What is Shiatsu: Science, Experience, and Opinions

in this episode I discuss a more personalized expression of shiatsu and less a genralized expression that fits all types. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello everybody and welcome again to another episode of the Just Shiatsu podcast. As always, I am your host, Justin Zelinsky, and today I wanted to once again kind of look at what is Shiatsu. I find as I keep practicing over the years, this changes more and more, and sometimes I even wonder if I'm still doing shiatsu. But I am doing bodywork in touch that seems to be beneficial to people. So if I was to try to quickly define what Xiatsu is, I'll kind of give the spiel I give when I have someone new come in. So what can you expect in a Xiatsu treatment? So there'll be rhythmic pressure across the whole body. I will be using the classical meridians of Chinese medicine as a guiding point as to how I'm touching the body and moving around the body. Also, I'll be giving a couple gentle stretches or movements in the body just to try and open up the joints and create more space. The idea is that by doing this, I can help calm the body down and allow the body to self-organize. So this is the basic explanation of Xiatsu in my mind. I am going now to kind of go over some of the science that I have come across and I find interesting because it matches my experience. I will talk a little bit about some of my experience in Xiatsu and things I've played around with, some experiments I've done just to kind of help me understand more what the possibilities might be of what's really happening. And then lastly, I'm going to talk about some of my opinions. Some of these are a little more controversial because they're my opinions, right? I decided off of my experiences and things like that that certain things maybe aren't as important as some other people value them. So I will share all of that. So the first thing I want to talk about is some of the new modern science on what we understand about touch and bodywork. So a lot of the previous thoughts and ideas around body work were that the touch was in some way able to break up tissue and allow the body to start to restructure itself. So the pressure we give causes the fascia, the muscles, tissue to break down. Well, the current understanding of all that is that is not possible with touch. So that is one of those myths that's out there. It's probably still being talked about by a lot of people. Um and it's interesting, right? It's interesting that that is out there. And I have to say, from my experience, no matter the style of touch I've tried to use, I cannot seem to get the body to restructure itself. So what does it take for the body to restructure itself? Well, the current ideas about what it takes for the body to restructure it is a working load. So meaning, you know, if you work out enough and keep repeating patterns, the body tends to try to restructure itself so it can do that more efficiently. So repeated loaded patterns are what will cause the body to restructure itself. There's not much else. I mean, if obviously if you injure yourself, the tissue's broken, the body will restructure itself that way as well. But in the general sense of creating restructuring of the body, it takes physical movement. Um, either repetitive exercise that repeatedly hits the same areas and the specific motions that you're trying to build the tissue to structure itself around, or through daily life. Like your body obviously creates better patterns to do your daily living things. The next interesting thing that I've been running across in science lately is ideas on pain. So, especially chronic pain, because you know, we hurt ourselves. It's logical that our bodies create pain to let us know something's happened and that we need to take care of it. But the real confusing thing, and and they don't understand this fully still today, but it's interesting, some of the new science on it, is that when we are in pain, it's not necessarily because of the structures. So they used to think the structure was the driving factor. They're finding now, um, looking at healthy people, that there actually is a lot of structural deformation in healthy people that are the same as people who have chronic pain. So they're starting to understand that maybe the driving factor behind pain isn't necessarily structure. It might have been one of the reasons why the pain first showed up, but the real question is why did the body keep the pain signals going over time? There's a lot of stuff on this that we still don't quite understand. But the idea is that the nerves somehow are not being locked down again. Like the way I heard someone talking about this was for a pain signal to be sent, there's a threshold that needs to be um reached. And then at that point, there's like a the sensor opens up to let the body know there's pain. Something that they're starting to notice in chronic pain is that this sensor doesn't go back into lockdown, it stays open, so it stays extra sensitive in a ways that it doesn't in the average person. Again, they're not quite sure why this is happening, but the idea is that something is confusing the system, so it's not re-locking down. Some of the ideas is that the mapping of the nervous system in that area might be a little muddled due to something that would happen. So it's like the system can't see it clearly, so it defaults to a pain sensor. Also, the this is weird, but the nervous system gets lazy, and if you've had pain in there for so long, it actually just maps that spot