Valuing Touch and Dancing Touch

In my last article , I explained that a “Form of Touch” is a quality of contact that activates functions that span both body and mind. Each Form of Touch is really an attitude which is transmitted through the quality of physical touch and also flavours the whole relationship between therapist and client. In my view this inner attitude is more important than the techniques or meridians used. It can happen that practitioners work with a meridian but undermine the Qi of the meridian through their attitude.

The energy functions to which each form of touch relates are often called the Six Divisions of Yin and Yang. Whereas the pairing of meridians in the Five Elements show a Yin-Yang, complementary relationship between two Zang-Fu Organ functions, the Six Divisions pair a leg meridian with a synergistic meridian in the arm. These pairings are both Yang or both Yin and show how the two Organs work together as part of a deeper function.

Traditional Chinese Medicine doesn’t define these deeper functions. However, my research in the 1980’s into child development showed clearly that it was the pathways of these Divisions that guided infant movement development and, at a biological and social level, facilitated the formation of the self.

The Inner Community
Physiologists, neuroscientists and psychologists no longer view our self as a single entity governed by a central controller. Instead there is convincing evidence that both body and mind are made up of a community of autonomous parts, all competing and collaborating with each other . It is from this complex network of mutual communication that a single sense of self emerges.

This viewpoint makes a vital difference to medicine, whether orthodox or alternative. Over 80% of orthodox medicine is palliative or surgical, meaning that it is simply getting rid of the symptoms caused by a part of the body that isn’t working. Much of alternative medicine is based on various models of organic harmony with their own diagnostic and treatment protocols. Energetically, these systems are aiming to control the system; to bring it into a ‘correct’ state. However, if one takes the ‘community view’ of the body seriously, then much of medicine is not taking the group dynamics of the body into account and thus the treatments do not last.

To give a simple example, in many forms of Shiatsu, the (simplistic) idea is to find a Kyo-Jitsu pair of meridians that relate to each other, to support and nourish the Kyo and to disperse the Jitsu. However, if the condition is chronic, then the Jitsu energy has been working hard for years, and resents being ‘dispersed’ just as a person in a group who has been organizing the teas for years can resent being told to stop because other people are now willing to do the job. The Jitsu-person needs to be valued by the rest of the group for the work he has been doing before he can let go.

There is now a large body of research into what makes groups of people work well together . These insights can be transferred directly into a bodywork session and we can use group facilitation principles to help the inner community to work well together. We will show how four meridians, which form two Divisions, are responsible for helping the inner community to follow these “group principles”. The Forms of Touch related to these divisions demonstrate how to activate them through bodywork and through your attitude.

Liver – Group Purpose
Groups usually need a purpose to stay together. If this ‘group purpose’ is not clear the group tends to fragment. In the first part of adulthood our sense of purpose seems to focus on attracting partners, children, jobs, creativity and status. One of the issues of getting older is that many of these earlier purposes cease to be relevant, which can lead to the breakup of the Inner Community and serious health problems. The Liver that provides a central purpose for the internal community to collaborate around and its flexibility is important to redefine our purpose at different stages of life.

Pericardium – Networking
However, having a central purpose is not enough to form a community. For a truly collaborative group to form, every part of the body-mind needs to connect and communicate with every other part. This network of connectivity is represented by the Pericardium function. In Chinese the Pericardium is called the Xin Bao, or the Heart Fascia.

But Bao means more than fascia; the character pictures a womb (the red bit is an embryo); so the fascia is seen as more than just connective tissue, it also embraces and nurtures every member of the inner community. Fascia gives the physical foundation for the interconnections within the community. It is this feeling of supportive connectedness within the internal community that the Pericardium facilitates.

The Jue Yin and Valuing Touch
The Liver and Pericardium together form the Jue Yin Division. The Pericardium embraces each member and gives them a sense of connectedness. The Liver is more active, holding everything together, and is thus more embodied in muscle. However, a group that is working well and communicating with each other does not need to be forced together. In such a group the Liver embraces the whole, valuing every part and providing a central purpose to gather round. It’s only when a group is fractured that the Liver needs to resort to control to hold things together.

People often come to Shiatsu because they want to make a change; to fix a problematic part of themselves. But to help a group to function, one has to start by valuing each member for what they are already doing, not what they could do if they changed. For example, a chronically tense muscle is painful and it is natural to want it to change and let go. But the purpose of chronic tension is often to protect. This can be useful in the healing of trauma even if the end result is dysfunctional. So the tension can be appreciated for its role in the inner community. Valuing a habit for the job it’s been doing can produce a profound transformation. I often murmer “Well done!” under my breath when contacting such an issue. This attitude encourages each part of the self to feel a valuable part of the team and paradoxically helps it to change.

Each form of touch consists of an attitude and a physical technique. The Form of Touch associated with the Jue Yin is called “Valuing Touch” , whose attitude is embracing and valuing what is already happening rather than trying to change things. The physical aspect involves helping the client to choose to do what she is already (unconsciously) doing. For instance, instead of trying to release a chronically tense muscle, one can show the client how to consciously condense the fibres in the muscle. By doing this she can own and value the job the muscle is already doing and she can frequently find another way of doing that job so that the muscle can be released from its bondage.

