Inspirational Touch

In this episode I explore a little of what inspires me to work the way I do. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello everyone and welcome again to the Just Shiatsu podcast. As always, I am your host, Justin Zelinski. Um I was actually looking to stop doing this as some of you have reached out and emailed me and wondered where my episodes had gone. And honestly, it's been a little inspirational that some people actually care about what I'm saying in the world. Um and for that reason I have been a little more inspired to maybe not stop doing this. It is hard to often come up with new ideas and thoughts around this, but as I haven't done an episode in a very long time, um I have done a lot of experiments over the last year or so and do have a lot more insights and thoughts about the work we do, but I also have come across some things that I find a bit challenging in the work as well. Um and I I think there might be some more to share, or at least give you my impressions of uh the work that we do or that I do and how that might help you or the people you work with. One of the newest things that I've kind of started to get away from is just using a lot of science to understand this work. Um I have been using, you know, AI has become very prominent in our world, and I have you been using it to research a lot of ideas and thoughts around touch medicine, right? Not just shiatsu, but like touch medicine. Like what is touch doing? What do we know? What do we don't know? And it's been very interesting, right? Um, one thing I I'm well aware of with AI is it tends to want to tell me how I'm right. So I know that I am very careful about how I ask questions, and I often will use the opposite line of thought to countercheck myself with AI. And it actually has taught me a lot. And what it what it really taught me is we actually have no idea what's going on in the body. And I want to share uh a couple quotes from people that like kind of inspire me in some ways. I don't know if they'll be inspirational for everyone because they kind of lean to this idea that like we really just don't know what it means to be human, at least from the scientific point of view. So this is a quote from uh Neil de Grasse Tyson. And I ran across this, I don't know, sometime over the last year, and I found it probably is the most true thing I think I've ever read. It says, one of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you're right, but not enough about the subject to know you're wrong. This is basically how I've felt over the last, I don't know, six months or so as I've been trying to study and use science to kind of help explain what's going on and why we're creating shifts in people and change. And I find science doesn't really do a great job of explaining how to touch someone's soul or how to really affect someone in a way that is beneficial to the sense of that person's self. And then this is another quote from Richard Feynman. I actually have two quotes here from Richard Feynman. I like both of them, and um, I just wanted to share them. So science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. So I know, at least in the Western culture here, we very much rely on science to for understanding and truth about what's what is life, what is reality. Um and I have found that you know it is a belief system still of what we believe is happening in the world, and then creating a bunch of experiments that seem to be reliably repeatable, right? But I do think there's still some mystery to the world, and maybe even some of our science might have some foundational flaws in it that we just don't quite know yet, right? Um as I've been experimenting in this world of healing and touch, right? I've definitely had things happen that science cannot tell me the reason why it happens. Right, no matter how I look at it, there's just no explanation for that. And that to me seems to suggest that there's some things we still don't understand. And then the other one that I really find interesting from Richard Feynman, or at least a quote that usually gets pulled off, is the first principle is that you must not fool yourself. And you are the easiest person to fool. In this world of subjective medicine, I find it interesting that we are relying on reality through our felt sense of the world, and often we don't agree when we really get into the nitty-gritty of what we're feeling. Like if you get into some conversations with people who work in this way, right? We'll often find some place where we can meet and agree upon something. But if we really were to get into the fine details, I find not very many people are experiencing the world the same way, right? Which is why, you know, different treatments from different people might feel different as well. I want to read a little bit here. I've been sharing this with my classes lately, so if you've been in my class, you've heard me say this. But you know, I've been really contemplating and thinking, like, what are we trying to do with touch? Like, what does that mean for someone? Or for me as the person. Like, I I'm really starting to lean more into this idea that we really are just artists, right? Art is the biggest way to express the soul, the biggest way to connect with people, right? So I I think as bodyworkers, if we really want to connect with someone, we need to think of our work as more of an artistic expression of self, a sense of authenticity within yourself that can help express your point of view of the world, and we will help touch others who have similar points of view. And then there will always be people who will come to the work and won't also be inspired by the work as well. I I I've been watching a lot of documentaries on musicians, and you know, you can see how these musicians inspire people and touch the world and help, you know, just make people feel a little better about where they were in life before they came to the you know concert or heard the music and helped inspire them. But you know, just as with anything, there's also people who would feel the opposite way about that. And I think that's just inherent in what we do, right? Sometimes we're gonna touch people in ways that are gonna be very profound, sometimes we're gonna touch people in ways that mean nothing to them, and we just have to accept that as conscious beings that have the ability to make decisions and look for connection in some ways, there's always just gonna be this aspect of life that either speaks to someone or doesn't. So the thing that I want to read though before I started trailing off on down this rabbit hole is um oh, I should guess I should say before I read this, I don't know if this is something I wrote. I don't know if I took this from a book somewhere as something that just really spoke to me. Um if I was a