Dr Dave's My Alternative Healing & Health Blog

Posts Tagged ‘well being’

Amongst the popular alternative health treatments available, Zen Shiatsu is perhaps the most pragmatic and understandable. Other methods, like Reiki for example, take a leap of understanding and faith to appreciate, but Zen Shiatsu is founded in physics, believe it or not. Even though both therapies work with energy flow inside the body, and how this should be balanced for health, a Reiki therapist claims to channel universal energy out of or into the human organism. You can even pay a therapist to send you a Reiki, which seems a little out of the ordinary, when all said and done. Because of these observations, Reiki retains too much pretend spiritualism, and likewise leads people to think that there is an aspect of supernatural or magical connotations to the practice – this is neither the reality, nor healthy for any one concerned.

A training course for Reiki can be brief, even though many years are needed before you are a ‘master’. Of course, like all therapies, there are self-proclaimed experts. Zen Shiatsu courses are well planned and comprehensive, requiring a lot of practice and rigorous examinations after each year. What is the foundation of Zen Shiatsu? Theoretically, every thing that exists consists of energy, which is balanced, and is important to the harmony of every thing on the physical level. It’s been postulated that even the atoms in solid matter are really packets of energy that give the quality of appearing solid as we interact with it. The human body is made of the same universal energy, pulsating at various frequencies, and more or less in balance.

A Japanese psychologist named Masanuga showed that energy flows around the human body in definite meridians or channels. The flow of this energy can be stimulated or blocked using pressure from the fingers, and so make the energy levels more balanced. When this energy life force is out of balance in our bodies, then sickness results. Zen Shiatsu is very valuable as a preventative medicine tool, and is fast becoming popular in the West. The therapy holds dear the Eastern idea of one body-mind, rather than treating the different aspects of human life in abstract sections, like mental, physical, emotional and spiritual – they are closely related and one doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s good sense to treat ailments at this basic energetic level, because it affects all aspects of our mind-body functionality.

Although it isn’t really a massage system in the strictest sense, Zen Shiatsu is decidedly a hands on therapy. Therapists may use fingers, thumbs, elbows, knees and feet to give gentle pressure to the energy channels.