This is fundamentally different to the Sotai techniques of contract-and-release because the latter is just another technique for releasing the muscle rather than valuing what it is doing. Chronically tense muscles are not fooled by Sotai because they know that they are doing a necessary job, even if it is not the most harmonious way of doing it!

The Shao Yang and Dancing Touch
The complementary Division to the Jue Yin is the Shao Yang, consisting of the Gall Bladder and the Triple Heater. Whereas the Jue Yin focuses on giving a feeling of connectedness, these Yang functions are concerned with how the internal community acts together and resolves conflict between its members.

There are essentially two distinct forms of conflict. One could be called the Shoot Out, where two forces are acting in what seems to them to be opposite directions. The only solution that the combatants see is that one or the other wins and beats the loser.

The other is the “Cop Out” where two people who are in relationship don’t make contact, creating a tension between them because they are also needing to work together.

In a group, if one person is Copping Out, then it often diverts the energy of the group into trying to pull the cop-out back into the team. This is a very common form of conflict in the body where one part is not doing its job.

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Conflict resolution depends on finding a common activity within which both forces can feel equally valued. This could be called The Magic Roundabout.

The Triple Heater focuses on helping every part of the internal community to be involved. The Gall Bladder function focuses on helping potentially conflicting members to use their differences in collaboration.

For example, to provide strength, it is common for one side of a joint to be braced while the other moves. But this causes conflict in the joint – just as if one partner in a dance holds still while the other tries to move. If this pattern remains even when strength is not needed then the continual conflict can wear the joint down. If one can teach the braced bone to join the dance the conflict can be turned into harmonious and graceful movement. Because of this metaphor, the Form of Touch associated with the Shao Yang is called “Dancing Touch” and this joint work is a physical example.

The same principles can be applied to any form of conflict in a person’s life. If they are feeling pulled in opposite directions then Dancing Touch listens to both sides of the conflict and explores how they are connected. Often a common direction emerges that respects both energies and allows both to act together.

The Integrating Family
The Jue Yin and the Shao Yang work together as a family of four meridians to Integrate the Inner Community. Together they also join the Wood and the Ministerial Fire Elements, which are both concerned with relationship. Working with Valuing Touch and Dancing Touch aims to heal the dysfunctional dynamics within the community and then the group can reconfigure to deal with its challenges with good heart. This is particularly relevant for old age, disability and chronic conditions. In these cases we are not necessarily trying to heal the condition but to help the person-community to embrace it and deal with it in the best way they can. The important principle in working with this family is not to aim for change but to value what is there and help it to explore its potential.

Case History
One client taught me a lot about these forms of touch. Sally came to me with period pains and migraines but immediately I started working with her, she tensed up, blocking the touch. When we noticed this reaction she remembered that she had a dreadful skin disease as a little girl, because of which she couldn’t be touched for a year. So she was in conflict, she wanted to be touched but the traumatic memory blocked it when it was offered.

My first response was to value the blocking. It had been doing a good job protecting her from the pain of that trauma and we spent a session feeling the contraction and saying “Well Done!” to it. Next, I suggested that, when she felt the first signs of the contraction she told me to stop and actively pushed me away. Through this activity she was exploring an expansive and conscious way to protect herself instead of the unconscious contraction.

It took several sessions for her to find the confidence to really open to touch, knowing she could push me away at any time. Eventually she found a way of meeting her need for contact and trusting in her boundaries that transformed the chronic Kyo-Jitsu dynamic: she could open herself to receive what she needed knowing that she could always push away what she couldn’t cope with .

Thus the original conflict was resolved by finding the common ground between Invitation and Protection. Both energies became aspects of Expansion. She could let go of Contraction as a way of protection. Almost irrelevantly, the physical symptoms she had come with also disappeared.

1 Bill Palmer, The Six Forms of Touch, Shiatsu Society Journal Autumn 2018

2 Bill Palmer, Development of the Yang Ming and Tai Yin in infants. JSOBT 1995

3 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained

4 Dale Hunter, The Art of Facilitation

5 Dragon Dreaming: www.dragondreaming.org

6 Eight Shields: 8shields.org

7 For more about this case history see www.seed.org/sally

Inner Qigong is a synthesis of traditional Qigong, Developmental Movement and Somatic Exploration. Its aim is to bring awareness to different body systems such as the inner organs, the fascia, the skeleton and the muscle system and to explore how they all contribute to your ways of being, both in body and mind.

We use the developmental movements to show how the meridians of Chinese Medicine are actually the pathways along which we learn, as babies,  to join up the body and make intentional movements. Babies not only learn to use their bodies through these movements but also develop their characteristic way of being and personality.

The twelve movement meridians act together in three groups of four.  Each of these groups teaches a profound life lesson by embodying its energy through the movements of the Qigong.

The first lesson is how to define and be grounded in yourself.  If you are centred and relaxed in how you are then you can both have clear boundaries and be open to receive support and nourishment from the outer world. The physical side of this is learned by first feeling how the ground supports us, feeling the upward force from the ground flowing up into the inner organs and supporting us from underneath.

