Don’t underestimate the training of shiatsu!

From time to time, people from other countries visit me and ask me to teach shiatsu. Most of them are travelers with some experiences of manual therapies and want to learn quickly during a few days’ stay. I always explain them that it takes three years to learn shiatsu at least, and they’d better go to a shiatsu college or a private school where great masters are teaching authentic shiatsu.

At the shiatsu college where I learned, we practice standard procedures again, again, and again for three years. If you just want to know how to do the procedures, maybe about a week is good enough. It’s not so complicating thing. To know the procedures is not to master shiatsu, though.

We practice the same standard procedures each other in the same class for three years. Everyone does shiatsu treatment for exactly the same points in the same way, but each classmate does his or her own characteristic shiatsu. Shape and size of the hand are different. Some have warm hands and others don’t.  Powerful, mild, sharp, soft, fast, slow… really, all shiatsu are different. Over three years, we realize each other that we are getting better and better with strictly following the prescribed procedures but at the same time keeping his or her own characteristics.

Bruce Lee said, “The knowledge and skills you have achieved are meant to be forgotten so you can float comfortably in emptiness, without obstruction.” After finishing three years training at the college (it takes four or five years for some students), the student becomes a full-fledged shiatsu therapist and embarks on an endless journey to discover his or her own shiatsu. Some continue to follow the standard procedures, and other try out other styles of shiatsu, or totally different manual therapies. Even though the details of the procedures are forgotten, a firm foundation of shiatsu, however, has already seeped into all of us.

Sometimes I have shiatsu treatment of my classmates, and I feel that they are moving ahead on their ways. It really inspires me.

Oh, I just love the expression “float comfortably in emptiness”! I wish I could do shiatsu like this someday…