as painful. So it actually just doesn't change because the nervous system said, no, the spot's painful. So we can actually try to influence this with touch. So if there's confusion in the system about what's actually happening there, touch can bring awareness to that area in a way that it hadn't felt itself in a while. That new awareness can cause the nervous system to restructure the signals and the way it sees itself there. So that can help with getting rid of pain or lessening the pain signals. And also, if the body is has mapped that area in a particular way, like us touching it can help bring awareness to it again in another way. So basically, what the touch is doing is sending information to the physiological processes of the body, and then it's up to the body's ability to work through that and decide what it needs to do. So we don't get to be the controlling factor on that. And there's so many factors that can go into how someone's nervous system reacts to the information it's getting. Just beyond the physical sensations, you know, the current stressors in life are going to influence how those uh signals are sent, uh, expectation, so expectation of what they think will happen can influence it. Belief systems. If you believe touch can heal it, there's a higher probability that touch will create a positive result. If you don't believe touch can heal it, your belief system will influence the nervous system in that way, right? We call these placebo and nocebo effects. And there's also physiological structures that are happening that go beyond consciousness, and those are the ones that you know we can have a more reliable reaction on, but the other parts are also very strongly uh part of the mix. So just something that's interesting about pain nowadays. So it's not always about restructuring the body, it's more about letting the body create a new model of itself and experience so that it can change the way it's experiencing the world instead of just defaulting to pain. It's a little different than maybe some of the traditional thoughts around what was happening in bodies. Another thing that I find very interesting is the body tends to heal best when it feels safe and comfortable. Um, so there's a lot that goes into that. So in my treatments, I'm trying to provide safe, comfortable uh spaces, you know, trying to make sure that the person, me and the person understand each other well enough that they understand the expectations of what's going to happen. Um, I try to get a little bit of feedback on how they're perceiving the touch so that we can make sure it doesn't feel triggering or uncomfortable to them. And the rhythmic pressure that comes along with the Shiatsu process, so that like constant rhythm and pattern actually has a very beneficial reaction to creating a positive, relaxing response. Some of the current science I was looking at that seems to suggest it might take about 45 minutes to an hour of that sort of touch to really kind of get the system to flip into that more parasympathetic vagal tone, depending on what words you like to hear. Um that's interesting, right? It helps us understand why maybe a full-body approach of an hour session might actually be having better better better benefits than focusing on just one spot on the body and trying to you know get the body to rebuild it because we're now starting to realize that isn't even a thing that can really happen.

unknown 10:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

So my experience on that is that I do see better results when I work full body and have a gentle focus on the areas of their concern, meaning I do a general treatment and then I focus for not extended periods of time, but definitely like I want the person to notice that I'm paying special attention to the areas they mention. I have noticed that if I work on an area for too long, it seems to cross some sort of threshold. I don't know if it's the nervous system starting to see itself as me as a threat, or if maybe I'm working on it so long that I'm reinforcing the model that it has of itself and the pain around it, right? If I just keep poking at it and creating more and more pain, I'm reinforcing the uh map of itself by being, oh yeah, that spot is painful. So I'm finding that there is some trying to ride that threshold of stimulation there without causing too much pain, but also not staying there too long to reinforce the model, instead creating a more balanced feeling through the whole body. Um there is some ideas here that creating a more coherent system by touching all of it so the body's getting a big, wide picture of itself uh might be adding some benefits to chronic pain in ways that we didn't really understand before, and we probably still don't understand fully, but it's interesting. And it validates my experience because my experience seems to say that that does have more benefit than just focusing on the area. So that's a lot of the the newer science I've been looking at and understandings as I as I understand it at this moment in time. So I also wanted to talk a little bit about my experience with this work. So I like to consider myself a little bit of a rebel. I you know, I push back against a lot of ideas and thoughts, and I like to also try to find experiments to either validate my opinion or contradict my opinion, right? Like I you hear something, I'll be like, that doesn't sound right. So I do a couple experiments. So some things I've been interested in, right? This is in some forms, people will talk about this as an energy medicine because we're dealing