When the organs are expanded by this support they form a buoyant and springy centre to the body, which we can relax onto without collapsing. In fact, their bouncy tone moves our energy upward and outward. This self-support underlies our ability to be authentic, have clear boundaries and ultimately have mutually supportive and nourishing relationships.

The second lesson is how to act and move in a way that is aligned with your inner spirit.  Many of us inhibit our spirit because we are over-concerned with other people’s approval. Physically we learn to act with spirit by feeling our inner motivations and listening to them. Maybe we don’t act on them all the time because we also live in society, but at least we acknowledge them.

Physically, we can feel this clarity by learning to feel how the force of our movements travels through the skeleton and how to align our bodies so that our actions are consistent with our intention. The Inner Qigong of this group of meridian movements first teach us to become aware of our skeleton as the physical aspect of our core being. The qigong develops practices which access our primal energy – deep, often unconscious, impulses that give vitality to life – and to feel how to align our actions with our primal spirit.

The third lesson is how to creatively deal with conflict. Once we act authentically and move in the world we come into contact with other actions and movements that might not agree with ours. Two dysfunctional ways of dealing with this conflict are fight and flight. In one we try and dominate and, in the other, we collapse and lose ourselves. In both cases, we are not able to find a mutually agreeable relationship.

This is also true inside our body. Sometimes an action seems to require a movement that puts an unhealthy strain on another part of the body. The trick is learning how to involve the whole body in all the movements so that each part feels integrated and involved. Physically we learn this through developing elasticity in the muscles and fascia which give the sense of being joined together. The Inner Qigong of this group of movement meridians first shows how all parts of the body are connected and then uses those connections to develop spiral movements, which involve every dimension of the body.

The Six Forms of Touch is a system of training that I developed almost 40 years ago. The main idea is that the WAY in which you contact a person is as important, or even more important, than the meridians with which you choose to work. This article describes two of these Forms,

The Six Divisions

Each form of touch relates to one of the Six Divisions, which I wrote about some time ago, and it might help to remember the deep meaning of these channels.  Each of the six divisions is the combination of a leg meridian with an arm meridian and I think they were the inspiration for Masunaga’s meridian extensions.

However, the six divisions express deeper archetypes than the functions of the individual meridians. The Ling Shu states “The arms reach to Heaven while the legs stand on the Earth”. So each arm meridian embodies an energy through which our body expresses mental and spiritual capacities. In contrast the leg meridians express the way in which our feelings, thoughts and spirit can become embodied, supported by the Earth and transformed into action. The combined channel forms a bridge between the body and spirit and this bridge is a kind of combination of the energies of the leg and arm meridian. Just as the Five Elements combine the meridians into Yin-Yang pairs, as if they were brother and sister, the divisions combine them into Yang-Yang and Yin-Yin pairs, two brothers and two sisters.

For instance, the Stomach and the Large Intestine together form the Yang Ming division. The stomach function, essentially, is to reach out and ask for what we need. Notice that it is  a Yang function so it impels our body into action – in this case to reach out and to take in nourishment. The Yin “sister” of the Stomach is the Spleen whose function is to receive the nourishment, filling and toning the flesh. The Stomach’s Yang “brother”, on the other hand, is the Large Intestine who gets rid of those things that we have taken in which are not needed.

So the Yang Ming has the deeper function of maintaining our boundaries and forming our individuality. The Large Intestine’s ability to say “No” to things which we don’t need is often a necessary precursor before we feel safe enough to ask for something that we do need. The Yang Ming mediates our exchange with the outer world and gives us our sense of self and other.

The last member of this family is the Lung, who is the sister to the Large Intestine and elder sister of the Spleen. The Lung’s relationship to the Large Intestine is that she expands us to fill our personal space the boundaries of which the Large Intestine guards. This expansive energy is also protective and allows us to have clear boundaries without them becoming barriers to contact. The Lung’s relationship to the Spleen is that she continues the inner expansion of the Spleen into the outer world.

Together they make a family which has the profound but simple function of maintaining our sense of self within our exchanges with the outer world.

  

Forms of Touch

Although the forms of touch are related to the Six Divisions, they are not treatment techniques. By this I mean that they are not techniques to be used when there is an imbalance in one division. Instead they describe six different dimensions of therapeutic contact and a good therapist will be using all of them. However, if there is an imbalance in one division, then one should be clear that your contact with the client includes the form of touch associated with it.

To illustrate this, let us start by describing the form associated with the YangMing division. The YangMing has the function of actively reaching for what we need and pushing out what we don’t need. The important aspect of this division is that it is active, so in order to support its energy the client has to be active and interactive.

This is unusual within the traditional format of a Shiatsu session because, usually, Shiatsu is performed in silence – the client being quite passive and the practitioner making the decisions about what the client needs. This silence also has an important function so I am not disparaging it. But a client who has difficulty with boundaries will often accept without question what someone else thinks they need and is therefore open to abuse in their lives. If we simply follow the routine of diagnosis and silent treatment within the Shiatsu session then we are not helping such a client to develop their active ability to maintain their boundaries.

