Why Does Touch Heal?

Spoiler! I dont have a clear answer, but will explore some thoughts around it! 

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Hello everyone and welcome again to another episode of the Just Xiao Tzu podcast. As always, I am your host, Justin Zelinsky. And today I my mind's been going a little crazy. I've been doing a lot of research, a lot of um trying to see some different approaches and viewpoints to touch and how it's actually creating a change in the body. So I wanted to talk a little bit about maybe some of those other points of view or alternative ways to look at it. I actually want to start with a quote here from uh Neil deGrasse Tyson. Um I really enjoy this quote because it seems to be true to me, right? 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. That's kind of the inspiration here today, is this kind of quote, right? Like this podcast comes from the viewpoint that shiatsu and kind of like keeping it inside of that box of shiatsu. What happens if we break that box down and start looking at it from a bigger perspective of what we know and you know possibly why touch heals. I'm not gonna have you listen to the end of this to get the answer. The real answer of why touch heals is nobody knows. Right? We don't understand why touch sometimes creates these grand gestures of change, and other times it does nothing. But let's look at it again in some context. I know a lot of this stuff, again, I think I talked about this a few episodes back where I'm getting to the point where there's not a whole lot of new stuff to share. Like I've explored the science, the ideas behind it. Um, so I'm just reorganizing it a little bit. There might be some new stuff in here, but it's more just a reorganizing uh all this information around why does touch heal? Or what do we know about touch? And then some speculative ideas maybe around what might be happening that we're not quite clear of yet. And I think the real answer here is even with really good studies, we probably never will know. There's just too many variables happening inside of a human. Uh just that all the systems that are processing information, along with, again, this mysterious idea of consciousness really adding another variable that we can never fully get our minds around from the observing standpoint. So let's just come back and talk a little bit about what we do know about the actual physical aspects of touch. So a lot of what we thought was happening through touch is actually not what's happening, or at least what modern science is coming to start to see or or think about. So again, restructuring tissue, as far as modern science is concerned, it's not a thing. And I was thinking about this the other day, and I had this kind of image pop in my head about you know why that is. The body is basically made up of all this elastic tissue that expands and contracts to allow itself to stay together to hold its form. If we were able to break that up so easily by just compressing on the body, I don't think our bodies would hold together quite as well. If you take a bungee cord and stretch it as hard as you want, you know, like it just never breaks. I mean, there's obviously a weight capacity to it, and the body's the same. But touch will never get past that weight capacity. At least this uh passive, compressive sort of touch will never create this band to break, right? Because often we're not even having it at max stretch, and then we're just compressing down into the fiber. It's that same sort of thing. So maybe that visual gives you an idea of you know what that modern viewpoint is. Like the tissues are just too strong for us to be breaking apart. We can signal to the body through touch and compression to restructure itself. So the body to restructure itself requires certain specialized cells in the body to get called into action. They actually break down the constructs of the body there, the collagen, the elastin, you know, all the building blocks between everything. And those microphages and fibroblasts, and there's probably some other ones too. These are all the cells that come in and actually like deconstruct the materials there and then reconstruct it in a way that's more beneficial. So this is why working load tends to be a little more um dynamic in the body, rebuilding itself. We're putting a load on the body, we're sending signals that we want to repeatedly do this, then the body, for some reason, decides to organize itself that way. They come in, breaks it down, restructures it in a way that allows that movement to become more efficient. But basic compressive touch doesn't do that. Even this deep manipulative touch that sometimes people will call deep tissue, right? There's just not enough strength or power there to really be tearing apart tissues. Now, you can break blood vessels, we're positive of that, right? People bruise from this stuff all the time. Um, that tissue does seem to break a little bit when we apply a lot of pressure. So, what we do know though, and I talked about this in the last podcast, is with compression, there's a change in the fluidity of the body. So the body tends to sit in a more gel state when it's less active, and it gets more fluid with more activity. So when we press on the body, there's a sense of clearer movement that can happen. So information can get sent clearly, right? We talked about how some of the ideas of pain is this idea that the signals aren't getting moving around the body clearly, like a game of telephone. Um, if you ever play that as a child, right? You sit with like seven people