guess, it might be something from the Seiki book, but I definitely have changed some of the wording for myself. Um, so it's not a direct quote, but if I had to guess, my guess would be maybe it came from something in there that inspired me. The moment of connection is where the shift itself begins. It's not all in finding a particular point or place. The reason for the shift is only so we can return to ourselves more. This is each person's individual journey in life. We all have hopes and desires that we would wish to manifest. And to do this, we need to feel ourselves prominently in this moment. Connection can give us this sense of self. If something has gotten in our way, we can recognize this, and the body releases, or we become more self-aware of the changes we need to make to accomplish our goal. Touch can do a lot in regards to helping these realizations come about, but the person under our hands still has to take action. If I touch you heart to heart, there is a moment where you notice yourself. In this regard, when we touch something, it responds not because we are doing a technique, but because we are touching a person. True connection is how the aliveness of life returns. And then I had another quote that I liked in there or writing or something. Um it starts with a question: what's the point of technique? It is a way to connect, it is a way to move through the walls we learn to put up through life. As we learn to connect with others through touch, I believe technique is less a definitive skill, but a way of expressing our authenticity. This means if the connection is right and you're authentically there, it is a pleasurable experience for both parties involved. But without this, we don't establish a connection with the person. In this state, the person craves physical sensation to fill the void of a lack of connection. And in this case, the technique does matter. When we stay separate, it becomes just technique and it import and its importance increases. So that's some stuff that I like really does inspire my thoughts around what we're trying to do with the work. I was actually putting together a class I'm going to be teaching about some of my thoughts and ideas and techniques that I personally use as my expression to share with people. And, you know, so I sat down and started writing out, you know, things that inspired me, things that have haven't inspired me, um, ways that the work affects me, right? We often sometimes, I don't know if we forget, but I think we often don't reflect that, you know, when it comes to body work, we only ever experience what bod feels like through our own experience. And no matter what you believe about that, it means you will never know what someone else's experience of bodywork is like. So, you know, know that your experience of what affects you in the body work is a hundred percent going to be what inspires and kind of controls the direction of how you do your bodywork. Right. For me, I you know, we I've I've talked about this in past podcasts, but you know, I'm definitely hypermobile. I've even gotten to the point now that I think I might actually have Eller Danlow syndrome, but getting diagnosed is a whole thing in our culture that's hard to do. Or, you know, the medical system here is not not very helpful in uh letting that be a thing that can happen easily. But that does influence my perspective of body work, right? Anytime someone moves one of my limbs, I notice I guard. If somebody works on my body too hard, it's sore the next day. Right, in a way that wouldn't be too hard for other people. Right. I've also lived most of my life with a sense of anxiety, and even, you know, I I I tend to disassociate very easily, right? Because of that, right, I I I won't be present with the work if it starts to feel unsafe. Like some people can, you know, like the discomfort or like the challenge of feeling yourself in an uncomfortable position. To me, it already overrides my body into a state of unsafeness, and it's not uncommon for me to disassociate from the work. So, you know, that has inspired the way I work. It also means that other people who experience the world in this way probably will benefit from what I'm trying to do with the work. But as you hear me describe my experience and you go, I don't even understand that experience, right? My work might feel good and it might be helpful, but it might not, right? Your experience is so different from my experience that this won't be helpful to you. I think as bodyworkers, we really need to understand that. And this really clicked for me once in a class. Um, we were working in a class about, you know, it was uh trying to find a little bit of authenticity in some senses, like what we were trying to do there. Um, the teacher was trying to get us to, you know, feel ourselves, be inspired by spirit, and then work forward from that. And what happened to me in that experience is, you know, I had someone work on me, and they worked on me in a way that was not beneficial to me. Like it actually made me more anxious. Their technique was very abrasive, or maybe abrasive isn't the right word, was very stimulating to me. And, you know, as someone who's on the edge of overstimulation all the time, adding too much stimulation sets me in the other direction. So this treatment actually I felt more anxious afterwards. But while they were working on me, I was like, why would someone work on me this way if this wasn't beneficial for me? Like I was pretty clear about the type of work that doesn't benefit my body. So I tried this experiment. Well, you know, when it became my turn to give instead of receive, and I worked on this person in exactly the same way they worked on me. And it was very interesting because at the end of this exchange, this person told me that it was the best bodywork they had ever received. Right? And all I did was copy what how they were treating me. Right? So this helped reinforce some of my ideas around this idea of like how we like to work. As a teacher, I see this in students all the time too. And I don't see it as a bad thing, right? I it I could see how it could go either way in your thought process, but why not just embrace the gift of who you are and offer what you can to the world through your perception? Right? That's all we have to work with. We can only understand other people's perceptions through their descriptions and how well we can embody a sense of that feeling, but it will never be the true experience as it comes from their internal world or their consciousness, right? These are the the internal world and consciousness are the two things that I think is so individual to each person that we will never fully understand it in the way that that person does. So, you know, to think of that, and there is a little bit of selfishness in all the work we do.

