Hadrien Aujoulat-Mendez
Masseur specialised in Thai and Osteothai massage
Practitioner in mind-body therapies
Yoga and meditation teacher
Co-facilitator of movement and breath workshops
The path to touch
Body arts have been an integral part of my life since my childhood in Provence: I grew up watching my mother teach Tai Chi. At the age of 20, I had the privilege of discovering yoga, a practice that had a profound impact on me, with a philosophy based on the quality of the gesture rather than on performance.
After following an intellectual academic path, it took me several years to realise that the feeling of incompleteness I was experiencing was linked to a disconnection with my body. My physical activities were always oriented towards a performative objective, ignoring the bodily and sensory dimension.
It was in 2018 that I fell in love with Thai massage during a training course in Chiang Mai, a city in northern Thailand. Touch and listening then became central to my practice. This experience was decisive: it was then that I made the arts of movement and breath a priority in my life. To pass on what I had learnt.
La voie vers le corps
Look at our children: their bodies seem naturally fluid and free. This innate suppleness becomes rigid over the years spent sitting on school benches, where the intellect takes over from the body. This mechanistic vision, which sees the body and nature as a simple machine to be exploited, is linked to industrial development. As a result, the body is often neglected, and the harmony between the physical and the mental is broken.
The practices I propose do not seek performance. They focus on listening to oneself and the quality of the movement. The real aim is to learn to ‘inhabit’ your body fully, to reconnect with it gently. This bodily presence generates a sensation of deep joy, perceptible in the eyes of the people I guide.
Like a musical instrument, the body sometimes needs to be retuned to regain its fluidity.