at the table, one person whispers to the person next to them something, and then by the end you have someone repeat it back. If that message isn't given clearly across each person, right, the message starts to get distorted and it becomes something different than what was originally said. So with compression, we're trying to allow that signal or that message to be more clear and get less uh distorted as it moves through the body to get clarity. This is what we know is happening in the body. There's obviously other things happening that we probably just don't even have the faintest idea of how to look at or get a clear picture of what's going on. But that's probably the clearest idea of what's happening there. We also talked about when tissue gets compressed, it creates an electrical signal. That signal, again, just more information that can move through this. The other thing that I think really makes touch medicine almost impossible to study is the idea of the person's consciousness being a big factor in the work. I've been reading a lot of studies lately, and there's a lot of studies that suggest expectation is one of the biggest factors in the outcome of what happens with touch therapy. So this means if the person believes that there's more potential for a positive outcome, there tends to be more positive outcomes. If the person is a little skeptical and doesn't have as much positive regard for the work, again, studies seem to reflect that it has less of a positive effect on the body. And the way I try to simplify all this, at least in a sense of coming from somebody who does the work, is I just try to provide something that feels safe and comfortable for somebody, as opposed to doing a lot of work in a way that creates a lot of contraction and a lot of defending. This is part of, or I think this is like pretty much the only way we can control the consciousness. Um, we can always have talks before and after the work setting up expectation. Um, but I do think there is a lot of ethics and morals around how we should talk to people and what we should actually say is possible and what we should be clear about in a way that it's not always possible either, right? The real if anyone, if anyone, when you're getting bodies, tells you something is a hundred percent pers effective, you need to leave that room right now. They're lying to you. There is nothing in touch medicine that is a hundred percent effective. So when we talk about the consciousness, right, we know from a lot of studies things that will affect treatment. So, how does the person feel about you? Right? So that is a big proponent of like this whole expectation. Um, that means like how connected do they feel? We tend to feel more connected with people we can relate to and less connected with people who don't understand our experience or don't have similar experiences. So, again, I think it's important in the work to try to find people who can understand your experience a little more. It'll add a little more connection, you'll feel a little more seen, you'll feel a little more heard, and this will create uh more potential for a positive outcome. The other factors that will come into play is how do you feel about the method. We all have heard stories and we have expectations based off of other people's experiences if we've never had the work before. I have had people show up to get shiatsu with the expectation that somebody told them they should get it. I can tell you most of those uh treatments, nothing really much happens because they weren't motivated themselves to become part of the process. They were just following someone else's instruction. And the instruction wasn't real clear to them. It was more like you should try this shiatsu thing and not much else. So they didn't have much expectation, much positive regard to what was going to happen. They were just following, again, the recommendation of somebody who is in a position of authority to help guide them in maybe some sort of healing movement. The other thing that is part of the conscious is how does the touch quality feel to you? As someone who gives touch, this is hard to do. So I don't try to find the most pleasurable sense of touch. I try to find a sense of touch that isn't uncomfortable and doesn't trigger the person. If you sat there and just dialogued about trying to find the perfect touch, I think a lot of time in treatment would be used in that regard. And I don't know that that would be more beneficial to just sit and dialogue about how you can make everything the most pleasurable it could be. If it's feeling safe and comfortable, it's in that range of acceptability for the body to allow information to move. So just something to think about. So what it really comes down to if we keep this in uh a generalized sense is a lot of what makes body work become positive or negative is what we call the placebo and nocebo effects, which is some sense of expectation set through belief, ideas, um, feelings, like all those sort of things that kind of can be a factor in the work. I know that to some people those words can be a little negative. I don't think of them as negative if we're uh helping the body self-organize through expectation. I don't understand why that is a bad thing, um, other than it just gets rid of some of the science around it and becomes more about feeling and being, um, which I'm all about. We should feel and be in the world. So if a certain feeling makes you heal or feel better, who cares about the science of it? But since this is a podcast and I need to talk about something, and I