as a student, not a scholar — the sense organs seem to be understood more fluidly. The hands hear. The belly hears. The soles of the feet know something the mind does not yet know.

I do not want to romanticize this. Every culture has its blind spots, and I am not trying to claim that ancient practices had it all figured out. But there is something worth sitting with here — a question about what we might have set aside without noticing.

I made this little table not as an authority but as a way of holding the question in front of me:

Tradition	Word for Listening	What It Includes
Thai (nuad boran)	fang	Hearing sound, feeling through hands, sensing energy lines (sen)
Ayurveda (Sanskrit)	śravaṇa	Auditory hearing, but also receptive attention across all senses
Japanese (Zen)	kiku (聞く) — but also monosugoi attention	Hearing, but taught alongside ma (the space between)
Vipassana (Pāli)	sati — not "listening" but "remembering to notice"	Awareness of sensation, sound, thought as they arise
Modern Western clinical	"Active listening"	Cognitive processing of verbal content, with body language noted secondarily

I share this with some hesitation. Every one of these words could have essays written about it, and I am only pointing at the moon. But when I look at this table, I notice that "active listening" — the frame I was trained in as a manager — is quite narrow compared to what other traditions seem to be pointing at. How did we get here?

One possibility is that we became very good at extracting information and less practiced at receiving presence. These are not the same thing. Information can be extracted from a report, an email, a transcript. Presence can only be received from a living being who is here, now, in a body that has a history.

When my teacher placed her hand on my sternum, she was not extracting information about my tissue. Or rather — she was, but that was almost a byproduct. What she was really doing, as I understand it now, was arriving. She was letting her attention settle so completely into her palm that there was no longer anyone trying to figure me out. There was only contact.

I have been trying to bring this into meetings. It is very hard. My mind wants to be preparing my next sentence, wants to be solving the problem being described, wants to be efficient with time. All of these are reasonable impulses. And yet — when I manage to just place my attention on the person, the way a good practitioner places a palm, something different happens in the room. The other person often slows down. Sometimes they say something they did not plan to say. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes we sit in a silence that would have been unbearable a year ago and is now, somehow, the most useful part of the meeting.

I do not know what to do with this. I am running a company, not a monastery. But I also cannot unsee what I have started to see.

The hands, it turns out, do not think. This may be why they can listen so well. My mind is busy with plans and predictions; my hands, when I let them, simply meet what is in front of them. There is no agenda in a palm. There is only pressure, temperature, texture, rhythm — a whole language I did not know I had forgotten.

The Body as a Guest House

There is a line I keep returning to, from Rumi — the body as a guest house, with different visitors arriving each morning. I used to read this as poetry. Now I read it as a description of what a practitioner feels under their hands.

When I lie on the mat and someone works on me, my body arrives in pieces. The right shoulder shows up first, tight from months of laptop hours. Then the left hip, holding something I cannot name. Then the diaphragm, which apparently has not fully exhaled in a while. Each of these is a guest. The practitioner does not argue with them. She does not tell my shoulder it should be different. She simply greets it, and something in the greeting allows it to unclench.

I wonder if this is what real listening between people also is. Not agreement, not advice, not even understanding in the analytical sense. Just — greeting. You are here. I notice you are here. I am not trying to move you.

I notice that when I am listened to this way, I stop performing. When I am not listened to this way, I perform harder, hoping to finally be seen. This seems like an important loop to understand, in leadership and in life. How much of what we call communication is actually two people performing at each other, hoping to be received?

I am a temporary guest in this body and this role. The people I work with are temporary guests in theirs. Maybe listening, at its root, is remembering this — that we are all just passing through, and the least we can do is put a palm on the moment before we start rearranging it.

What I Am Still Learning

I am still learning that I cannot listen and defend at the same time. When someone tells me something difficult, my first impulse is still to explain, to contextualize, to protect. The hands do not do this. The hands just receive what is there.

I am still learning that silence is not empty. In Thai massage there are long pauses between movements, and at first I found them uncomfortable — I kept waiting for the "real" work to begin. I did not yet understand that the pauses were the work.

I do not want to end with a conclusion. I do not have one. I only have a question I am carrying: what would change, in my company, in my marriage, in my meditation, if I listened the way a good pair of hands listens? I do not know yet. I will let you know when I do — or perhaps you will get there before me, and you can tell me.

FAQ

Q: Do I need to learn Thai massage to listen this way? A: I do not think so. The hands are a teacher I happened to meet, but I suspect any embodied practice — gardening, cooking, holding a child — can point to the same thing. The tradition matters less than the willingness to slow down.

Q: Isn't this just "presence" or "mindfulness" repackaged? A: Perhaps. I am wary of collapsing distinct traditions into a single Western wellness word. What I noticed in Thai massage was specifically about contact — attention traveling through touch. That felt different to me than seated meditation, though they seem to be cousins.

Q: How do you bring this into a business context without seeming strange? A: Mostly by not announcing it. I do not tell people I am listening with my whole body. I just try to do it. If it changes anything, they notice the change, not the technique.

Q: What if I try to listen this way and my mind keeps wandering? A: Mine still does, constantly. I think that may be the point — you notice you have wandered, and you return. The return is the practice, not the staying.

Q: Are you saying verbal listening is wrong? A: No. I am asking whether it is complete. Words carry a lot, but not everything. That is all I am pointing at.

Q: How did you find your teacher? A: Slowly, and by accident, which seems to be how most real teachers arrive. I would rather not name her — she does not think of herself as a teacher, and I want to respect that.

Q: What would you say to someone skeptical of all this? A: I would say I understand. I was skeptical too, and part of me still is. Skepticism is a form of attention, which is itself a form of listening. I would only ask: what if you tried placing your hand on your own chest for a full minute, and simply noticed? Whatever you find, or do not find, is yours.

Paweł Sokołowski is a CEO, Vipassana meditator, and student of Ayurveda and Thai massage. He writes from the intersection of technology, consciousness, and the ancient body.

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