In fact, I think this is true for many people, who need to have explicit permission to ask for what they need and to say no to things that feel wrong. This is what a strong YangMing gives us. The YangMing form of touch gives this permission and actively helps develop its energy in the client.

All the forms of touch have two aspects:

• • A technique which develops a capacity or develops the client’s awareness.
  • An inner attitude on the part of the practitioner. Our touch subtly transmits our inner state even if the client is not consciously aware of it.

The technique part of YangMing Touch is best performed as an ‘awareness exercise’. I help the client to scan through their own body and to notice any places which they feel are significant. This can be difficult for people who are not very aware of their body and I find that at first they only notice  places where they feel pain or tension. However, as they receive more bodywork, more subtle sensations come to the surface. I then ask them if there is a place where they would like to be touched and if they are not sure, I just ask them to choose one of the places they noticed in the scanning.

When a person is actually touched, they can usually feel more clearly where they want the contact. It’s as if the mind has an idea what the body wants but, when the body is touched, it knows what it needs much more precisely than the mind does. So I immediately give them permission to change their request and to guide me to a place that feels ‘right’. I also say that they can ask me to change the quality of touch, for instance to press more deeply or to give soft contact with the palm.  By this I’m giving them permission to say no to what I suggest and to ask for exactly what they need. This process is teaching them to listen to what their body wants rather than to what their mind THINKS their body wants.

The ‘inner attitude’ part of this form of touch requires the practitioner to let go of the desire to fix a problem, to let go of the high status which comes with the ability to diagnose and treat and to be totally open to the requests and corrections of the client. If you are used to deciding where to touch and how to touch it can feel disconcerting, even insulting, to be asked to do something different. Maybe you DO know best but the point is to teach the person to listen to their body and to develop their own expertise. To do that, you must get out of the way and let the other person explore themselves.

It can actually be a great liberation to form a more equal relationship with the client  because, face it, there are times when you feel a bit lost and being able to ask the client where they would like to go next keeps contact with them and maintains the flow of the treatment. Moreover, this exercise gives them permission to give useful feedback while you are working.

In summary, YangMing touch is the aspect of therapeutic relationship which is helping a person to listen to their own needs and explore themselves rather than being dependent on the expertise of the therapist. It does not subtract from the competence of the therapist, in fact it needs awareness and skill to create an environment where the client is able to share what they really need and safe enough to guide the therapist while they are working.

Tai Yin Touch

The Yin side of this family of meridians is the TaiYin. It is the combination of Spleen and Lung.  As I said before, the connection between these two energy functions is that they are both related to expansion. The Spleen is the ability of the organism to receive nourishment and fill the tissues, toning the organs and the flesh.The Lung takes that expansion further and fills our personal space, making contact with the outer world. Whereas the YangMing governs the gates of our personal space, the TaiYin fills it.

If the TaiYin is not working then there is a tendency to collapse inward and this movement sucks other people in to fill the hole. So it creates a Victim state which feels that it needs Rescue. Stephen Karpman described what he called the ‘Drama Triangle’, which describes how the Victim role is also vulnerable to abuse.  This abuse doesn’t have to be evil in intent – the Rescuer can easily cross over boundaries, giving specific advice or performing particular interventions which subtly make the client more dependent on the Rescuer rather than empowering them to be more independent.

The essence of TaiYin touch is that it focuses on meeting someone at their boundary rather than diving in to fix their problems. I often call this form of touch “Front Door Touch” because, energetically, it is analogous to the act of knocking on someone’s door and waiting for them to open it, rather than marching into the house and sorting things out. This is a subtle attitude but makes an enormous difference to the relationship. It covers the way you ask questions, the way you physically touch and the clarity of the contracts you make. For example:

Asking open questions

Open questions help a person to explore themselves and express their hidden feelings rather than simply supplying information to the questioner. This is particularly important in bodywork because open questions help the person to get in touch with their body instead of getting caught up in emotional stories. I call questions that narrow the field and ask for explanations “Pointed Questions”. In general pointed questions are asked for the understanding of the the practitioner, to help them make a diagnosis. Open questions, on the other hand, are asked for the benefit of the client. For instance:

Client: “Im feeling angry today”

Pointed Question: What happened to make you angry? (This takes the client away from the present, away from their body and into the past. Energetically this is an inward direction and doesn’t help the client to express their present feelings. It enmeshes them in a story)

Open Questions: Where do you feel that in your body?  If you were to express that feeling with a movement, what would you do? Etc.

With open questions you are not trying to analyse or diagnose or fix things, but they stimulate the client to explore and express. In other words, energetically, they stimulate expansion and so activate the TaiYin.

Touching the Superficial Fascia

When one stretches a muscle there is a point of “first contact” where you have taken up the slack in the muscle fibres but have not begun to lengthen them. If you stay at that point then the receiver has the opportunity to let go, open up and lengthen the muscle themselves instead of being passively stretched, This is again analogous to knocking on the door and waiting for the owner to come to you.

