Working with Shiatsu 1: It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it

CHAPTER 7 Working with Shiatsu 1


It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it


When we begin to practice Shiatsu, our intention is often wholly altruistic. We want to help and heal, to do good. If we are honest with ourselves, there may be other considerations as well, but for most of us the desire to help others is primary. We approach our work from this perspective, focusing on identifying meridians and points, practicing skills and techniques, keen to master Hara diagnosis and increase our knowledge of the theory. Strangely, after the first blissful couple of classes in which we crawl happily on our equally happy receivers, while looking forward to increasing our knowledge and practicing until we understand what we are doing, we begin to lose the joy and relaxation we originally experienced. Straining to ‘feel something’, we may find we feel nothing at all. As our knowledge increases, we often lose our confidence.


Referring back to Chapter 4 ‘How does Shiatsu work?,’ we can see that a Shiatsu session is an interaction of fields, the giver’s and receiver’s.



Enjoying Ourselves


This is a key feature of energetic bodywork. When we are working to supply Ki to a part of the receiver that needs it, or making a connection that is beneficial for the receiver, we will feel it in ourselves as pleasure, the ‘charm of Qi’ as the ancient Chinese writings call it. This feeling is of a particular kind, more than the pleasure of a good stretch, and certainly different from the mental satisfaction of ‘doing it correctly’. It is tranquil, nourishing and exciting at the same time, and it resonates throughout our field.


When we first begin to practice, we do not usually perceive this feeling as more than general enjoyment and the sense of greater well-being after having given Shiatsu. With increasing experience, we can pinpoint the feeling to the moments of optimum connection with the receiver’s ‘upright Ki’, the moments when we have found the right tsubo, the right angle and the right level of connection. At this stage, the feeling of pleasure can act as a guide to our Shiatsu, an inner teacher which tells us where we can work most effectively, because it does not occur when we are treating in a routine fashion, without awareness of ourselves and our connection with our receiver.


This mode of treatment could be called ‘follow your bliss’; I sometimes call it ‘selfish Shiatsu’ – jokingly, as it is not in the ordinary run of selfish activities to spend an hour leaning on another person in order to benefit them! But it is oriented towards ourselves as well as the receiver, it acknowledges our own participation in a mutual process from which our own pleasure is not excluded, and it encourages us to observe our own sensations.



Being Aware of Ourselves


Our body, our sensations and our field are our Shiatsu diagnostic equipment, which is why we need to keep them healthy and balanced so that they can give us as much information as possible, and why we also need to pay attention to the information which comes from them. However, our sensations are also the source of our subjective experience of our own lives, and so we may be reluctant to accept the information they bring us when we are concentrating on another person. There are two points to bear in mind when we make our own sensations and experience an important part of our Shiatsu session:



• When we give Shiatsu we are not experiencing our sensations in the same way as we do in our everyday lives. Our experience in a Shiatsu session happens in a particular context in which our only responses can be whether to touch, where to touch and how to touch.


• The information that comes to us as ‘intuition’ in the course of a Shiatsu session is not the creation of fantasy because we do not follow it except in the clearly defined arena of whether to touch, where to touch and how to touch. But we are experiencing information which has not necessarily come from our conscious intellect. As mentioned on p. 25, 11 million bits of information (minimum estimate) are received by the brain each second, of which 50 (maximum estimate) are brought into consciousness.



As givers of Shiatsu, we have a commitment to be as aware as possible (in a relaxed way) of all the sensations we can perceive during the course of a session, including sensations that are hard to pin down. A well-known Shiatsu teacher from the US, the late Pamela Hannay, once described this kind of subtle sensation as ‘the lights go up and the music changes’. The sense is that something has changed; we may not know what, but we can still respond.


This is a theme to which we return time and time again in this book. The commonest obstacle to development in our Shiatsu, one shared even by gifted and experienced practitioners, is that we do not focus enough attention on the sensations we receive in practice, and in consequence we lose valuable information. More often than not, we do not allow ourselves to recognize our sensations because of lack of confidence or fear of fantasizing, and in consequence we lose much of our effectiveness.


Since the sensations that we experience in a Shiatsu session are part of a shared field, it is possible that some of them will show us something about ourselves as well as the receiver. For this reason, ‘being aware of ourselves’ is a practice that we should take outside the session and the treatment room, so that in the session itself we can easily identify the sensations that reflect our own state rather than the receiver’s. The meditation and breathing practices in the previous chapter will help with this, supported by an ongoing, relaxed attentiveness to our experience as we go about our lives. More on this subject on p. 53.

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Sep 4, 2016 | Posted by in MANUAL THERAPIST | Comments Off on Working with Shiatsu 1: It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it

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