unknown 17:06

Right?

SPEAKER_00 17:06

To an extent we work on people in a way that we wish people would work on us, because that feels like that would touch our heart the most, or touch our sense of self the most most, touch our soul, inspire us to be more of the person we want to be. So why not use that, right? That has feeling to it, that has emotion to it, that has your soul in that movement. I think this is what really touches people is this trying to connect to them through our experience, because that's the only thing we have. The other thing I've been contemplating a lot lately, and I think I've said this on other podcasts before, is this idea of like if I'm trying to touch the soul, if I'm trying to make this person more aware of themselves, you know, give them a safe space to be in so they can feel their purpose more in life or their expression of how they want to move forward. You know, life has a limited amount of time with it, right? I I try to help people um feel their uniqueness so that they can go out into the world and express it in whatever way feels appropriate. But, you know, we often think of this idea of a healthy life as one without pain or discomfort. And I don't I don't know if I believe that's true. Right? I get how it feels more comfortable not to be discomforted or in pain. But if it wasn't for my discomforts, if it wasn't for my anxiety, if it wasn't for, you know, these feelings of dread that sometimes enter my mind or this self-criticism that um you know, these negative spirals we go into, it seems to be very human nature. Right. And, you know, I don't sit in them all the time, but these moments are what really drive me forward in life to try and be better. Right? So I don't necessarily think that discomfort is a bad thing. Obviously, if it's hindering your ability to express your purpose, then obviously we want to try to help resolve that. But don't write off the discomfort as something that isn't actually beneficial. Right? If you look at the stories of most people who inspire, you know, these great stories that are usually used as inspiration for the ideas of how to be human or how to, you know, live your best life, right? A lot of these stories have discomfort as the driving factor for why this person decided to change their life or do something different. So this had made me start to think a lot about what I want to do with the work to try to help people. It's not just about curing discomfort, it's about bringing realization to someone's sense of self so that they can decide if that comfort is actually driving them forward or if it's something that needs to be removed. Maybe we need to lean into that discomfort to move through it.

unknown 20:35

Right.