just actually want to share a bunch of information as I like to info dump, um, I'm gonna talk about it anyway. Um The other things that I wanted to kind of think about or look at is this idea of the nervous system and the endocrine system. These are our response systems to the world around us, right? Our nervous system is always taking in stimulus from the outside world so that it can evaluate it to understand what reactions it needs to have in response to what's happening. Through touch, again, I like to keep it simple. Again, we're thinking about this idea of safety versus unsafe, uh, pleasurable versus unpleasurable. If we just keep it that simple, right, the body will send positive uh reinforcing messages with safe and comfortable touch. If the touch crosses a certain threshold, meaning that that person starts to interpret it as unsafe or uncomfortable, the body again responds with some things that inhibit um possible change because it needs to get away from danger. So when we don't feel in danger, the body allows healing and tissue repair to be part of that movement. When we feel in danger or unsafe, that system shuts down because first, before we can heal, we need to get away from danger. Right? It can get confusing in the way these feel because some of the chemical responses to threat and danger actually feel good, they enliven us, right? And we need to be enlivened because we need to get away from danger that requires energy. So, like an adrenaline junkie would be someone who thrives on the feeling of danger, right? That adrenaline is the body responding to a dangerous situation. So this is something that happens in body work, right? I talked about it on the last podcast. This sense of this deep pressure that creates a lot of pain or a lot of sensation that crosses a threshold releases a lot of hormones that mimic this adrenaline rush sort of feeling in the body. Um the endocrine system right is the long-term response to things. So when the touch feels pleasurable, we actually get a lot of reward hormones. So the body actually sends um hormones around the body that make us feel like we should do more of this because it's a positive thing. If the touch is done in a very particular way, it might release oxytocin, so this helps us feel more connected to people, um, creates a connection with the person who's giving the treatment, but it also helps can help with relieve loneliness and some of those other feelings that come along with that. And then the other system that I use is the meridian system of Chinese medicine. When we look at this from a more scientific standpoint, there is nothing that says this system actually exists. But if you look at studies, depending on which way you want to lean, you could find a study that validates either side of the equation. What I think of the meridian system is first, I think it covers the whole body, so it's a good system to use to touch the whole body. And I also think that if this is a real system that is moving in the body, that it is another information system. So we talked about how right touch in the most general sense is just sending information to the systems of the body so they can coordinate together and create a more cohesive system, which then allows us to live a more adaptable life, something that allows us to adjust to threats and pleasure in the world in ways that are probably beneficial for us. And I believe that what they're talking about in the classics is, or when I say the classics, I mean the classics of Chinese medicine, is a self-organizing information system that as of right now and our current understanding doesn't have form. So they're talking about a system that has some subtle, maybe invisible sort of organization happening to it. And if you get into deep studies, like there's some ideas here around fascia and that being a superconductor in certain ways, it's structured throughout the body that could also explain maybe what the meridians are. So again, even that explanation is something that allows information to travel faster through the body so that it can self-organize. I remember watching a study from Cliff Andrews, and if you don't know who Cliff Andrews is, he's uh part of the new energy works, um, and that he focuses on a lot of Xiao ideas and theories and is a big proponent on social media. One of his studies was suggesting that touch is homeostatic, so it means that when we touch points, meridians, the body self-adjusts in whatever way is appropriate for itself. Um, again, this suggests a self-organizing system, not one that we get to influence by our own will, per se. Some other things that I think are interesting to talk about are chronic pain ideas, and again, we talked about this in the last one a little bit. Um, but chronic pain, and I even want to extend it to like chronic emotional pain, um, chronic thought patterns that create discomfort, right? So these things that just keep repeatedly happening, we don't seem to be able to break the repetitive pattern of it. So there's a few things that I have found interesting over the years. First off, some of the new stuff on chronic pain is suggesting that the body actually has healed the tissue in the areas that originally were damaged that may have triggered the pain response. Um, but for some reason, the nervous system still is sending signals of pain in that area. So, again, some sense of confusion within the system that isn't allowing it to let go. Could it be it's overly actively protecting itself? So it has a tendency more to see everything as unsafe instead of safe. Again, I think maybe