Katja Schneider, Bio - experience

Katja started travelling around the world in 2009, after she finished the High School in Germany. The first time her travels lead her to Australia, where she lived and worked in different places along the Australian East Coast for one year.
Falling in love with Melbourne she wanted to stay there for longer. This made her study a course in Tourism Management at a Melbourne based college. Here she wanted to come closer to her dream of travelling the world.
After finishing her course in July 2012, Katja decided to travel again, starting from Melbourne, hitch hiking up the Australian East Coast her way to Far North Queensland. Here she came more and more in touch with nature, through WWOOFING ("willing workers on organig farms") and wild camping experiences.
When she was 22 years old, Katja heard for the first time consciously about the ancient science of Ayurveda. This made her curious about the medicinal properties of the plant kingdom and she was starting to focus on a naturopathical/herbology path. Reading books whenever possible and discovering more ways of living with nature through various WWOOFING experiences, the dream grew inside Katja that she wanted to know more about the ancient ways of healing sciences.
Travelling to Mongolia in March and April 2013 brought her more in touch with the Asian way of generousity and simplicity. She felt connected to the people and their beautiful heart warming and easy going temper.
In August 2013, Katja visited her home country Germany, giving often massages to her family members which were very much enjoyed from both parties.
The friend of the family who was from Thailand and who was practicing Thai Massage in the local village, recommended Katja to study Thai Massage once she reaches Thailand. This was a seed planted in her mind. The spontanious decision came up to eventually travel to India. This journey began in September 2013 in New Delhi. Here she started to travel the North of India, living in the Ved Niketan Ashram in Ram Jhula, Rishikesh for two months and practicing Yoga on a regular basis. This was a very profound experience as it was a new discovery of the feeling for the body.
In the further travels around India, Katja connected again with her previous idea of studying Ayurveda. Reading books of David Frawley, meeting other Ayurveda students and seeing Ayurvedic practices all around, she came back to her previous dream of studying Ayurvedic Massage and the teachings.
When she eventually reached the South of India, Katja went to a small town named Kannur, in the state of Kerala, where she began a one month course in Abhyanga Massage, Ayurvedic Face and Head Massage, Kalari Marma Massage and Panchakarma treatment techniques.
The course covered the different types of Doshas, how to determine the body constitution of each individual person, the Pulse reading techniques and the five subdivisions of each Vata, Pitta and Kapha.
In this course Katja felt that she got a perfect base in understanding the basic and fundamental principles of the universe connected to Ayurveda. As Ayurveda is a science of life and is as infinite as life itself, it is connected to a neverending process of learning and studying.
Yet there is many parts of plant treatments and herbology that are still to be studied and I am so curious and excited to learn these too!
After six months of travelling through India, my Visa finished and I had to leave the country.
Hearing more and more about Thai Massage while my last month in Goa, South India, I was getting curious and getting closer to this next dream of studying the ancient art of Dr Shivagos Thai Massage.
Arriving in Chiang Mai in March 2014, Katja began her study in Thai Reflexology Foot Massage with a local business named Sabai De Kaa. After this course she spent a month of enjoying the north of beautiful Thailand, travelling to Laos as well to renew the Thai Visa and finally returning back to Chiang Mai in April 2014 where she began her study of Thai Massage in a family based business, the Khunchamnan family. Here she had a one on one training with the teacher Nok, who had been taught through generations of her family the ancient art of Thai Massage.
Studying a basic and an advanced course in Thai Massage, Katja learned many different techniques, ways and positions of massaging the body and releasing energy blockages by massaging some of the many different energy lines, named Sen in Thai Pali language.
Staying in Thailand, Chiang Mai for a further three months, she got to know many other friends who were studying Thai Massage as well and together they practiced with each other in their free time.
Katja returned back to Europe in the summer of 2014, having also learned a style of knotmaking jewlwery, named Macrame, she began her travels to SUN festival in Hungary and Boom Festival in Portugal. Meeting like minded people on this journey, the passion for the newly learned skills grew.
In November 2014 Katja went off to new shores to explore Mexico. Here she began a job as a massage therapist in a hotel Spa in Tulum on the Caribbean coast. This job gave her massage experience a big push as she had to massage several people every day, developing many new techniques and skills.
In Tulum finally she met Edgar. He was already living there in a paradisaic community where he was practicing and teaching Yoga and giving Thai Massage.
The two discovered their equality in the passion for these ancient practices and started practicing and learning together and from each other.

Continue reading the story in the next chapter " Welcome"