While giving me a massage to heal my arthritic hip, I interviewed Stella, the neighborhood manghihilot, an expert in the ancient form of healing massage. This is her story.

Stella, 62 years old, a veteran senior-citizen manghihilot, is as strong and active as ever in her old age. She is small, frail and dark, looking like a 45-year-old. She grew up in Sarrat, Ilocos Norte. Her tiny hands and fingers are so strong, she can give a massage for three straight hours.

From the age of five, she was trained by her grandfather in the art of "hilot" (healing massage), an ancient tradition that dates back to the pre-historic arrival of Malays from Indonesia and Burma, the so-called Austronesian Dispersal that started about 10,000 years ago.

It is handed down orally only to direct relatives. There are no written documents or primers. Manghihilots can be found in all ethnic groups — Tagalog, Bisayan, Ilocano, etc., — hinting that the ancient art was practiced extensively among Malays of the Austronesian Dispersal before they arrived in the Philippines.

That arrival took thousands of years of a slow migration. Hilot has survived centuries of colonizations and assimilations and lives today in small villages everywhere. It is, however, slowly dying because oral education is dying.

Stella is also trained in reflexology (Japanese) and Swedish massage. She combines all three culturally diverse healing massage traditions into a unique hybrid form. Hilot defies documentation because it is partly psychic, just like acupuncture. I asked Stella how she is able to locate and identify pinched nerves and cold muscles. She could not explain. She just "knew," implying an ancient psychic form of oral education.

Although Stella knew the art of hilot as a child, she did not practice it until she became an adult. I asked if she would perhaps forget all that she learned and she smiled and said that it was part of her forever, this psychic reality imbedded in her soul. Somehow, psychic oral education has a permanent character.

Stella has trained, as of this writing, about 80 people through the years, in Iloilo and parts of Mindanao. Her course takes about a month. A financier would pay for her food, transport and lodging — a round-trip air ticket, taxi fare to and from the airport, a first-class hotel, fine dining, a car to wherever she wants or needs to go, the works, on top of her P1,000 per day fee for 30 days, or a cool P30,000 a month.