Shiatsu Shin Tai in Chester County PA

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Tuesday

16Feb2010

God, Do I Love My Job

Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 02:31PM

In case your notice of this escaped you somehow (in spite of the continuous twittering, blogging, facebooking and whatever else) I gave my Shiatsu for Lovers and Others class this weekend.

Two days, two locations, and much to my surprise, two full houses in each. (yay!)

In spite of the romantic overtones, being Valentine's Day and all, I did open it up to any combination of partners, because after all, this was shiatsu, not erotic massage or anything. But as it was, the enrollment consisted of eight married couples.

Couples (or at least half of the couple) who thought this was THE perfect thing to do for this holiday... learning how to give a shiatsu treatment to their partner (and then get one in return). And partners who were there more as a gift to their, um, wives (there I've said it) but still made a valiant effort, and for them I am doubly appreciative.

I did my best to make it special.

I printed up hand-outs and supplementary materials presented in these cool rose-embossed folders of pink and purple; I offered cheese and crackers, grapes, dates and chocolates (as promised!) and fancy-schmancy carbonated blood orange juice served in plastic martini glasses.

I made up a gift bag for one couple to to be able to reproduce the experience later... consisting of "The Book of Shiatsu", a special aromatherapy candle, some other stuff and a free shiatsu session.

And then the class.

Given the theme and the time constraints, I really had to distill into a few short paragraphs what I felt was relevant for the class to know, as the demo portion would take up most of the time.

I honed in more on the healing aspects of loving and therapeutic touch, rather than the particulars of shiatsu, but I found even that could have filled an entire weekend. Which is is very exciting to me, as the wheels are now turning in regards to an entire weekend workshop next year.

And I certainly wil be exploring this more in blog posts to come, if not a whole online course.

But anyway, it was a joy to me to see these people, most who had hardly even heard of shiatsu, kneeling by their partners, coming from their haras to give wonderful shiatsu pressure... sneaking in kisses and cuddles, while I tried not to grin too noticeably.

I learned a lot as well... remarkably how much touch is a form of communication (duh.. I know, right? But to see it in action..), and how much more there is to say about this vast topic.

Which I will. I am very excited. And again, very grateful for what I do and for the people who allow me to do it.

Oh look, pictures of happy people!! (I'm the shorty in the middle...)

February 13th, Lionville Holistic Health CenterFebruary 14th, Creative Healing Arts

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Wednesday

27Jan2010

Letters to a Young Therapist

Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 07:53AM

(It's only take me almost three years to finally figure out that a great place to get blog ideas is in my search queries. Hopefully that person will return to find that there is now matching content...)

Here's one I discovered yesterday (and only caused me to chuckle a little):

"Can I make a living being a shiatsu practitioner?"

My first snide and unhelpful response would be:

"Define 'a living'."

My second would be:

"I'll let you know when I get there."

But seriously. Here's my advice .. ala' Rilke:

Dear Shiatsu Practitioner Wanna-be,

I would suggest first asking yourself why you're considering this as a livelihood.

Is it just something that sounds to you like a cool and glamorous way make some money? (It is, and what follows is not meant to be discouraging, but...)

The reality. Your income is in direct proportion to your session hours. You work on 15 people in a week, you get paid for 15 people in a week. You only book one or two clients in a week (one of whom decides to cancel) and guess what?

It gets a little tricky concerning financial planning, and knowing when exactly to quit your day job.

"So, then, I just get a bunch of clients. I mean, I work 40 hours in my cubicle job. That's 40 times... (wait, I remember paying $70 for the last shiatsu I got)... that's like $2800 a week!"

Easy there, friend.

First off all it takes time to build a client base. And by time, I mean hours, days, months tirelessly spent marketing and promoting yourself. Time spent building experience, and trust, and relationships, and a good reputation so others will help spread the word of how fabulous you are.

Time which you don't get paid directly for. Think of it more like ... an investment.

In addition to the 5 year statistic of how long it takes to get a business into the black, (did I mention this would be a business?) I think the rule of thumb is that for every client session hour, you invest an hour and a half of behind-the-scenes time: marketing (because clients come and go like the weather, and you gotta keep 'em coming in) client maintenance, bookkeeping, and quite possibly, learning how to do all that stuff to begin with.