In the same way, when one presses a tsubo, there is a point of first contact. This occurs when the touch has taken up the looseness in the skin and meets the elasticity of the layer of fascia just underneath it. This layer has only recently been recognised by anatomists for what it is. Previously it was just seen as subcutaneous fat, but actually it is a tough layer of loose knit connective tissue holding the fat cells. Moreover, it has recently been found that this layer also contains a large number of sensory nerves – mainly stretch receptors – which sense the movements of the muscles and organs below. It covers the whole body like an internal diving suit and, just as the skin is a sense organ facing outwards to sense the world through touch, this “superficial fascia” is a sense organ facing inwards, giving a sense of the holistic integrity of the body. In a sense it is the inner boundary of our body. Making contact with it but not going deeper gives the receiver a sense of their wholeness and knocks on their front door, encouraging their Qi to wake up and participate in the therapy.

In summary, Tai Yin touch comes forward to make contact but stops that forward energy immediately one senses that one is crossing a boundary. At that point, you don’t back off but open out, waiting for the receiver’s energy to expand outwards to meet you and open the door. It needs practice to reliably feel those boundaries because the Victim archetype is actually asking you to come in further. Using the Front Door analogy, the Victim is calling from the bedroom for you to open the door and come up to rescue them. If you don’t collude with this, you help the person to really express their underlying vulnerability and this, paradoxically empowers them to find their own resources rather than rely on rescue.

Conclusion

I hope that the descriptions of Yangming and Taiyin touch have given a clear idea of what I mean by a Form of Touch. I see these ‘therapeutic attitudes’ to be more effective than any particular choice of meridian that one may make. In fact, the wrong attitude can completely sabotage the therapy even if the diagnosis is precise and appropriate. For instance, if the receiver is low in energy, depressed, collapsed and with low tone to the muscles a TCM diagnosis may well indicate treatment of the Spleen meridian. But if the attitude of the therapist is that of an expert treating a passive client then the work will not wake up the Spleen function. In fact, it will maintain the dynamic, because the low Spleen energy is expressed in the archetype of the Victim and this is simply amplified by therapeutic Rescue. It is the attitudes of the Forms of Touch associated with the TaiYin (and maybe also of the YangMing later on) which activate and energise the self-supporting, expansive energy of the Spleen. Thus the Six Forms of Touch show what attitude and what quality of physical touch activate the holistic energy functions and make the whole therapy consistent with the work on the meridians.

Bill Palmer and Teresa Hadland are teaching three UK workshops in 2019 which will explain al the forms of touch in depth. They are also running a workshop in Totnes on the 1st and 2nd December which gives an overview of the Six Forms and acts as a taster for the one year programme. See www.seed.org for more details.

The philosophy underlying our work comes from two sources, Taoism and Dzog Chen.

Taoism has a basic attitude which values the natural process. You shouldn’t push against the water. Taoism seems to be the philosophical system that describes the nature of life most accurately.

Life needs to be adaptable and resilient. Adaptability comes from flexibility but resilience comes from strength. If there is too much flexibility then nothing persists. If there is too much strength then things can’t change when necessary. So life depends on the dynamic and complex interaction of two complementary qualities. This is the meaning of Yin and Yang in Taoist philosophy.

Taoism is also practical. Because it sees these two qualities as being dependent on each other then they interact in a way that is strange to the mechanistic philosophy of western medicine. On the other hand, the principles are familiar within human psychology and martial arts.

For instance Taoism would say: “If you are stuck, then go further into stuckness and when the Yang of the stuckness reaches its extreme it will naturally transform into the Yin of release.”

In terms of therapy, it would say: ” Don’t try to cure a chronic condition because you don’t know the consequences, but become aware, experiment, help things to move and the condition will transform through natural development.”

The Taoists never strive for perfection because that is an idea, and the idea may not run in the same direction as the natural process. For instance, it is possible that a serious disease could be a valuable process in someone’s life, even if it kills them. One of my clients once said to me that she didn’t want to distract herself by hoping to cure her newly diagnosed cancer because she wanted to spend the rest of her life fully living. In fact, she ended up living for another 9 years, although the doctors initially gave her six months without treatment. Her viewpoint was very Taoist.

Dzog Chen, or ‘Great Perfection’ in Tibetan is a spiritual approach which values Direct Experience instead of ideas. Instead of seeing spiritual practice as a way of attaining a state of enlightenment, Dzog Chen practice focuses on letting go of the stories and ideas about yourself and your goals and targets. From this viewpoint, striving after change only takes you further away from the direct experience of yourself.

Paradoxically, it is only when you let go of the desire to be better that you are fully present in yourself. If change happens, it happens as an organic, developmental process – like a baby growing up. We don’t say that a baby is an imperfect adult – the baby is perfect as a baby – and by fully being a baby, it will grow and change into other forms of perfection. As I see it, this is the essential viewpoint of Dzog Chen

The three principles of Movement Shiatsu are:

1. Help the client to have a direct sensation of themselves instead of perceiving themselves through various stories. To be aware of their current ability rather than focusing on their imperfections.
2. Teach the client exercises through which they can explore the new connections and help the initial direct awareness become embodied in their nervous system.
3. Help the client to integrate their direct experience of themselves into the rest of their life through experiments which they perform outside the therapy sessions.

