Dr Dave's My Alternative Healing & Health Blog

Posts Tagged ‘zen shiatsu’

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.

The big resurgence in Eastern medicine over the preceding few years has focused on acupuncture and shiatsu, but these are just 2 of the disciplines related to Chinese medicine. It appears that there is a public reaction to modern medicine, in that chemicals (drugs) are overly prescribed, and there can be unwelcome consequences of the treatment. Eastern medicine and modern practices vary in various ways, but the most basic is the manner in which these two approaches view the human organism. The Eastern adherents, including those in India, China and Japan, operate on the concept of mind-body, which is to say that our human organism can’t be separated into mental, physical, spiritual and emotional sections, but must be thought of in it’s entirety, and treated accordingly. On this side of the world, the Western concept sees these facets of life as though they exist separately from the others. This split view of the human body can lead to damage in the long term.

Another large divergence between the two perspectives is that, even though this is gradually changing, Western medicine is mostly reactive while Eastern therapists focus on treatment before sickness. Loosely speaking, in the West we tend to go to the doctor when there is something wrong, and want rapid treatment to put us straight. In the East, it was the traditional role of a medical man to keep the body balanced and well, so that sickness didn’t occur. In ancient times, a doctor in China was paid for regular treatments, and the money was withheld if the patient became sick!

The major concept behind Chinese medicine concerns the life energy ‘chi’, which is the universal energy that passes through our bodies and everything thing else that exists in our universe. Equilibrium of this energy, or Yin-Yang, is crucial to our health, and when it becomes unbalanced, we get sick. All of the disciplines within the Chinese medicine concept are concerned with affecting this energy in assorted ways, including aromatherapy, homeopathy, reflexology, acupuncture and zen shiatsu, the latter 3 being very closely related.

Zen-shiatsu is developing well in most European countries, and variations in approach and application are springing up in France, such as the Shiatsu Toulouse branch. Reflexology could be named ‘shiatsu for the feet’, as it is a type of treatment applied with the fingers in the same manner as shiatsu. Acupuncture employs very fine needles to penetrate the skin at really precise places,which correspond to the channels of energy flow in the body, thereby regulating the flow. Shiatsu acts on exactly the same energy channels, or meridians, but employs pressure brought to bear by thumb, fingers, elbows, hands, feet and knees for re-distributing energy. The Shiatsu Toulouse style has a very gentle approach physically, but promotes deep reactions on the energetic level.