So, good news: yes, it's a full-time job. But perhaps not in the way you thought.

Unless you work for someone else. In which case, they do all the leg work, carry the overhead, and you get paid less. Possibly for more hours. And less flexibility.

And regarding that you-get-paid-only-for-the-hours-you-work-on-people thing? It's physical work. Sometimes even emotionally draining and heavy.

And there's only so many hours you can do in a week if you want to avoid injury and/or serious mind-boggling burn-out.

And you gotta be on. Whether you feel like it or not. Whether you just had a fight with your spouse, or got cut off in traffic, or have PMS or whatever. Your client is counting on you to be there for them... to be their therapist. Not vice versa.

Sure, there are are superhumans out there ... maybe you're one of them.

But for most mortals, I believe, again, the rule of thumb (pun totally intended) is around 15 session hours a week, if you want to keep doing this for a while.

"But still, that's like $1000 a week!"

Yes, it is. Which, if you budget properly and learn good business sense you may then have enough to cover your liability insurance, rent, marketing, advertising, slump times, vacation weeks, sick days, continuing education, utilities, promotional materials, and possibly even some groceries!

Oh, and bodywork for yourself. 'Cause you're gonna need it.

"Okay, so why the hell would I want to do this? Can people actually make a living in this profession?"

Like I said, that was not to discourage you, but to get the point out of the way that it's not all sparkles and sunshine.

It is, however, about making a life, not just a living.

A lovely platitude. Yet this is why I asked the initial question: why are you considering this?

You may not even realize or have conscious intentions of how profoundly becoming a shiatsu practitioner can change your life. But it can.

Choosing this profession has the potential to give you much more than a job. Much more than a career.

It becomes, as the Buddha talks about, Right Livelihood: a trade that not only refrains from hurting other living things, but one in which you are dedicated to their healing and well-being.

You develop a sense of compassion and empathy for the suffering of others. You become aware of your own suffering and find a path by which to heal it so you can be of greater service, and regain your own sense of wholeness.

You enter into a profession that, at its profoundest level, is holy communication of the heart and soul.

You experience the joy of having helped another human being feel relief from pain and freedom from limiting patterns so they can live their lives a little more fully.

You can elevate your own sense of self-worth by what you now have to offer to our human community ... a skill of tremendous value that will never be obsolete, that will never outlive its usefulness, and that can never be replaced by technology (no matter what all those shiatsu chair ads may say.)

And you can sleep better at night knowing that this.... this is what you do for a living.

The monetary compensation is essential, yes, but as you can see, such a small part of the overall fulfillment picture should you choose this path for yourself.

Having said that, it is important that it be a profitable occupation for you, not least of all, so you can keep on doing it.

Once you have allowed your heart and mind to be given over to Shiatsu as a Life Path, you may find yourself making use of other related talents and gifts so as to expand on your practice.

Offshoots such as teaching, offering workshops, hiring yourself out for corporate chair massage, writing blogs :) and books. Creating art. Expanding your practice to such an extent that you can hire other people.

There will always be opportunities for expressions of the core healing message available to the creative and passionate person.

So, long answer to your short question:

Yes, it is totally possible.

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Monday

14Dec2009

When Worlds Collide

Monday, December 14, 2009 at 11:54AM

So, I did this podcast last week, with friend and fellow unschooler, Amy Childs, on her show, Whatever Whatever Amen.

I wrote a little about that here, but one thing I was not able to fully get to during our time chatting together was this budding realization of some of the similarities between the unschooling philosophy and the holistic healing philosophy.

Which is kinda cool.

As I'll be going more in the whole unschooling thing on the onlyhuman blog in the months to come, I won't dwell on it here, but here are some key "Parallels I've Noticed" between how humans learn and how humans heal.

Trust.

In education, not to mention parenting, there seem to be two main camps concerning human nature. One is that we are born flawed and must be continually educated, trained, guided, and sometimes cattle-prodded, if necessary, into becoming productive members of society.

Without the extrinsic motivation, and if left to our own devices, we would resort to our basest self-serving impulses, and given the choice, would wile away the hours in front of the xBox.