with the meridians and qi. So I got curious with that um working off the body. I found actually some pretty good results working off the body, if I was willing to dialogue with them about what I was feeling and where I was feeling it. But if I refused to guide them in a particular way or talk about it in a particular way, it seemed like it offered less of a benefit. Though everyone always kind of, you know, they they know I'm trying to do something, so they're trying to feel. There's always some sort of reaction to me working in the space around them. But in general, I found this sort of work seems to reflect, at least in my experience, a little more dialogue is needed to create changes in a way that you both are trying to accomplish. Right? Left as a wide open thing, I notice people start to experience it in a lot of different ways. Um, not in the ways that I always am experiencing it, meaning like when I feel the area, I get this sensation. If I don't guide them in my particular sensation, right, they start to experience it in a different way, and it has a different meaning for them. So there's a lot of meaning making happening in off-the-body work that I've I've seen, and we'll talk a little bit about this meaning making of the mind uh a little bit later when I get into some of my opinions on the work. Another thing that I kind of always have been curious about because we're talking about energy medicine and we're talking about touch, is what happens if we just touch one spot and don't really interact with the rest of the body? Can we still get changes to happen in the body? My experience says yes. Not quite in the same way with some people as it would be if we touched the area directly, but I have found with some people, just touch anywhere on the body creates changes in them, right, in response to me being there. And part of what I was trying to experiment here is I was just curious how much consciousness or presence might be a better way to say it, is part of the treatment. I think a lot, like from my experience, I would say presence is probably more important in the treatment than technique. I know it's probably a little controversial, but that's my experience, right? My presence, my ability to be there with someone and fully commit to engaging with them in a way to be beneficial, right? I mean, there is some context of intention there that I think is important, but also I don't think it's as important as we think or I think it is. Um it's kind of an interesting thing. And again, I'll talk a little bit about this um later too. This idea of our consciousness, our awareness, and how it's kind of a weird thing. Um The other thing that I'm always curious about, and I've played with this in my experience, is this idea of touch that creates pleasurable sensation to the person versus maybe like a more mechanical approach to the touch that is offering physiological change or physiological possibilities of change. Um and you know, when we look at the science, what is the physiological possibilities of change? Obviously, we can't restructure the tissue. There's a couple things that happen with touch. As long, you know, if we get out of the perception of safe, safe adds another layer to it, um, but even if we just look at physiological touch, uh when we compress tissue, you know, the the fluids as a body have uh a thicker sort of I don't want to say the wrong word, viscosity to it, I think that's how you say it. And when we compress that, so during the compression and for a little while afterwards, it doesn't seem like it's for long, that fluid becomes more fluid, less thick. So what happens when when that happens? There's more possibility for movement to happen faster. So just compression of the tissue causes it to be more fluid, which means just more information can be um distributed around the body, right? Chemicals can be moved around, we can flush out cells easier, so all those things that we know about the physiological processes. Also, when the tissue gets compressed, it creates an electrical response called piezoelectricity. Again, it's just interesting that you know, touch again is starting to send more signals and more information. So it's generating electricity. Maybe this is qi. I don't really know. Like the idea here is that we're generating electricity. Um, this idea of qi as electricity isn't too far out there. You know, when you get into some of these people trying to explain it through science, we get electromagnetic fields and all those sort of things. Um, usually are the closest things people will talk to about that. So we're generating electricity, qi, I don't know, right? But it's creating more information for the body. So that is the information the body is using to determine what it needs to do in that space of the body. Nothing about that process is has to do with the consciousness of the person. Right? So all this is happening outside of your conscious awareness. Now, your consciousness does seem to influence the treatment, right? Again, this idea of the placebo-nocebo effect on the body, right? So if you find it pleasurable, it might tend to offer a more positive effect. Um, if you find it unpleasurable, you might shut down to it and create more movements, right? The consciousness, um, in my opinion, seems to be the biggest factor of treatment that we have no control over in a clear sense. Um, it's the wild card in bodywork, right? I don't know. You know, if some people are honest about the way they feel, some people aren't honest. They just lay there and experience it and then never say