Manassah Lewis

I come to Thai Massage and Yoga through my own difficulties with my low back, having lots of pain there as a young woman.  When I started running, I pulled my hamstring muscle training for a marathon and my massage therapist at the time recommended yoga, since it is well known among runners that we don't stretch.  So I started practicing yoga back in 2000.  I went to a local house that a woman had used her downstairs for the studio and I met a teacher who had just come from India after studying yoga there.  I didn't realize at the time she was teaching me the style of Sivananda Hatha Yoga but later learned that after seeing her again years later.  I loved the classes.  I always felt there was something more I was getting from it than just stretching my muscles.  I would go to coffee shops and remember as much as I could from the class and write it down on a napkin so I could go home and practice.  Although, after she left that place and the woman who owned it decided to do some traveling, I started venturing to all different kinds of yoga classes which was making me more confused.  I wanted to know how to make my own class.  So I found Yogi Hari's Ashram in Florida, since I've loved Florida my whole life, and signed up for the teacher training.  It was beautiful and wonderful and vigorous and hard work and I lived for a couple of weeks ashram-style, yoga-style. It was beautiful and the joy we all felt was fed by all the beauty there and sharing of an energetic practice.  I started teaching right away after that.  I found it quite challenging at first because the general public wasn't as flexible as everyone at the ashram.  And I realized how much my students were teaching me about how to teach. I now teach at Dharma Yoga in Evanston, Illinois, and I teach a beginner class and also an open class for all levels.

Yoga helped my hamstring and also my back for a while and then the low back pain got really bad.  After seeing a chiropractor for over a year with not very positive results, I heard from a girl passing through a cafe I worked at about Chuck Duff and Thai Bodywork in Evanston.  I immediately signed up for a session with him and he did change my life, not just with the bodywork but showing me how to do things for myself, what muscles I could massage on my own with balls and other tools to keep myself out of trouble with pain or ease it once it has happened.  I was inspired to learn Thai Massage from what he had done for me.  I wanted to share that with other people.  So I started classes and practiced on my friends all the time.  Thai Massage is an art, a practice, just like yoga so it is important to do it a lot.  And I see it not only helpful for chronic pain but also as preventative medicine.  I work at Thai Bodywork in Evanston, Illinois, now as a Thai therapist and also as an assistant teacher.  I also do administrative assistant work for the studio.