SPEAKER_00 20:35

If I remove that for you, which I don't really think we have the ability to do, but if per se I magically could make your discomfort disappear, right, I would take apart, take away a part of your life that may have added more purpose to it. So, you know, it's just something to think about about this idea of discomfort and driving someone. So when I say I'm trying to touch the sense of someone's self, I don't always mean that I'm trying to remove your discomfort. Again, these are just things to think about, right? I don't have all the answers to to life. I wish I did, it would be nice, wouldn't it? Um, but I do have these contemplations. And the other thing that I think is important to think about when we work is our bias. Right? Again, I'm gonna come back down to this idea of our experience, our internal world, our own individual private sense of self that no one else can access. This is how everything we do in life is understood is through this lens. There is no way to get rid of your bias. I have noticed this throughout the years of me experimenting with touch and seeing what. I think is having a greater effect, what's having a less effect. Right. There's a lot of treatments where I do things differently and they kind of are the same. You know, at first when I started doing this, I'd be like, oh yeah, the person definitely feels better than the other way. But as I started to reflect more and more and try to stay open and honest with it, I realized that maybe a lot of the stuff I was doing wasn't actually changing anything. I was just feeling a little better about the way I was doing the work and hence adding a bias onto what I saw. Right? Like, oh, that made me feel a little bit better, even though it may have been about the same experience for the person. And because it made me feel a little bit better about what I was doing, it added a bias into what I was doing. So, you know, I believed that it was offering more. When in reality, it probably was offering more, but it was just offering more to me. It was making the work more rich for me, it was making it more interesting to me, right? I'm trying to touch everyone's sense of self, everyone's soul in some sense, right? But I don't think everyone who comes to me wants to feel that, but I always try to feel it. So there's a little bit of selfish interest in that. But my selfish interest is in that I believe if I can contact you in such a way or connect with you in such a way that the expression of yourself is more noticed within your internal world, um, it has more benefit to you. And this is just the belief system I move from in my work. You know, there's nothing wrong with working in the opposite way where you just try to work with the physical body and make changes of the structure and hope that that gets rid of people's body pains. It's not the biggest focus in my work. Now, interesting enough, when I try to touch the soul or try to touch the sense of the person or whatever it is that I'm trying to touch, right? Like the body does change sometimes. Like some of those aches and pains do disappear, even though they're not the main focus of what I'm doing. Just interesting things to think about in the work. I was contemplating this just a little while ago while I was watching uh a documentary, and these are some of the thoughts that popped into my mind around that. So when I think about my work, I'm like, what am I really trying to do? I know I gave some other quotes, but this is also something else that came out of my sense of purpose or or meaning in the work, right? It's just about giving someone space to feel better about life than they did before they came in. A place where we can forget our worries and concerns and just be for an hour. It's not different than what you expect from any sort of art. A place of escape that offers an opportunity to see yourself without all the bullshit in the world. And sometimes it's just a moment of relief, and sometimes it might change the trajectory of your life. Alright, that's what I want to offer. You know, if you just need relief from the stresses of life, take it from someone who's overloaded, eh, I don't know if I like that word so much. Take it from someone whose sensitivities in the world often make me feel overwhelmed very quickly. Right? That hour, even if it doesn't change the directory of my life, can have a big impact on me. It can take me out of a dark, deep place. It can put me into a space where I realize that life isn't as bad as maybe I thought it was before I came in. That's what I want to offer. Right? I can't guarantee I can get rid of your pains. There's no science out there that can a hundred percent tell me how to get rid of your pain. There's too much variables in a body, and then we add the consciousness's ability to interact with the body, and it becomes so many variables it's almost incomprehensible to even understand. And so this made me think a little bit, you know, again, on the science fact of it, right? Art is where a human soul is touched. And science is where it