it was good or bad and move on. I am one of those people. If I go get bodies, I'm not so concerned about making them better or worse. I'm concerned with how it feels for me. And if it doesn't feel good, I don't necessarily sit there and try to, you know, that's a lot of demand on my system to try to tell someone how to touch me. That's not what I'm here for. I'm usually there because my system's already a little bit over-demanded or a little bit on um overdrive. So I'm not looking to create more stimulus for me to interact with. Um, so in that case, people like that are less likely to talk about the bodywork and more likely to just come have a bad experience and never come back again. So just things to think about. There are people who will love to try to help you get a little better and talk about you know their experience and how you can touch and help them have a better experience. You know, it's a full spectrum as far as how people um process and are willing to interact with uh touch. The interesting thing here is sometimes people find pain as pleasure. Right? I uh I'm gonna say a general statement here. I don't mean this to everyone, but uh, it is kind of something that I I have noticed, like this this deeper tissue response, this idea of like this pain, and you know, you kind of contract, ah, ah, hurts, and then when they let go, it's like, oh my god, it feels so good because that pain's finally gone. Right. There are, you know, obviously because consciousness is part of the treatment, there are some positive things happening um through that with our consciousness. In the physiological processes, if a threshold is crossed, meaning that that pain was taken to just one level too deep, what you experience as pleasure is actually your body's chemical response to lessening pain so you can get away from danger. So it's releasing a lot of endorphins and stuff like that. So you actually do feel better that day, and maybe even the next day. The next day is usually when you tend to feel a little more sore. But your your body is literally releasing chemicals to make you be able to move and get away from the threat, so they send out chemical responses that lessen the pain in your body. This is why sometimes when you get that sort of work, you feel way less pain in your body than you had. A while after the work. A good telltale sign of if you're crossing that threshold might be how do you feel the next day? Is your body actually sore as it's responding to the idea that it was under threat? Yeah. I know there's a whole other side of healing where they talk about the healing crisis, and you know, you will feel worse the next day, and then all of a sudden you'll feel better. I don't know what's going on there. A lot of the science doesn't seem to suggest that's a good thing. Um maybe there's a lot a stronger sense of consciousness and placebo effect going on there. Oh, I felt like crap. This means I'm healing, and then you heal, right? I don't I think we are just underplaying how much consciousness and belief plays into our ability to heal. I'm not saying fully that if you just believe positively, you'll heal, and that if you believe negatively, you'll have a bad experience. That also is not the truth. But there seems to be a strong factor of that in a lot of healing experience. So now I want to kind of get into a little bit of my personal opinion. So these are going to be way more controversial than anything I've already said. So one thing I was interested in, I'm I've been trying to study consciousness for years now, trying to get a grip on like what we understand about consciousness, what is it, um, what do we think it is. I've heard lots of different theories. A lot of times it really just ends up being a lot of theories and ideas that we can't prove. And part of the problem is we're trying to look at consciousness with consciousness, because consciousness is the only thing we have to look at consciousness. It's hard to look at the thing you're using, right? So there's some inherent flaws in just trying to ever understand what consciousness is. But there are some interesting studies I looked at as far as how our brains work and what's going on there. Um, I find this interesting because I tend to not want to dialogue with people during work while I or while I'm working, partially because I I want to know what touch does. So I'm a little bit being a scientist there where I'm like, I'm gonna take the factor of dialogue out of here so I can see what touch really does. Because whether you know it or not, dialoguing with somebody while you're touching them creates huge changes in the body. Um, I don't dialogue most of the time during my treatments, but as a teacher, I dialogue a lot while I'm demoing on people, or sometimes what's happening in a treatment. And because I have those two juxtaposing points of view, I know for a fact that when I touch someone and I start to talk about how it feels and what I might be experiencing, it changes because of what I said. Only because when I do that in my treatment or my clinic, it doesn't change most of the time without that stimulus. So just know words sometimes have strong potential to create change. But there's another factor that I find interesting about the brain that maybe isn't so beneficial. So if you ever get bored and you want to look at stuff, I I was looking at these split brain uh experiments, which are you know highly unethical to do nowadays or anything like that, but back in the day, for some reason they were okay with it. Um, usually this is done for people who are