adding safe touch into that area that doesn't overstimulate it could potentially allow that information to shift and become something different. Some other ideas is that maybe the nerves are having trouble communicating clearly between the inputs and outputs of the brain that allow these signals to adjust to stimulus. And again, if we just think about what I talked about with the simple compression allowing more fluid states, more information to move, again, offers some potential for shifts to happen. Consciousness again becomes a big part of that. So the person's mental state expectations are also gonna have a big influence on the feeling of safety and unsafe and all those other things that come along with clear communication, right? The more stress we have, the more beliefs we have that kind of go against whatever the process that is trying to happen is, they tend to get in the way. The other thing that I find very interesting, I've been fascinated with neurodivergent thought processes and ideas around neurodivergence. And I think that brings to light some stuff when you look at it through that lens, because the idea here is that these people are choosing to be more sensitive. or they're choosing to, you know, react in a way that is uncomfortable for, you know, the typical population. It's a processing issue. So there is an actual structural makeup to the person that is processing information differently. And to me, like why I bring this up is because we need to be aware that like there's just different processings in the body. Sometimes someone's going to be more sensitive to something, sometimes people are going to be less sensitive to stuff. There's not a baseline of like it should be this way. So we always need to bring into context the possibility that maybe you just have a more sensitive system. The volume for pain and discomfort or processing information might be different than the typical patterns that we see out there. And you know those sort of individuals might need more time different stimulus those sort of things. So it's not always just consciousness and you know like I could see how maybe you could hear some of what I'm saying and being like, well it's all about how you think or your personal beliefs or your ideas right there is structural things in bodies too that affect it. Like some of the things we do know is pain can change the way you think or believe or the way you think or believe can change the pain. Right? They go back and forth. I just actually heard the other day that even immune responses in the body can influence our emotional and thought states. And that's even beyond pain right so those sort of things and we know like the way that the microbiome of our gut interacts with our foods can influence our mental and physical states and probably to some extent maybe even our belief systems. It's kind of weird to think about but I don't know that it's outside the realm of possibility. The other thing that I think is interesting to pay attention to is that every cell in our body and I know I've said this before replaces itself over time. Again I don't remember each part of the body has a different time frame in which it replaces its cells. But you know let's for just example say like every seven years every cell in your body gets replaced. So that means if you've had pain for more than seven years a new cell has actually replaced the old cell that was sending the pain message and this new cell also is still deciding to send the pain message or react to the pain message. So it's again seems to be an information system sort of um default wiring or some sense of um information being spread that is keeping that level of threat, pain, discomfort there as opposed to the actual building blocks of the space itself right something again that's interesting to think about another interesting thing to think about is this idea of body memory I don't know how to say this correctly I was trying to do some research get some ideas on people's you know viewpoints on this doing some quick AI searches and the AI kept spitting back at me the idea of memory was different than the way I was using it. So I want to just clarify kind of what I mean when I say memory well first let me step back. I I just recently watched this really interesting uh YouTube clip on a boy who was leading the science on memory transmission from caterpillar to butterfly and then he actually took it a little further and showed memory transmission or at least the ideas that he's showing memory transmission from generation to generation and I want to clarify what I mean by this. I don't believe that you know if somebody had a traumatic experience in their life that the next generation actually has the physical memory to reflect on what I mean by memory is that their body made physical adjustments to the threats they detected in their life so they became more sensitive towards things and it's beneficial for a body to do that for survival. It became into a very traumatic experience something that actually threatened the existence of that person or its health in some way the body needs to remember that so that it doesn't repeat that again. What I mean when I say memory is that the reaction that the system developed gets carried over to the next generation. So the system remembers in a physiological sort of reactive expression not that the person actually remembers the experience. Say you live in an area where there's a bunch of snakes right someone in your family history got bit by a snake almost died their system then goes snakes are dangerous I