disappears. Right? Every time I look at scientific studies or ideas, right, we're trying to get rid of the variable of consciousness because we can't control it. But I think that's the variable that's most important. Right. As someone who does bodywork, I think there's a responsibility to have some honesty about the potential. Right, so that we don't offer too much to somebody because I've been doing this long enough to know that like not everything's gonna be a miracle. But if I use scientific evidence to talk about it, or I use the general population's experience of something, right, there's an ignorance in that as well. And I think that sometimes being ignorant to those limitations actually opens up the possibility for anything to happen. I've been doing this long enough to see like miraculous things happen in the work, but I can repeat that same thing that created this miraculous result on another person, and it can literally do nothing. What's that? That's an interesting thing about what we do. Right. So sometimes I just think being ignorant about what's possibly out there might have some benefit. So with that being said, I think that I might start just kind of using poetry as a way to add deeper understanding to what we're doing. Right? Poetry is more the language of the soul, right? The language of self, the expression of feeling, meaning, purpose, right? That a lot a lot of that lies in art, and you know, poetry is a form of art and that I can use with my voice, right? I think we're doing this with our hands as well. Yeah. I I'm a big proponent of trying not to engage the mind too much in treatment because I want touch to be the driving factor, right? I want the artistry of my touch to really inspire and help you feel yourself. Right. If touch is my main focus, right, I don't want to engage the mind. The mind sometimes will pull away from the touch. I just want you to feel, right? Feeling is what we're doing with touch from both ends, right? I feel you, you feel yourself, and then what happens from there. But I was in a class a while back and we were asked to write a poem about what we think is happening, or you know, inspiration for our work. And I think going forward, maybe I might just add a poem at the beginning of every episode that I feel inspired to do. And this one I used a reflection of the ideas in Chinese medicine, so heaven and earth, you know, come together to create the human experience. And what I wrote was this earth. Our hands are the stones cast into the pond. They start the ripples that spread to the sense of self, allowing a shift in what is already happening and spreading what is already in order. Heaven. Our hearts are the light that brighten the dark corners, allowing one to see what's been left out and unattended to, propagating through the inner world and shining to the outer world. Human. Connection is the key to unlock the hidden treasures. It's the dissolving of the borders that allows true connection. In this moment and every moment, the potential exists for someone to feel themselves as whole. It's the division that doesn't allow it to be felt. So again, I just wanted to kind of thank everyone who reached out. You know, I had a couple people send emails wondering where my episodes went to, and I found it inspirational. You um I felt guided to come back to this and make sure that I leave it out there for people. Um I think in the next episode I might, you know, I tend to like once a year try to like go over this idea of what is Shiatsu. Um as I look at my downloads, the what is Shiatsu episode, the very first episode I did, which by the way is probably my worst episode, is the most downloaded. So there's definitely some curiosity about what Shiatsu is. And after they hear my first episode, they don't listen as much. There's definitely not anywhere near as much downloads on other episodes. Um, I wish I could change that, but you know, this this podcast is kind of a a documentary of my own movement through the work. As you listened over the years, or if you go back and listen to them in an orderly fashion, you will see how my mind has changed about things through time. Often led by my experience, um, often led by some of my skepticism. Right? I I I like to think I'm healthily skeptical. Right? I will put things to the challenge that you tell me are definable truths. And from my experience, sometimes people what people tell me are truths about the work, when I experiment with them, I find they're actually not, which is a whole nother thing to talk about. Um so as I you know got sidetracked on my own rabbit hole there. Next time I send out a podcast, I think I'm going to just talk a little bit about what shiatsu is to me again. I know I did that kind of in this episode, but we'll kind of bring it right to the forefront of where my experience is with that, what I think is happening through the work and my experience. As always, I hope everyone has a great life, a great time. You know, find your purpose through whatever inspires you in life. Until we meet again. Thank you.