having seizures and things like that, but because they were splitting the brain in half, so each of the hemispheres right down the middle, they were also curious like what does that do to human expression? Well, there's some interesting things here. So one of the things that I found most interesting is like obviously when you split the brains in half, certain parts of the mind on one half seem to control the other half of the body and seem to be interested in very specific processes where the other half doesn't. But one thing that was interesting is I don't remember that I'm just gonna choose a hand. The experiment might be the opposite. Let's say they ask someone to draw something with their left hand. So they draw an image with their left hand, and we're gonna say the left hand is the part that doesn't do verbal processing, and then they ask the person to verbally process what happens, and they always come up with a story that they believe to be fully true about why the other hand drew the picture, and it was never actually the truth. So this means that when we lack truth, our brains fill in the missing information with anything we can come up with to make sense. They think it's because it's very uncomfortable to sit in untruth. So instead the brain makes up a truth until presented with new info. So we are always weighing that truth against other information we have, but when we are lacking information, we tend to just believe what is said because we don't have anything else to offset it. So I think as therapists, we need to be really consciously aware of what we say and what we do. Because when a person is lacking any other information, everything we tell them is the truth, regardless of if it is or not, because they don't have anything else to go against. Um, I have had this in my personal journeys, right? I have a left shoulder pain that has been bothering me for at least a decade. It comes and goes. Right. I don't know why. So I started to explore a lot of the wellness ideas, right? We get this idea of you know trauma in the body. This is like a huge thing and it seems to be an area people want to focus on, right? I had a very, or I should say I possibly had a very, very traumatic experience as a child. So I believed that that was the reason for my pain because that's the suggestion for some of that stuff for chronic pain. Now I know it's not related, but it's very easy when I'm lacking other information to just get caught up in it. Right? I noticed that my shoulder also flared up when I got frustrated or was working too long. So then I started to be like, well, maybe there's some spiritual context to this. Maybe I'm trying to tell myself something, right? Again, I didn't have any other information. It seemed to match some story I could make up about my shoulder. And I believed that for a while. Oh, maybe this is spirit talking to me, right? Like my shoulder hurts, I need to stop doing this. La la la. I still am not a hundred percent I know what's wrong with my shoulder, but you know, I have recently found out that I'm hypermobile and it does very much match coat hanger pain. But I had to work through all these false narratives to get here. So, what I mean is if sometimes we suggest something to somebody and they don't have another path, they will get stuck in that as a possibility because they will stop exploring other possibilities if they believe it's the truth. So, our minds are more meaning-making machines than they are good at filtering out what is really true and what's not true. For that reason, in my treatments, I try not to dialogue too much. And if I do dialogue, I try to be very specific about my sensational experience and not telling them stories that my mind is creating meanings around their injuries. So obviously, whenever we take an intake, someone tells us their story about what's going on. I try not to make their story the reason that hurts. Right? I will just tell them instead this is what I feel. Like, for example, I had a client the other day, and he came and saw me for uh a few treatments to try and get this um issue going on. But he talked about how his leg was hurting in a specific area, and it was, you know, there were some swelling issues going on. And it happened because uh I think it was ice skating, twisted the ankle. So when I touched that area of the body, to me it felt twisted. Even though, like, it's not anatomically twisted, you know, like in an energetic sense it felt twisted. I told my client that I felt this, but I also was very clear with him. I am not sure that I'm feeling this because of his energetic presence or because of the story you told me, right? You told me you twisted it. It makes sense that I might touch your leg and feel the sense of twist in the leg. Without that information, would I have felt that twist there? I don't know. But this is just an example of how our minds create sensation and meaning based off of information we have. So we also need to be aware of this as the practitioner that we are not creating too much of it, and that if you just stick to sensation, and sensation is even prone to our mental stories. So again, when we talk about all these experiments, I have experimented in trying to touch the body in many ways and try to feel the body in many ways. All of them seem to introduce some new sensation into my body, depending on how I focus. And oddly enough, a lot of times it does seem to relate to the person, but I don't know if it would relate to the person if I didn't ask them. I'm feeling something here. Do you notice something there?