These, to me are an echo of the three basic principles of Dzog Chen. There are two articles which expand on this:

Disability is Personal Ability

Body Buddhism

 

As other posts have said, our basic standpoint is that each one of us is a community. When you start to sense and move the inner organs, they each seem to have personality and have intentions and needs. Each muscle can be seen as a person: some are very stubborn, or sulky, some are lazy couch potatoes. This inner community communicates through movement, posture and voice and each part senses and talks to its neighbours through the nervous system and the elasticity of fascia and muscles.

However, humans are social creatures and we often listen more to how we think we should be (and what other people say we should be) rather than listening to this inner community. This means that we often abuse parts of ourselves by forcing them to go along with something that they can’t cope with because we want to be different to how we are.

Inner Qigong is a system of focused explorations by which you learn to sense and listen to each part of this inner community. In the classes we will use movement, visualisation, voicework, partner work, touch and music to experience these inner people and give them a chance to speak in the first person.

Inner Qigong has been evolving for over 35 years. Some of the influences have been Aikido, Taoist Movement Meditation, Body-Mind Centering, Feldenkrais Method. Japanese Seitai. Wolfson and Roy Hart Voicework. Tibetan Yantra Yoga and Developmental Movement Therapy. It is not a rigid form of movements to learn but a framework of focused experiments through which you can become aware of the inner community and how it connects together.

Over the 1980’s and ’90s I worked with many babies who had problems with their development. This opened out into a decade of research into infant movement development in collaboration with several physios and speech therapists. We were surprised to find that the way in which those early movements evolve followed exactly the pathways described by Oriental Medicine as the ‘meridians’. I am not sure of the energy language in which Chinese medicine is couched, but I believe the meridians to be innate pathways, possibly hard-wired into the motor nervous system. As babies we learn to integrate our bodies by exploring how to join up movements along these paths. The focused explorations of Inner Qigong also contain some of these developmental movements and help you remember archetypal connections in the body.

If you are a physical therapist of some sort, you can teach Inner Qigong to clients, through which they can become aware of what they want to take care of, or energise and support in themselves. Through this awareness they can ask for what they need and the bodywork becomes led and guided by the client rather than determined by diagnosis and theory by the therapist.

I find that by working in this way I also become aware of how I listen to others and live in community. I believe that how we live with each other is reflected and influenced by how we treat ourselves. So if our internal decision maker forces members of our inner community to do things with which they can’t cope then we will tend to do that in our outer groups. If we learn to listen and take care of our inner people then that gives a foundation for how we treat others.

So my hope is that these classes can become a laboratory for practicing how to listen to ourselves AND to others, how to take responsibility for our actions and to take on responsibility for the group and for the outer community. I hope we are encouraging responsibility and responsiveness, both inner and outer.

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In several classes, when doing the first series of Inner Qigong, I have suggested that people feel the ground pushing up on the soles of their feet and then use that feeling to feel the upward force supporting their body.

I have also said that according to Einstein, this is the reality- that the force of gravity is in some way an illusion and that what we really perceive is the way in which the floor stops us from moving down.

 

This has caused some argument and confusion. Isn’t gravity a real force?

Actually, no, it isn’t in the sense that we normally mean it. The downward movement that the floor interrupts is not caused by a force. The effect of gravity is actually more subtle than that, and the real force produced by gravity is a tidal force squeezing us sideways and stretching us lengthways. This is too subtle to notice at our scale. But the earth notices it and that is the cause of the ocean tides.

But forget that, it confuses matters. Why is the downward movement that we experience when we jump off a cliff not caused by a force?

A very good analogy is swinging a ball on a chain:

You think that you ‘feel’ a force pulling the ball outwards. This is often even called ‘centrifugal force’. But what is actually happening is that the ball, left to its own devices, would travel off towards the horizon in a straight line. It is actually the force that you are exerting to pull the ball in towards you that is the real force, pulling the ball out of it’s natural state of movement. It is the inertia of the ball, ‘wanting’ to travel in a straight line, that gives the illusion that the ball is pulling on the chain with a force.

The same is true of gravity. Our natural movement in the vicinity of the earth, is to fall downwards weightlessly. We would feel no force at all. This is what astronauts experience. It’s not that there is no gravitational field in orbit but that they are freely falling in it, so don’t experience any weight or force. The speed of the spaceship is such that they fall ’round’ the earth rather than falling to the ground. Isaac Newton was the first to think about this.

Newton’s cannonball
Newton thought about the motion of a cannonball fired horizontally on the Earth’s surface. If you fire a cannonball horizontally (neglecting air resistance), it will travel some distance before it strikes the ground. If you fire it much faster (again horizontally) then it will travel much further before hitting the ground.)

Newton asked what would happen if you fired even faster. He reasoned that the cannonball would maintain a constant height from the surface of the Earth – in other words, it would move in a circular orbit. This is what a rocket is used for. It is not to propel the satellite to a place where there is no gravity but to accelerate it to enough speed so that it is orbiting in the gravity field rather than falling back down to the ground.

So if there was no ground to stop our movement, we would feel no weight and no force (or no downward force) . What gives us the feeling of weight is the reaction of our body to being stopped from moving by the upward force of the ground.