have a weird reaction when I see a snake the next generation doesn't have to remember the bites there but for some reason the next generation when they see a snake get a visceral reaction in their body to the snake as threat. That's what I mean by transmission of memory. So this got me thinking a little bit of like well if it's memory can we change memory we know that or at least some of the suggestive signs out there is that memory isn't actually the real event itself remembered in complete truth meaning that memory somewhat has an emotional state to it and that emotional state influences the memory we know through some studies that memory is influenced every time it's called to the surface. So when we remember something the context of what was happening when we bring up that memory becomes essentially encoded as part of that memory moving forward so in touch I think we can use this as a positive so when someone recalls an uncomfortable situation an uncomfortable feeling in the body you know anything along those lines as long as we're providing safe comfortable touch we're actually in some way reprogramming the response again depending on how um how intense the the conscious aspect of it is is going to also allow you know whatever possible changes there. But we're creating small changes so over time you know tiny tiny changes can add up to a lot over a long spans of time. So again body works not always you know come in and you're all fixed. Sometimes we need to repeatedly keep adding new information to the system so it can reevaluate and start to turn down the volume or the reaction to it. Again I like this idea of adaptability more than healing or curing something. We're teaching responses in the body to turn down the volume a little bit so that they can be more appropriately reactive to the scenario. If you've ever been in highly traumatic situations you know it can be hard to turn down the volume on your reactions to things because it was such a stressful situation right you start to look for it everywhere because you don't want it to happen again and we start to kind of link things in inappropriate ways sometimes and then we can create like you can essentially create a system that sees everything as a threat because it can't help to differentiate what's safe and what's unsafe anymore because of the big traumatic experience. So part of what we can do with touch is offer a safe space you know I you can be with another individual I can show you that I'm safe and that I can provide you comfort and be there with you in your pain. And that sometimes allows um shifts to happen in the system because now everything isn't a threat right I'm literally physically trying to show you that everything isn't a threat. This allows change to happen. Same thing they do through talk therapy they just do it with words instead of touch. And this has also led me to question a couple things. So I was taught a method at one point where it was like bring up the memory and then let me work on your body and calm it down and then let's reassess how that memory feels if somebody's open to this it actually is a really good method. The problem is you don't know someone's open to it until you ask them and if the asking triggers too big of a threat response it doesn't matter anymore what you do. They're kind of in threat already so I don't know that I like this method as much but if somehow you can get to a space where you can offer this up without triggering somebody I think it can have value. I also think if somebody's coming to us to work on something specific like this I don't know that we necessarily have to call it into conscious awareness because it's already there. I mean that's why they came it's kind of um unspoken and kind of sitting in the background already. So I you know I've been back and forth on this this method. I I at this point in my experience working with it have decided to move away from it because it just the the chance to trigger is really counterproductive and as I said I think it's kind of sitting there in the space if someone came for that reason right I mean again we're working with expectation we shouldn't be trying to work with things outside of the space of what the person's expecting to happen right from some of the studies if you're trying to work on something outside of their expectation don't expect a lot to happen. Over the years of teaching and also learning this right I got a little fascinated with this idea a little bit too much which is how I've come to my conclusions on it. But you know I see students and practitioners sometimes get focused on trauma when somebody brings it up in the space because sometimes our questions lead people that direction and then we get fixated on the fact that maybe it's trauma and we lose track of the real expectation of why they came in. So keep that in mind as a practitioner and the ideas like I'm talking about here right is expectation is what will influence treatment. So if they're expecting you to get rid of their shoulder pain and you're expecting to heal their trauma because you believe that's part of their shoulder pain, the expectations aren't exactly in alignment here. And you know if you listen to my last podcast again I talked a lot about how my personal expectations and how our minds make meaning around things can maybe create false realities to some extent. I I kind of hate saying it that way, but I don't know how else to say it. Alright now I'm gonna again talk about something probably very controversial in in this so how much do I control then when I bring all this