Shiatsu & Qigong Experiences

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Shiatsu experiences usually revolve around the receiver.   Here’s a change:

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A recent interesting, if not riveting read (worth persevering for the gems), contains the description of a potter’s (the author) relationship with pots.   It echoes some of my feelings when giving shiatsu.  Just replace “pots” with “people”!

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All this matters because my job is to make things.  How objects get handled, used and handed on is not just a mildly interesting question for me.   It is my question.  I have made many, many thousands of pots.  I am very bad at names, I mumble and fudge, but I am good on pots.  I can remember the weight and the balance of a pot, and how its surface works with its volume.  I can read how an edge creates tension or loses it.  I can feel if it has been made at speed or with diligence.  If it has warmth.  I can see how it works with the objects that sit nearby.  How it displaces a small part of the world around it.  I can also remember if something invited touch with the whole hand or just the fingers, or was an object that asked you to stay away.  It is not that handling something is better than not handling it.  Some things in the world are meant to be looked at from a distance and not fumbled around with.

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Excerpt from the preface of The Hare with Amber Eyes, author Edmund de Waal

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Client Comments:

 

I rarely share feedback from clients.   Both positive and negative comments need to be put in context. However just can't resist sharing messages that two of my current clients recently sent:

 

"Felt really chilled, haven't felt so at ease in my body for years."

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"Previously the “at rest” pain score was around 2-4.  At the moment it is probably 0.5.  I had the best night’s sleep I’ve had in months, going to sleep at around 11pm, and apart from a visit to the bathroom in the night, didn’t wake up until 9.15 (good thing I don’t have a job to go to!).  I’m not pushing it of course but even if it’s only a few day’s respite, then that is wonderful."

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"Hi Kim, for the first time in two years I am straight and feel twenty years younger!"

 

 

At a Shiatsu College graduation, a teaching colleague, Nick Pole, gave an inspirational reading to our new graduates.   Nick read a short extract from a book entitled "Teach Us To Sit Still" by Tim Parks.   The extract was a description of Tim's experience of receiving shiatsu.   I was blown away and decided I had to read the book myself.   Its brilliant, read it!   Here is a little taster, I've no doubt more extracts will appear:

 

"It can't do any harm," my wife Rita said.   I had a mental block about massage.   Perhaps I associated it with laziness and self-indulgence, or with things oriental and threatening.   Perhaps I was scared of being touched.

 

"Shiatsu is not massage," Ruggero (the shiatsu practitioner) corrected me.   "Its a form of therapy through touch and pressure."   He talked about meridians and yin and yang as if they were as real as red and white blood cells, nerves and skin tissue, not just words, inventions, stories.   I decided to humour him.

 

Ruggero loved to talk about these things, none of them remotely demonstrable.   But when he started to touch me all talking ended.   When he took hold of a leg, or arm, his hands immediately transmitted reassurance and knowledge.   You were held, and he was knowing you through touch.   It was all new to me and I have to say beautiful, even moving.   Emotions moved in me like mud stirred with a stick.   "Let go," he murmured lifting my head.   They were the only words he spoke.

 

Before and after the treatment, I let him talk for a while about reinforcing this or that meridian, or draining energy from the upper or lower body.   It was mumbo-jumbo.   At the same time I trusted his hands absolutely.   I knew those hands knew things.   It seemed better not to try and say exactly what.