The Sweet Night Namo (A silly story)

The Sweet Night Namo
A Somewhat Silly Story
by Nephyr Jacobsen

Once upon a time, in the land of Plentiful, there came to be a small group of caring Plentifulians who heard tales of the healing powers of the Sweet Night Namo plant found only in the land of Cocobliss . They heard the tales from travelers who had gone to the land of Cocobliss, and had drunk the Sweet Night Namo in delicious teas, or bathed in pools of warm Sweet Night Namo steeped water. The caring Plentifulians were kind people, who longed to help others, and fortunately, they were also adventurous people, for the land of Cocobliss was far away. And so it came to pass that over the span of many years, the Plentifulians, one by one, traveled across the salty rainbow oceans to the land of Cocobliss to learn the ancient medicinae art of healing with the Sweet Night Namo.
Now the Sweet Night Namo healers of Cocobliss had long held their medical knowledge as sacred. It was information shared only with the select few who could prove to the healers their worth and dedication. Once accepted as a student, the novice healers would spend years apprenticed to their teachers, learning the ways not only of the Sweet Night Namo plant, but also of the Dark Red Soul Stone, and the Secret Quiet Moon Chants, for the Sweet Night Namo could bring healing on it’s own, but it was limited without the Dark Red Soul Stone and the Secret Quiet Moon Chants. These three medicinaes were complicated in their many uses, and it took years of supervised practice for the novice healers to become adept in their art.
It must be mentioned that the Sweet Night Namo teas and the pools of warm Sweet Night Namo water which were offered, for a nice profit, to the vacationing Plentifulians, were provided not by the true Night Namo healers of Cocobliss. They were offered by the owners of the wander lodges and by various entrepreneurial Cocoblissians who would bring the delicious teas to the beaches in baskets, telling the sun warmed Plentifulians of the healing found in the aromatic brew. But as the vacationing Plentifulians were followed to the land of Cocobliss by the kind Plentifulians who wished to learn the healing arts of the Sweet Night Namo, a small handful of the Sweet Night Namo healers were lured by the promise of Plentibucks to teach the foreigners how to use the Sweet Night Namo plant for medicinal healing.
The healers of Cocobliss were a bit confused at first by the Plentifulians because the Plentifulians only asked to be taught about how to make the delicious teas and warm Sweet Night Namo baths. They never asked about the Dark Red Soul Stone, or the Secret Quiet Moon Chants. And they never asked about the other, more complicated uses of the Sweet Night Namo. But this was okay with the healers of Cocobliss, in fact it felt to them that it was just as it should be. Because of course, they did not really want to share the entirety of their sacred medical knowledge with the strange Plentifulians. After all, it was rare to find even a Cocoblissian with whom they would really divulge their secrets. In fact, because none of the Plentifulians were fluent in the language of Coco, it would have been impossible to teach them the deeper healing arts even if they had asked. Even if a Plentifulian were to learn to speak Coco, it was unlikely that they would be able to speak in the medical terminology needed to convey the whole of ancient Cocobliss healing. Most Cocoblissians did not know the needed words, and the Cocoblissian novice healers would in fact, spend a great deal of time in their apprenticeships learning the language of healing. No, it would be impossible to truly teach the healing arts of Cocobliss to the Plentifulians.
The healers of Cocobliss were good people though, and the ones that enjoyed teaching the Plentifulians did their best to help the Plentifulians to make the most therapeutic sweet night namo teas, and the most deeply healing of Sweet Night Namo baths. The rare Plentifulians who asked deeper questions, and spent more time in the land of Cocobliss became very adept at the teas and baths, and came to feel that they had a strong understanding of them. They even felt that they could sense the best ways in which to use the teas and baths to help those in need. Eventually, these more serious students of the Sweet Night Namo began to teach it’s uses in their home land of Plentiful. They attracted small groups of wide eyed students who listened in enthusiastic attention to the lore of the Sweet Night Namo plant and the tales of the land from which it came. The Plentifulian teachers even began to write scrolls that explained how to be a Sweet Night Namo tea/bath healer. There