sort of evidence and thoughts to the table? It's not much. I mean in reality I don't get to control much I can again from a physiological standpoint I can create clearer clearer spaces in the body for movement to happen so the signals can be seen a little more clear clearly than maybe they have from the expectation standpoint I can lead expectation somewhat I think we have some moral and ethical things that we need to make sure that we're not crossing when we're trying to lead expectation but you know not promising too much but we also don't need to undersell I can definitely regulate myself to feel safe and comfortable in a situation which is my attempt to try to make it feel comfortable and safe to the person I can't control all their experience and response to everything I do but I can control mine. And this is where a big part of some of my thought process comes in is co-regulation. So a lot of science out there shows that bodies will co-regulate to each other there seems to be a factor in there that I haven't quite understood or got down yet because it seems like sometimes we co-regulate to people and sometimes we don't and I don't know what the trigger is as to why someone decides to co-regulate with you and why their system decides not to co-regulate with you. Again I I could come up with a bunch of theories here that I think are interesting. I know for a fact not everyone co-regulates because I've given treatments with anxiety and panic attacks before and the person does not take on those states. I don't readily say that I'm having those experiences. I think if I did that it might influence the system so I just treat and try to keep myself calm and relaxed as I can while in those states which you know I've done a lot of work on my anxiety over the years so I definitely can stay calm and relaxed in the middle of anxiety and panic attacks. Another book that was highly influential in my thought process on there is there's a book called Another Self by Cindy Ingall and that you know she talks a lot about this idea of co-regulation and how science has kind of looked at all that we know that you know heart rhythms sink up if we're around people long enough. I think there's a safety factor here you know uh our bodies are always reading the environment I'm I'm speculating that if I offer something that the system finds agreeable it might be more prone to move in agreement with me. If I'm offering something that is less agreeable I think the body might just shut down taking information in that way from me. But we know it happens. So it is a factor of the work that I can control. So my personal regulation of self I also think how we think about what we're doing um how we present ourselves to ourselves internally and how we focus our attention creates micro adjustments in our touch even if you don't think they're happening uh they're happening in very subtle ways and our systems are very much tuned to subtlety in ways that we don't even know like if you look at some studies on facial expressions if someone makes a facial expression in fractions of a second and changes it we can't physically process that information but the body actually reacts to it. So there's a lot of studies showing that there is some conscious processing of subtle things happening outside of our conscious awareness. And you know those studies are very interesting. We also know through studies that there are such things called emotional contagions so um depending on threat levels right the body is going to respond to threat way more than it's going to respond to safety I think it just you know safety doesn't need to be getting away from um threat does so things we provide as threat are definitely going to be more reactive than things we provide as safe. So emotional contagion means that when other people are having some emotional response other people sometimes will start to feel that emotional context inside themselves I find this interesting as someone who tends to be reactive in that way I often don't respond to people feeling happy or safe like those seem to be less contagious in my presentation but things that are anxiety scare you know being scared fear you know those sort of emotions they definitely seem to trigger in my body when somebody else is having them so there seems to be a threat level sort of detection for emotional contagion so again self-regulation I think is important here to um not let those micro movements become part of what's happening in the treatment and again there's also physical contagion which is just a weird thing especially in Cindy's book she talks about how if you were if you say worked in a hospital where you worked on people who you say you specialize in hip pain right so everyone who comes in has hip pain it is very common experience for people in those fields to also develop hip pain which is interesting and I think there was a study in there of a dog whose owner had a limp and whenever the dog was with the owner the dog also had a limp I think after the owner passed away the limp on the dog went away so even cross species this seems to be a thing. So again just it what I'm trying to get at here is it shows that we are highly sensitive to what's happening around us. And as the therapist I think it's important for us to kind of try and lead or control our reaction to the space. So being very self-aware of how that person's uh story is affecting us and then being able to sit within that story and still regulate yourself without it becoming your story. So again my biggest factor in the work I do right we talked about