unknown 32:35

Right?

SPEAKER_00 32:35

I don't know if that makes sense, but by me leading the mind there, I'm creating them again to try to find harmony with my thoughts. Right? We feel less comfortable in disharmony and more comfortable in harmony. So the brain is always looking for harmony. It's not looking for disharmony because that makes us feel uncomfortable. So I know that's a long little tirade, but it's something that I think we should really be conscious of and aware of in our treatments. I've had conversations with people who think that we should just tell people what we're sensing and our uh stories around it because it gives them potential to explore it. I do understand that point of view, and I don't necessarily think it's wrong. I just think about what if I'm steering the person in the wrong way, right? This is my personal expression. Other people don't seem to have this conflict of if you're doing the right or wrong thing. They just kind of like the idea of throwing something out there so that the person can explore their experience through that lens and see if it has meaning to them. But again, as I said, if they don't have a counterbalancing point, there's no way for them to explore it outside of your suggestion. So just things to think about. Something I find a little bothersome in uh the body work world. Also, because of this, I have stopped doing the Zen Shiyatsu diagnosis. I find that doing a Zen Shiyatsu diagnosis in the beginning is creating so much story in my mind. This might not be other people's experience, but it's definitely mine. Right? We're trained that way. That's part of why we do a diagnosis is to get understanding. And then we examine that through the lens of Chinese medicine's perspectives. Now, I find some of these perspectives, and again, this is going to be controversial, sorry. Some of these things that Chinese medicine says are so broad-stroked that it's like reading an astrology prediction in the paper. Today, something will get in your way. Today you will have a negative thought. Right? These are things that I could just say, and it will be the experience of about 99% of the people in the world. Right? So, you know, one of my big pet peeves is this whole metal idea of letting go. You could literally say you need to let go of just about anything as a hindrance to your ability to heal, right? So that is such a broad stroked idea that it almost has no meaning because it's too broad. I find that there's a lot of that in some of these diagnostic procedures. And when that's not there, it's usually just a reflection of what the person said. And in that case, diagnosis isn't needed. We just talk about what you said and talk about how that feels in your body. There's not a diagnosis needed for that. So for those reasons, um I have steered away from it. Now, for someone who's beginning in the art, I think there's a lot of stuff there, right? You lacking confidence in your ability to do the work. Um it can help you dialogue with the person to create more connection, right? This dialoguing at least helps create some connection with the other person. They feel like they're being heard or you're trying to understand them. That's it's important in the healing process. The biggest part, I think, though, is it gives a good map of where to touch on the body. So if you're not comfortable just exploring your sensation of someone else's body and knowing that that will provide benefit to them, instead, you get hung up on like, am I doing the right thing? Am I doing the wrong thing? The diagnosis helps give you a clear path forward. Now, over the years of doing this work, I can treat all the meridians in about 45 to you know 60 minutes. So that's a full treatment for me. I can touch all the meridians. I'm not worried about if I miss something or I don't. Um, I can pretty much touch the whole body in that time. Now I was not always able to do that, and I never really intended for my work to be touching all the meridians, but it's just gotten there, right? My ability to process information and understand what's under my fingers uh very quickly has improved. So I don't spend a lot of time feeling things and trying to understand them, I just feel them, right? My experience has helped me move through um distinguishing or making sense of that information more quick. Um, so I have moved away from diagnosis because I feel like it creates a more of a block from touching the person because I start creating too much meaning where I could just get rid of trying to create meaning and just feel the person under my hands. Right. I know some people are gonna argue that it helps feel them better, but that's just not my experience. Right? I'm not gonna take your experience away from you. If it does make you feel the person better, then I would actually do that. So I'm not necessarily saying I'm against diagnosis, I'm just against it for me. Um, there's a couple other things that I want to talk about as far as my opinion goes. So I have this sneaking suspicion that a lot of what happens in our perception of ourselves, so our connection to our body, you know, we talked about how the nervous system lights up in particular ways in reaction to stressors, beliefs, um, you know, placebo, nocebo. To me, that's all