was, however, a problem that the Plentifulians encountered when they taught and wrote their scrolls. The problem was that their audience would want to understand the Sweet Night Namo plant medicinae on a deeper level than the Plentifulians had been able to actually learn it. Since none of them spoke Coco, and none of them had actually devoted years of their lives in the single focused study of the novice healer, they did not really truly know the medical theory of the Sweet Night Namo. Many of them, in their ignorance, assumed that the Cocoblissians did not really have a very highly developed system of healing at all. They even went so far as to assume that the Cocoblissians had in fact, merely borrowed their medical knowledge from the well known medical system of the neighboring land of Nicespice.
Many scrolls had already been written about the ancient medicinae of Nicespice. And since there were indeed certain similarities and shared histories in Cocobliss medicinae and Nicespice medicinae, it was easy to think that the readily available information about medicinae in Nicespice, could be applied to the more esoteric medicinae of Cocobliss. And because the medicinae of Nicespice was relatively well known in Plentiful, it gave a certain credibility to the medicinae of Cocobliss to say that the two were really nearly almost the same. And so, with each new scroll that the Plentifulians wrote, and each new class that they taught, the myth that Cocobliss medicinae was merely a twist on Nicespice medicinae grew until it became known in the land of Plentiful as fact. The Plentifulians practiced their version of Sweet Night Namo healing, with a foundational underpinning of Nicespice medical theory, and only a vague thought given now and then to the Dark Red Soul Stone and the Secret Quiet Moon Chants. These two aspects of Cocoblissian healing were known about only in tattered threads, and were considered by the Plentifulians to be quite separate from the Sweet Night Namo healing, and perhaps, unimportant.
And so it came to be that the Plentifulians practiced and taught an incorrect and incomplete form of Sweet Night Namo healing. It was pleasant for the recipient, and indeed could be very therapeutic. It was, however, limited. Deeper and more specific healings were rarely attained, but most of the Plentifulians did not know what they were missing. Indeed, it would seem that they did not want to know. For every now and then there would come a Plentifulian who realized their error, but the others did not wish to hear of it, for they had become well known for their scrolls and curriculaes. They had reputations to protect that were based on the idea that they fully understood Cocoblissian medicinae and to question the overlapping of Nicespice theory would, well, possibly lead to very low sales in scrolls and curriculaes and would not be good for all the official organizations they had formed to support their work.
Back in the land of Cocobliss, the wise old Sweet Night Namo Healers just shook their heads in bewilderment at the antics of those strange foreign Plentifulians and went back to their business of healing with a fully developed system of medicinae that existed in it’s own right, quite different from the medicinae of Nicespice, despite their shared ancient histories.
And the Plentifulians? Did they ever learn the deeper mysteries of the Sweet Night Namo plant? Did they come to understand the connections of the Deep Red Soul Stone and the Secret Quiet Moon Chants? Did they come to see that Cocobliss medicinae was not the same as Nicespice medicinae? That my friend, is not yet known. The Plentifulians are still learning, still writing their story. But I have faith in them. They are, for the most part, people who wish to be the bearers of healing and truth. And besides, the need to understand more means more journeys to Cocobliss, and they love going to Cocobliss.

Author’s note
of course, Cocobliss is Thailand, Plentiful is the modern western world, and Nicespice is India. The Sweet Night Namo plant is Thai massage, the Dark Red Soul Stone is Thai herbalism, and the Secret Quiet Moon Chants are Thai animsim, shamanism, Buddhism. I was inspired to write this little tale by conversations with Pierce Salguero (author of many books on Thai medicine), and Wit Sukhsamran (student of T.T.M. extraordinaire) that opened the door to a room in my mind in which I stored my doubts about the validity of putting traditional Thai medicine always under the umbrella of Ayurveda and also my understanding of the degree to which western teachers of Thai massage (and the Thai schools/teachers that we learn from) are barely skimming the surface of a deep and complex medical system.