Galileo and the Tower of Pisa

Another way of seeing that gravity is not a force like magnetism is to see what happens if you drop two different weights from a height. Galileo performed this experiment (maybe from the Tower of Pisa but maybe that’s an urban myth).

He found that the two weights dropped at exactly the same speed. This was tested again on the moon (where there is no air resistance) and a feather and a hammer were dropped simultaneously by David Scott and hit the ground simultaneously. (see this on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C5_dOEyAfk).

In contrast, if you have two magnets, one strong and the other weaker and you place them close to another big fixed magnet then the stronger magnet will move faster than the weak one. This is what a ‘real’ force looks like. You double the amount of force and the acceleration doubles. The analogy to the strength of the magnetic force in the case of gravity is the ‘mass’. It is mass that responds to gravity but things with more mass do not fall faster than things with less mass (as long as the larger mass is not big enough to create a sizeable gravitational field itself) .

So I hope you can see that gravity is an illusory force and the real force that we feel is the the ground pushing up on our feet. So the visualisation of the qigong is a real energy, not just our imaginations.

This article is about the related Chinese words Ming, Xing and Zhi.

Ming is normally translated as ‘Destiny’ but this doesn’t come close to the subtle meaning buried in the character.

The Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing, one of the most ancient Chinese medical texts, states that the highest level of healing is helping a person to fulfil their Ming and giving nourishment to their Xing ( translated as “true nature”). To the authors, this was more important than the mere curing of disease .

What’s the point of being cured if you’ve lost the point of living? In fact, to one Taoist school of Chinese medicine, one couldn’t work with Qi if you didn’t take account of the Ming. So what do the characters really mean and why are so important to those ancient Chinese doctors?

Taking the character for Ming to bits: the top two strokes represent a person. Then there is a single line – representing unity – and with a subtle connotation of unifying past and present, ancestors and oneself. Then two shapes. The left shape is a mouth and the right is an embryo.

Putting all of this together, Ming really means something like “The instructions given by the ancestors to the embryo”. In one way, it could be identified with DNA. That’s exactly what DNA is on a physical level.

But I also like to see it in a more active role. I like to imagine that before birth I went to the ‘university of the universe’ and looked at the courses on offer. I chose one and was told “OK, we’ll give you these parents, this ancestry, these relationships, these traumas and illnesses, these challenges and that will be your course in life.”

This fantasy changes one’s feelings about life and its challenges enormously. Also it changes how one sees the process of therapy. Instead of focusing on changing oneself it moves us to focus on making the best of oneself, of learning from our problems.

The second character Xing consists of two parts. The left is a heart, the right is life. So it means Heart-Life. It is normally translated as one’s nature.

If we see life as a journey, Ming is the ‘instructions being given at the start of a journey’ , maybe our spiritual and physical genes, which contain the potential for development that will unfold through interaction with the environment. Xing is our way of travelling it, our core heart feeling that we have when we are doing something that conforms with our real nature, not what other people want us to do

So Ming might be seen as the map of our life, Xing is our guide to whether we are on the right track..

 The Zhi

If we are inspired by our purpose and are following our nature, we act with authenticity. The power of authentic action is called Zhi in Chinese, which is usually translated as Will.

If we analyse the character it has two parts. The top part is Shi

This is one of the ancient chinese four professions. The other three are merchant, artisan and farmer. But Shi does not have a clear definition. it can mean scholar, artist or soldier. If you feel the common feature of these people, it is that they go into new areas. There is a feeling of exploration, courage and creativity.

 

The bottom part is Xin, literally the Heart, but in Chinese it also connotes any aspect of Mind or Awareness. So together Zhi has the connotation of the Creative Mind. The aspect of ourselves that goes into new territory, doesn’t follow the herd but follows one’s authentic spirit.

Ted Kaptchuk translates it as Wisdom and observes that two aspects of Will arise from the Zhi. The Yang Will is similar to our English usage: a conscious purposeful force behind our actions. The Yin Will embodies the sense of unconscious purpose that we sometimes have when we look back and realise that our actions have been working towards an end that was always meant to be.

In a way, you can see that the Yin part of the Will is similar to the Ming

by Bill Palmer 2017

This article is written to mark the 30th anniversary of Movement Shiatsu, an approach to physical therapy that I developed in the 1980’s which is particularly relevant to working with so-called disability, chronic conditions and old age. Many people would say that it bares little resemblance to the common forms of Shiatsu. It seems closer to Feldenkrais Method [[1]]or Body-Mind Centering [[2]] because it integrates body-awareness exercises, movement experiments and bodywork into a coherent system. In this approach the client is more active and the practitioner facilitates the client’s self-exploration rather than treating them as a passive recipient.

However, I see it as an evolution of Shiatsu for two reasons. Firstly, the theory underlying Movement Shiatsu includes many of the ideas common to other forms of Shiatsu. In fact, as we shall see, it actually explains them in terms that modern scientific culture could accept as plausible hypotheses.

Secondly, the many forms of Shiatsu have a wide variety of theories and techniques but most of them use a common quality of touch. This vertical, non-manipulative and still touch gives the client a sense that the practitioner is listening to them at a profound level and stimulates self-awareness. Movement Shiatsu uses the same quality of touch and also helps the client to use their awareness to explore themselves and experiment with their habitual patterns.