a sense of consciousness and awareness. So I'm gonna make a distinction between both. So awareness to me is what you can have a dialogue in your mind about, so you're aware enough about it that you can actually create constructive thoughts and ideas around it. Consciousness to me means that you are taking in the information, but you may not be aware of it. So consciousness is bigger, consciousness has awareness in it, but consciousness is also bigger. I think that a lot of what creates problems in our movements to experiencing life in a way that doesn't create so much dissatisfaction, maybe, um discomfort. You know, it's kind of hard to talk about it in a way without a word that really expresses it. But you know, a sense of like just unease in your living situation or your life or your journey, however you want to say it, is this idea of a built self. So, what is the built self? It's expectations that have been put on us from other people, right? We have certain things that we need to do in life to fit into our community and structure, right? We have to make money to pay our bills. Um to make that money means that we often have to do things that we don't want to do in life to survive in the structure of the society we have, right? So there's one sense of it. You know, your parents have put some expectations and demands on you throughout life, those have formed a little bit of who you think you should be. If you're in a job, your boss is putting demands on you of expectations of who you think you should be. Your social groups, the ones that maybe were beneficial to you at a time, maybe still are beneficial, and some of them maybe aren't beneficial, but they're your sense of community and connection with people, right? Those put expectations on you of who they think you should be. Right. So a lot of our defined sense of self is understood through others' expectations of us. And those are our stressors, right? Those are the things that cause contraction, right? If we if we think about what stops life, is just a movement. What stops movement? Restriction. Every one of those defined factors is a restricting factor of your full expression of self, right? And you know, if we took all those defining factors away, it might be hard to define yourself. I get that. Like there is value to them, and I'm not saying that they're they're not valuable. I'm just saying that they create contraction, restriction, and movement that might be better expressed in other ways if you were given a full range of possibility of expression. This is what I'm trying to offer in my treatments. So when I when I think about this in the bigger sense, how do I, you know, we talked about how I can't restructure stuff. We talked about how I can send information through the system, but I don't get to control exactly how that information is used. I can just give information. Right. So I'm trying to touch in a way that allows me to maybe get yourself to feel around you just your awareness. And there's no way to prove this, right? This is purely speculative. I can't prove it to you because we're talking about like, well, you can't comprehend what's going on because it's outside your consciousness or outside your awareness, is what I'm saying. So, again, this is just speculative ideas of what I'm trying to do because I think that it is helpful. So I do this by trying to offer just safe, comfortable spots. I try not to create too much meaning in the work I'm doing. And I know that sounds weird because it sounds like somebody's paying me to not pay attention to them, and that's not what I'm doing. Right? I'm actually trying to create more awareness around the things that you aren't aware about so that you can make change. And I do that by generally touching the body. And I will so there are specific experiences I've had that lead me to this idea of consciousness that is outside of awareness. Um this is they're weird, just to say, like the sense of it. I believe that my awareness is only part of all the information I'm taking in, and that there my consciousness is actually taking in more information than I'm aware of. So I've tried some ways to experiment with this. It's really hard. Um, but one of the things I found interesting is I used to walk, or I used to, I still sometimes go walk in the woods. I don't know if I do this experiment so much every once in a while. But while I'm walking, I sometimes close my eyes and I'm like, I should have uh a spatial awareness of the space in such a way that I should be able to keep walking along the path without going off of it. Okay, again, speculative, right? I'm losing my visual perception. Maybe that's not possible. But here's what I noticed experimenting with that is that if I close my eyes and have an expectation of the visualization, so I'm using my imagination to visualize the path I just saw before I close my eyes, I walk off the path almost immediately. If instead I try to inhabit the space just as a sensory system, I know it sounds weird. It's kind of like I just go into a void of the now and don't try to imagine what all the other things might be around me. I will stay on the path longer. And I can repeat this over and over and over again. And even odder to this is I did this walking backwards on a trail without