The other camp believes in the intrinsic sociality of humans, trusting that we come into the world hard-wired to learn all we can in order to fit in to our tribe, and to seek our purpose and passion.

Prodding is unnecessary, perhaps even counterproductive, but positive expectations and healthy modeling are critical and provide all the impetus a human needs to grow into his full potential.

Like this latter perspective, holistic-types tend to trust that the human body in an intelligent, self-healing organism, needing only the right environment, conditions and stimulus under which to regenerate and thrive.

Rhythm.

Contrary to how how public school system and the work world at large is set up, humans, being a part of the natural world, are just as much subject to rhythm -- the ebbing and flowing and what-have-you -- as everything else in nature.

We do not learn naturally in a linear fashion... at least not most of us... and our growth tends to occur in spurts followed by periods of absorption, contemplation, and a great deal of 'behind the scenes processing' (often mistaken for 'daydreaming').

Same goes for the healing process. We have periods of drought, the occasional blessed Aha! moments, movement forward, regression, and then the scaling of new plateaus.

True healing and wellness success sometimes require that we cycle through past experiences, and that we recognize that some things cannot be addressed just through will alone ... losing weight for example.

We would also attain a level of peace with our bodies if we recognized that, like everything in nature, we are subject to environment, seasons, hormones, and age, all of which are about rhythm.

Connection, Relevance and Ownership.

I've lumped these together because I perceive a lot of overlap here. But these qualities are always what provide that magical spark which takes 'learning' into the realm of 'knowing'. This is what makes learning or doing anything really a joy and a passion, even if it's majorly challenging.

The standard educational model has been founded on compartmentalization and seemingly arbitrary timetables determined by educational experts and logical rational.

Has this had any more of a profound effect than the one of totally sucking the joy out of learning anything? Not to mention removing us from the learning process itself.

We are now passive subjects and receptacles, and have to be trained or enticed or threatened even, to do something we would have joyfully done anyway.

I see little difference in the way we approach our own health. We rely on experts to tell us what we need to do, what to eat, what we feel, and even while seeking those professional opinions, we resist acting on them, as self-care has now become an item on the to-do list, much like dreaded geometry homework.

How many people have I have heard say, "I know I 'should' be exercising more... (or eating better, or I always sucked at math, or I don't care for history, or....) but..." Statements like these are usually tinged with guilt, and some degree of self-loathing and a sense of failure.

How is this helpful?

It seems that from an early age we learn to give away our power to those more 'qualified' than we, as well as our autonomy over how and what we learn, and what is best for us and our bodies.

When we are not trusted from the get-go, we learn not to trust ourselves.

There's something about making the internal connections between what we know in our heads as information and what we know in our hearts to be true... what those connections are exactly remain a mystery to me, though I've felt that 'cha-chunk' feeling (as Mark Silver describes it) when heart and mind are in alignment, and even the most daunting challenges lose their, um, daunting-ness.

And, there's something about owning the learning process that makes it stick for us, in no way that prodding or self-discipline ever could.

How is it that a baby suddenly becomes obessesed with the desire to join the ranks of the upright, so determined that will attempt nothing else besides pulling themselves up and falling down day after day until he masters it? And all without toddling classes! (Though I wouldn't be surprised if they do exist.)

A tiny person will defy the laws of gravity unaided, and master complex human speech, but still can't be trusted to learn to read or add and subtract without drills and a timetable.

How did we come to this? How can we get back to reclaiming our own inner knowing?

I suppose I could beat you over the head with this point, and perhaps I will in future posts.

For now, however, the question in my mind is how can the unschooling philosophy better help me support my clients and readers?

*****

PS... After writing all this, I drove my kids to the dentist, where I happened to pick up a recent issue of Time Magazine lying face down next to me in the waiting room.

This oddly appropriate article was featured on the front cover, which I'll leave for you to read, but one line serendipitously seemed to hint at the question I left hanging above at the end of my post:

"...research suggests the brain in its relaxed state is more creative, makes more nuanced connections, and is ripe for eureka moments."

Yeah. Exactly. More to come....

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Sunday

04Oct2009

Energywork or Bodywork?