how I kind of try to sit in a space of just responsiveness without trying to overthink or overanalyze anything. Because of this idea of self-regulation one of the things that I find helps like helps my body stay regulated in a way that's less reactive to the person underneath me regardless of what they've said right I mean if you've done this work long enough you've definitely had someone walk in who you don't agree with whose viewpoints on life are very different than yours are you able to still stay safe and calm when those are presented to you the way that I think Can approach this when we get into these disagreeable states is the idea of unconditional love. Right? Meaning it's okay that there is a difference in perspective between you two, and neither one of you has to be right or wrong. Right? We can just be together without conflict. And what a wonderful place this world would be if everyone could do that. But it doesn't always work out so nice. But we don't need to get into that aspect of the world. In my treatment space, I'm trying to find a space where I can offer you unconditional love. So I usually check in with this feeling a few times throughout a treatment, maybe throughout the whole treatment. Again, um I see a lot of patterns of ADHD in my brain's movement. So I can't always focus as clearly as I would like. So I have to let my mind kind of move around to stuff that I find interesting at times. But I usually do at least once in a treatment check very much in with the fact of am I offering unconditional love to this person? Is my touch staying within the bounds of unconditional realms? Which means no matter what I feel, I offer a sense of change, but if it doesn't change, that's okay too. I know it sounds weird, and there's something about sitting in this space that allows something magical to happen. You know, it might not actually create physical change in the body, but there is a some sort of conscious awareness that picks up on this and offers us something that maybe most of us don't experience in life too much. I try to offer that. I think the key here, if you don't like the word unconditional love, is knowing the difference a little bit between this idea of sympathy, empathy, and compassion. I actually really like there's a Brene Brown video out there where she talks about the difference between sympathy and empathy, and it's like a little cartoon thing. Kind of funny. It's also very interesting to think about how those might be different. So, sympathy to me is when you see someone suffering and you understand that they're suffering. The thing with sympathy is it can be done from a distance. You don't ever have to become part of that experience. You can look at somebody suffering and be like, that sucks, and keep moving on in life. So there's there is a little bit of a lack of connection in the idea of sympathy, or at least in my opinion here. Empathy is the ability to understand someone's experience and process that in a feeling sense in yourself. So it's the idea of sharing the experience. Again, we can share an experience with somebody and offer no help. So it doesn't, I don't want this to sound like it's actually superior to being sympathetic, empathetic, sympathetic. They both have a quality to them that doesn't have to offer anything to change, right? You can sit in the same space of discomfort with somebody and still offer no assistance or help. You both can just be miserable. This is where I think the idea, or at least how I think of compassion, is important. Because compassion is the ability to help assist in the discomfort. And I think compassion can come from sympathy. So you can see someone from the outside without ever experiencing it, and still offer some assistance, some desire for them to be better. From an empathetic point of view, right? You can share that experience, come to an understanding of it, and you can also from that space try to offer assistance. I don't know that one is superior than the other. I myself tend towards the empathy sort of presentation, so I can give more in that realm. Um, I have trouble sitting on the outside looking at people's suffering without becoming part of the experience. Um, I will do it when the feeling becomes too threatening, but then we're starting to get into this idea of disassociation, um, which isn't necessarily healthy and might be a little beyond this idea of sympathy. So it's the idea of compassion. I would call compassion and unconditional love close to the same thing. The only thing I would say is probably different is you could have compassion for somebody wanting to help them change, and you could be forceful in that change with compassion because you can you can do things in a way that you think are offering assistance but might not be helpful to that person, and I still think that is being compassionate, right? You're trying to assist with removing this person's discomfort. So this unconditional aspect means we're not being forceful. So it's a condition of allowance instead of a condition of forced change. It means an allowance, an acceptance of the person you are right now, how you are right now, and also realizing that maybe that's okay. Right? Why do we always have to think there's something wrong with us? I get there's discomfort, but you know, it's it is part of life. You know, it helps us grow, helps shape us. So that's my very unshiatsu-focused approach to touch on a podcast called Just Shiatsu. As always, never quite sure when I'll feel inspired again. But until we meet again, I hope everyone has a great journey in life.