with the same concept. I was able to this way I had my eyes open, you know, walking backwards, but I couldn't see what was coming up in the trajectory of where I was walking. I walked the path better when I tried not to imagine what was behind me, and instead just walked backwards with like almost a faith sense that I would go the right direction. So when I say I'm doing less in the body work as far as creating meaning and you know, uh stories behind what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to enter into this state. So when I'm touching the person, I'm trying to, for lack of better words, lean into the faith that I am actually receiving information that my awareness doesn't understand, and that I am reacting to it and responding to it in a way that is beneficial to the person. So, in a sense, you could say, I'm letting spirit guide my um actions. I find when I work this way, it actually creates a less invasive feeling to the work, so it creates more comfort and safety. I get less distracted by the things that I think are meaningful, and often when I find my mind focusing on something that I feel in a person's body that isn't of their concern, I remind myself to stop and remember what they wanted. Right. I know you know, I don't know if this is other people's experience, but my experience is sometimes we get fascinated with the things we feel underneath our hands just because they're different than we felt before. And then we start creating a story or making up some ideas that, like, oh, maybe this is the reason that the problem is there, right? Sometimes that probably does come to fruition, sometimes it doesn't. It's really just us getting fascinated with our own perception. I'm trying to steer that away from self-interest and trying to steer it into a bigger awareness of the person. And it's really weird to work this way at first, but as I've gotten more and more comfortable with it, I just feel like it's offering more to the person. This idea less is more. Um, right? Maybe the body, this is again pleasurable touch versus healing touch, right? For something to start to change in the body, it just needs a minimum threshold, right? This is the idea of less is more. We just give the minimum amount of stimulus a body needs to start the effect of the process of change. Does giving more to that process add anything? I the argument would be no, it doesn't add more because it does seem like less is more. Sometimes by giving more, we actually cross the threshold of what was um in the allowable range of reaction and cause a defensive mechanism instead because we've crossed a threshold. Usually this is demarcated by pain, but not always. Right? Sometimes tissues aren't responsive, nervous system might be having uh trouble, you know, um clearly reading the area. We talked about all that, right? So that's where I'm at in my work. Um, it's really scary to talk about how I work because it's kind of like I'm trying not to do a whole lot, but with not doing a whole lot, a lot seems to be happening. So I'm letting the experience actually drive my work more than my conscious awareness, um, which is giving good results. But you know, I I I have been trying to practice things to allow that awareness to become more available to me, and so I'm not condensing um my expression and missing information. It's a challenging thing, I'm not gonna lie. This is um I find it quite challenging, at least. Maybe somebody else whose mind doesn't work like mine might not, but mine um is easily distracted, wants to always be paying attention to other things. So I don't know. These are obviously my opinions on the work, this last part. So, you know, take them with a grain of salt. This is my personal expression of where I'm going and what I'm sensing and the results I'm getting. I did want to send with like a another sort of poem I wrote. Right. This poem again is kind of the idea of what I just talked about, right? Um I call it a brief glimpse of the authentic self. Touch moves flesh. Does the spirit stir? This moment removes distraction. Now self can't be ignored. Now the spirit stirs. Touch points at this moment. Realization emerges that self might not be self. Constructed and deconstructed, constructed and deconstructed. What self is me? What self is other? Touch stirs what's beneath that self. Desire stirs. Not desire as distraction, but desire as truth. Truth guides a purposeful life. Do we know? Can we know? I hope. So that is what popped in my mind one day while I was trying to think of another poem to write for this sort of presentation. Well, I know I probably said a lot of things in this that are a lot more controversial, a lot more probably even hard to understand through just dialogue and not experience. Um, but it's what I felt like sharing. Hopefully, someone gets something out of it. Maybe your experiences are starting to be questionable in regards to what other people are saying, and you also are down this path of what else is it? Like, what could it possibly be? Right? So hopefully there was something in here for you. As always, I'm never quite sure when I'll feel motivated to speak again. But until then, as always, I hope you have a great life. I hope you find purpose. I hope you find your authentic self. Thank you.