Sunday, October 4, 2009 at 08:04PM

I've often referred to myself as a bodyworker. Which sometimes has had the effect of giving the impression that I work on cars.

That confusion aside, there has also been the reference made to shiatsu as energy work, I suppose because the primary intention is on the meridians and therefore, ki flow, and therefore, energy flow throughout the body.

But, unlike say, Reiki, shiatsu often does require applying pressure to the body as well as using other physical techniques.

So, which is it?

Well, if you want to get technical, some would say that our bodies are energy. And that we actually have other, more etheric bodies that extend out far beyond our physical boundaries. It is in these bodies that our 'stuff' develops, and only when those issues aren't addressed, do they manifest in the denser physical body as illness.

One piece of writing I came across referred to our physical bodies as the 'energetic trash can' for our spiritual, mental and emotional layers. It also notes, as I've written about before, that our central nervous system is the interface between the denser physical and lighter outer bodies. If you can visualize the CNS as an antenna of sorts... bringing in vibratory information from the 'external' world to affect the tissues, organs, muscles and bodily functions, as well as sending out vibrations like a tuning fork, you can get a sense of the intention of the shin tai work I do, which is to clear any restrictions and stuckness from around the spine, within which the spinal cord and the CNS signals travel (as well as one of the main trunks of the meridian system, the Governing Vesel).

So, I guess, long story short, the body really is energy, and what we do to the body affects the energy. (And likewise, what we do to the energy affects the body..)

Like to read more about this stuff? Check out Saul Goodman's book, "Light Body Activation: Science, Dialogue & Non-Practices for Interactive Evolution".

Can a Shiatsu Massage Chair Do THIS?

Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 08:28AM

(But first, a small confession. I did buy one of these for my husband... actually a cushion that is placed on a chair with little whirling thingys that dig into the back muscles. I did this so he could get some degree of relief, without relying on me to have time to work on him. Just wanted to mention that to show I'm not TOTALLY at odds with machinery.)

It slices, it dices, it juliennes, whatever that is..Ahem. Back to my rant.

Thanks to the wonders of Google alerts, I come across many MANY reviews, ads, testimonials for shiatsu massage chairs. Almost all of them will tell you that a massage chair does everything an actual shiatsu practitioner can do, and, as one ad states:

"It's like having a live-in massage therapist who doesn't bill by the hour!"

Indeed.

I suppose some chairs are way better than others, and I will concede that it's really nice to be able to relieve some serious stuckness and pain just by relaxing into a piece of furniture in your own home.

I guess I'm just taking some small personal offense at the suggestion that a chair can be just as good as caring human touch.

Is it all about the convenience and money-savings?

Shiatsu, as I understand it, is more about the connection between people. The communication. The listening part, especially. The part where I take in your story, both the words and the vibrations, and I hold it gently, offering back what I hear, so you can be clearly aware of where you are.

Shiatsu is about reading the body like a well-loved book... dog-eared, and worn around the edges, but full of intrigue and drama, love and loss, pain and delight.

Shiatsu is about finding those places where you carry your wordly 'stuff', and those places that you keep locked away and hidden, all the while inviting your body to make peace and balance between them. Even if just for today. To remind you what it feels like to be really in your body. To breathe. To feel. To let go.

Shiatsu is about challenging your boundaries, just a little, and with respect... encouraging movement just beyond what you believe to be your limits, opening up new possibilities. It's about illuminating a different perspective on how to view your life situation, and learning a new language to describe it.

If a chair can do all that, then by all means, go for it. (And please, do be sure to give me the number of the company who makes it.)

I know massage chairs do have their place. In fact, I wouldn't mind seeing them in more situations: long airline flights, passenger seats of teen drivers, hair salons, dentist offices, the DMV... anyplace where people are subjected to sitting anxiously for long periods of time.

And I also understand that with ever-improving innovations, chairs can replicate a lot of the releasing and massaging techniques that a practitioner's hands can employ... offering immense and immediate relief from muscle aches and pains, stress... improving circulation, lymph flow, skin tone, and more.

At least on the back side of your body. (Yay! Score another one for the humans!)

I guess I really don't expect to be replaced by machinery, no matter how efficient or computerized ... I mean, would you really want a robot digging into your hara?

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