Improving Your Own Health

One of the great benefits of learning to heal others with shiatsu is that you also learn how to heal yourself! In fact learning to heal yourself, and developing greater health, is really a prerequisite of being able to help others in their healing. The more a student and practitioner develops their own physical and emotional health, the greater the range of clients they will be able to help.

Most teaching days begin with half an hour to an hours exercise. We use breathing exercises, meridian stretches and Do-in self-shiatsu practices, as well as a variety of internal energy exercises, meditation and chakra breathing to improve the physical and energetic health of the body,

Nutrition is one powerful aspect of Oriental medicine, which we begin studying in the first year so that students can make beneficial changes in their eating patterns. In the second and third years the therapeutic use of foods is studied, enabling students to begin giving simple dietary advice alongside their shiatsu treatments.

Shiatsu can have a powerful affect in healing the emotions, and some shiatsu practitioners specialise in using shiatsu to help heal on this level. As part of the training students are taught the basic principles of emotional healing, and are guided in opening to their own emotional needs through group sharing and specific exercises. For some this leads to big inner shifts in how they feel, clearing old feelings of stuckness, depression, or under-confidence.