How will you cure?
Some questions are good, and this is one of them. How will I cure? Paying attention to and showing an interest in the others, taking them to heart, engaging with them. I will take care of people who will approach shiatsu offering a listening ear and quality of ‘pressure’. I will try to help build a sense of ‘personal coherence’ and of ‘union of mind and body’. Working in tandem with medical treatments, shiatsu, as one of the cures of the future, can facilitate the promotion of health and self-care with activities of support, stimulus, rebalance that develop salutogenic processes.
The period in which we have had to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic by social distancing has highlighted the need to take care of ourselves, since we have all been subject to inactivity, strong emotions, stress, etc. We will therefore have to resew our existences.
Shiatsu can do that and be the protagonist of a change and a social evolution in the health sector and, as a consequence, of a ‘integrated approach to cure’. Health is one of the community’s basic resources, and everybody’s right. That’s why the changes in progress at social level require an adjustment of the concept of health itself, and shiatsu reveals all the potential it can offer in order to develop a concept of cure centred on the person, on the basis of its practical, methodological, educational, experiential and ideological contributions.
We need to focus on the ‘continuum of care’, which entails both pathogenic and salutogenic processes. Cure systems involve in fact both health care professionals, who specifically target degenerative and pathologic processes, and non-health care professionals, like shiatsu operators, who facilitate rebuilding, regenerative and adaptive – i.e. salutogenic – processes.
Shiatsu, a body mediation technique, is a practice characterised by a perpendicular, continuous, progressive and static pressure able to reactivate the different phases of a person’s existence by rebalancing their vital energy. The receiver gains greater harmony and centring, which facilitate the salutogenic processes. Shiatsu maintains its ancient features, but this doesn’t prevent its contemporaneity. It’s defined as ‘a healing art’ and, like with art, old styles never become obsolete, but they keep being enjoyable and offering opportunities for development. We’ll have to sustain the modality of analysis and synthesis, in which synthesis is ‘pressure in the right place’, which encourages the expression of beauty in both who receives the pressure and who exerts it. I will keep curing, conscious that each of us has a different type of beauty, a personal style.
It’s important to consider the environment we live in, as we often forget that our first habitat is our body, which is our house. Shiatsu takes care of our house, which must be agreeable and allow us to enjoy living in it. All Sickness is Homesickness is the title of a book by Dianne Connelly, and our sickness sometimes consists in not recognising our house, ending up homesick, and therefore not enjoying living in it. I like to think that a shiatsu operator works like an architect works on spaces, becoming an architect of choices, who teaches people how to create spaces in their house/body where they can live well.
The result? A pressure that informs, i.e. generates an impression and is born of a form, hence the expression that we are ‘in shape’. All this is highlighted in the cover image of the article: “Shiatsu and the Third Paradise”.
