Touch to Expand Health & Consciousness
Touch creates life
For each one of us, touch was necessary to create our being. It is also the first sensory experience of our life. Pressure on our growing embryo helps provide the perfect support and stimulation for rapid development in our mother’s womb. This pressure intensifies to provide waves of force that thrust us out into this earth plane, where we first experience the touch of hands and arms that hold and caress and feed us, bathe and change us, nurture our needs with care and love. Touch is a key component of our very survival during this time.
As we mature into walking, talking toddlers we become aware of so many sensations of touch: the warm sun on our skin, the fur of the family dog so soft in our hands, cool slippery water washing over our body, the soft kisses of someone who loves us. Nurturing touch is pleasurable and enhances the flow of energy through our body. It generates vitality and creativity.
Touch can also introduce stress
Some types of touch are cues of danger that help us navigate safely, like the pain of a sharp edge or the heat of a stove. We may have the experience of touch that is negative rather than positive; this can range from mildly invasive touch such as the kick of a sibling or bite of a pet cat, all the way into the realm of physical trauma or sexual abuse. These kinds of touch cause excessive pressure that the body (and often mind) cannot easily accommodate. This leads to restriction that can create all kinds of disturbances in the flow of blood, nerve impulses, respiration, digestion…. hormones, meridians, chakras…. emotions, thoughts…. the ramifications spread throughout the whole system.
Part of living a human life is to have a gamut of experiences which form our matrix of being. We figure out how to work our way through all kinds of situations and often learn tons doing that. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s not, but the yearning for expansion never stops. However, some unresolved stresses layer themselves into our bodies, creating a complex web of compression. This can eventually stifle our life force to such an extent that we can no longer express or create with any vitality.
Using touch to facilitate freedom
When people show up in your treatment room they are turning to you for a touch that is truly unique. You offer not the touch of a friend, family member or lover, but touch that is applied therapeutically, touch that is designed to facilitate the flow of life force through the body and energy system. In shiatsu/shin tai we especially focus on applying a type of touch that mimics the pressure in the womb. We listen to the response of the body to know what pressure is just the right amount to stimulate growth and development. Too much can shut it down, too little doesn’t have enough impact to generate change.
Pressing on a tsubo, stretching someone’s shoulder or adjusting a vertebra without paying any attention to the boundaries and response of the receiver is not going to create much positive shift in the body. But to apply pressure and then listen, wait and respond with awareness - that’s a recipe for freedom. A bodywork practitioner can utilize this type of touch no matter what techniques or modality they use.
Shiatsu/shin tai touch is a potent gift for today’s world
Touch that is applied with care and skill is a potent gift. It can unwind stress, release strain, open up the flow of energy and expand perception. That’s why you’re here, reading this. You use your hands to facilitate freedom. With them you expand health and consciousness in those you touch and thus in the world around you.
Many cultures of the world have been gravitating away from physical contact and touch over the last years, with the pandemic accelerating this tendency. This is occurring as things seemingly spiral into more compression. Many people are coming to an acute stage of restriction physically, emotionally and mentally and are looking for ways to relieve some of this pressure. But maybe this is just the pressure we need, just the right amount, like when we were in our mother’s womb.
Perhaps it is not a mistake that we are here, right now, investigating touch. Perhaps this is all necessary in order that we figure some things out that so far have eluded our awareness. Perhaps we are on the right track after all, in the perfect position with the perfect amount of pressure to bring forth a new type of being who knows how to live in harmonic resonance with the planet and all its resident beings.