Zen Flow™

Our own deep tissue, used on every body massage at both studios.Deep tissue usually means bracing. The pressure lands on one small spot, pushes in, and you hold your breath until it moves on.

Zen Flow™ is our own deep tissue, and it does not work that way. The weight is spread wide before it goes deep, the strokes run long and hand off to one another, and your breathing sets the tempo. It reaches the same depth. You simply stop flinching.

Is this just deep tissue with a name on it?

Fair question. The honest answer is that Zen Flow™ is deep tissue. What is different is how the depth gets there.

Conventional deep tissue is a series of arrivals. The therapist finds a spot, works it, lifts off, and finds the next one. Every arrival is a small shock, and the body answers a shock by tightening. That is why so many people leave sore and call the soreness proof that it worked.

Zen Flow™ never arrives. A stroke starts light, deepens through the middle, and passes into the next stroke before it lifts. Nothing lands, so nothing braces. The muscle stays open, and open muscle takes depth that a guarded one refuses.

The four parts

Every therapist here learns these four, in this order. A session moves through them in the same order.

One. Broad before narrow.

The first passes carry the same weight over more of you at once. Pressure that is spread is less likely to trip the reflex that makes a muscle guard, so it tends to reach the layer underneath without the sharp edge.

Then comes the narrow work, and this is the part people tend to remember. Thumbs find the knot itself, and they find it in a muscle that has already let go. The same pressure that would have made you flinch in the first minute is welcome in the tenth. Going broad first is what earns the thumb its room.

Two. Strokes that connect.

A stroke ends where the next one begins. There is no lifting off and starting again. Worked this way, the back stops being a set of separate complaints and starts behaving like one surface. The nervous system tends to settle instead of bracing for the next touch.

Three. Breath sets the tempo.

Your therapist works with your breathing, not against it. Pressure deepens as you breathe out, when a muscle tends to meet it with less guarding, and eases as you breathe in. Nobody has to tell you to relax. The timing does most of the work.

Four. The body is one piece.

A tight shoulder is rarely only a shoulder. The work follows the line: shoulder into neck, hip into lower back, calf into hamstring. What is connected gets treated, not only what hurts.

Where it comes from

Zen Flow™ was built here, in our own rooms, by therapists working on people from the San Gabriel Valley. It did not come out of a book. But the depth in it has a long address.

The hand technique underneath Zen Flow™ is tui na. The name is two of its own movements: tui means to push, na means to grasp and lift. It is one of the oldest branches of Chinese medicine and has been used for more than two thousand years. For most of that time it went by an older name, an mo, which means press and rub. Tui na is the name that stuck from the Ming dynasty onward.

It was never folk practice. China's imperial medical school taught massage as a department of its own from the Sui dynasty, which began in the year 581. Acupuncture did not get a department until the dynasty after. For a few hundred years, hands were the senior subject.

That tradition reached this valley the way everything else here did, with people. In 1970 the San Gabriel Valley was about two percent Asian. Monterey Park became the first majority Asian city in the continental United States in 1990, and nine valley cities are majority Asian today, Diamond Bar among them. The doctors, the herbs, the needles and the hands all travelled together.

Serenity Zen was founded by Dr. Nick, DAOM L.Ac., a Doctor of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine and a California Licensed Acupuncturist. The depth in our massage comes from the long lineage of tui na.

What we added is the flow. The long connected strokes are closer to Swedish work than to anything in a classical tui na text. Putting the two together, and then teaching the result to every therapist in the building, is the part that is ours.

You set the pressure

Not once at the start. Whenever you want it different.

The pressure changes in the middle of a stroke rather than at the end of one. That is the part that takes training, and it is the reason you never have to wait for a good moment to speak up. Say lighter. Say deeper. Say stay there. That is the whole instruction.

Every therapist here is trained in it

Every therapist at Serenity Zen is CAMTC certified. That means at least 500 hours of training at an approved school. One hundred of those hours cover anatomy, physiology, contraindications, health and hygiene, and ethics. It also means a background check with the California Department of Justice and the FBI.

Then they learn Zen Flow™, here, before they take a guest.

That is why it is consistent. The session you liked in West Covina is the session you get in Diamond Bar.

What to book

Zen Flow™ is how every body massage here is done, so you do not need to ask for it by name. Choose a body massage, or a combination that opens with foot reflexology and moves to the body, and tell your therapist how deep you want it.

Longer sessions are not more of the same. They are the same method with room to finish properly.

Where to book

West Covina, 423 N Azusa Ave
Diamond Bar, 1168 S Diamond Bar Blvd

Both studios keep the same hours. Open daily, 10 AM to 9 PM. Booking ahead holds the time you want.

Book West Covina  Book Diamond Bar

Zen Flow™ is the deep tissue massage method used on every body massage and every combination at both Serenity Zen studios in the San Gabriel Valley, including sessions that pair foot reflexology with body work. Serenity Zen opened in West Covina in 2012 and in Diamond Bar in 2018.