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Shiatsu
A Healthy Balance By Lyn Mettler
Imagine your body as a highway with energy like cars moving constantly throughout. Just as highways get jammed with too many cars, so can parts of your body become blocked with too much energy. That's where Shiatsu comes in. Shiatsu helps keep the body's energy balanced and flowing smoothly, preventing and helping to reverse health problems and traffic jams.
If you've ever pressed your temples during a headache or rubbed your hands vigorously together when you're cold, then you're already practicing Shiatsu. Shiatsu, which literally means "finger pressure," uses touch to stimulate the body's "ki" or internal energy. Using thumbs, palms and sometimes elbows or knees, practitioners of Shiatsu perform basic stretches on the body and work on the body's pressure points and meridians, which are like the "roads" on which the body's energy travels. "A practitioner can sense an excess or deficiency of energy flow," says Saul Goodman, director of the International School of Shiatsu in Doylestown, Pa.
According to Gerry Thompson of Brighton, England, author of The Shiatsu Manual, Shiatsu comes from both classical Chinese medicine, which was imported to Japan, and from folk remedies used for centuries in the Far East. "As a professional therapy it is relatively new, but its origins stretch back into an untold history of use in the Japanese home," he says. "Well into this century it was still a treatment that a rural mother would use, probably in combination with local herbs and other folk wisdom, to treat regular day--to-day ills in her family."