In this article, I will tell the story of the development of Movement Shiatsu and explain how working with children with special needs taught me the basic principles that underlie this work.

Combining Movement and Shiatsu
In 1979 I started working at the Central School of Speech and Drama teaching video techniques. It also turned out to be a big step in my parallel life as a therapist. The drama students often hurt themselves in movement classes and, once word got around that I was good at helping people recover, my office turned into a very busy part time clinic. Subsequently, these same students asked me to start teaching them how to prevent injury so I started teaching what I called Shiatsu and Movement classes.

The main focus of these classes was how to become aware where the flow of movement through the body was interrupted or inhibited. Such a break in the smooth continuity of connection in the body produces an area that is vulnerable to injury. The Shiatsu used touch and guided movement to explore how to bring this discontinuity together.

Movement Development and Personality
One of my other jobs at Central was to make videos of the treatments done by the Speech Therapists for teaching purposes. Several of the staff in the speech therapy department also came to my Shiatsu and Movement classes. One of them was Kay Coombes, a specialist in working with children with disability. Kay and I developed a close working relationship. While I was making videos of her work, I would be asking questions, making suggestions and learning the basics of the Bobarth style of developmental physiotherapy that was her expertise [[3]].

I found a deep empathy with these children and attended several advanced training courses in neurological and developmental therapies to learn how to work with them myself. I started to develop a theory of how the different ways that a child developed movement skills affected their patterns of movement and posture in later life. Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, who was exploring similar ideas in her system of Body-Mind Centering, also felt that sensory feedback from these patterns influenced the development of personality [2].

To give a simple example, if a child for some reason does not learn to move forward easily they may end up with a feeling that self-motivation is difficult. This could lead to a personality that is demanding and over-dependent on others. But I am not sure this is necessarily a causal relationship. Babies who have difficulty crawling often find other ways of moving themselves and it could be that the over-dependence on others is an innate characteristic that pre-disposes them to ask for help rather than trying other ways to move themselves.

Over a period of ten years, I documented the development of six of the major infantile movement abilities in a cohort of children and gathered some evidence that a baby’s way of developing movement seemed to be correlated with the development of certain character traits as they grew older.

It was impossible to tell whether the style of movement caused the character trait or whether their character predisposed them to favour certain types of movement. In fact, I think it is a two-way relationship; that body patterns and emotional patterns are two aspects of the same phenomenon. It is obvious how different postures express personality but it is also true that changing one’s posture results in a different experience of self.

What is Qi?
I think that this inter-relationship between body and mind is the real meaning of what Chinese medicine calls Qi. This is often translated as ‘Energy’ but that gives the impression that there is some substance that flows through the body driving the functionality of the organism. I prefer to see it as a description of similarities between certain bodily and mental processes that hints that these processes are co-created.

Traditional Chinese medicine describes several different forms of Qi that can be seen as fundamental functions that apply to both mind and body. For instance, the ability to satisfy need and the ability to push out things that you don’t want are an essential ingredient of autonomy both emotionally and physically. The process of eating, digesting and excreting is a physical example of this abstract function but it is obvious that these capacities are also part of emotional intelligence. In Chinese Medicine this particular function is called the YangMing [[4]].

Maybe our experience of our body and our mind are just different perceptions of the same thing. It is therapeutically useful to view the types of Qi as abstractions about this deeper reality because one can see how it might be possible to work physically with an issue that is perceived to be emotional, or vice versa.

Babies explain Meridians
However, an aspect of Chinese medicine that I found it difficult to swallow was the idea of meridians, the ‘channels’ along which Qi was said to ‘flow’. For reasons that I have explained in other articles [[5]] I found the interpretation of Qi as a form of energy not described by science deeply implausible. And if Qi is an emergent property of the complexity of body and mind then it didn’t need channels to flow in. In my opinion there is no satisfying explanation in East Asian tradition of why these exact lines are related to the different forms of Qi.

A possible explanation occurred to me while I was documenting the step-by-step development of certain whole body movements such as pushing away from the ground, rolling and crawling. These developmental movements don’t appear all at once, they spread through the body progressively bringing muscles and fascia into collaboration until the full movement is achieved. Surprisingly, the track along which they developed exactly followed the traditional meridians.

Significantly, the character trait that seemed to develop alongside the movement matched the description of the Qi related to the associated meridian. So this seemed to be a potential explanation of the traditional concept: that meridians are innate lines through the body, or innate connectivity in the motor cortex, showing how to connect parts of the body to perform these archetypal movements. Through this process, babies develop mentally as well as physically and the common theme in the particular body-mind skill that they learn is called the Qi of the meridian.

Disability is Personal Ability
Thus one can see ‘problematic’ musculo-skeletal patterns as attempts to solve developmental challenges rather than problems to be fixed. Efficient development is not automatic, it depends largely on environmental stimulation and facilitation. At a certain stage, a baby wants to move forward and if crawling is too awkward she finds another method such as ‘bum-shuffling’. It may not be the most efficient or the most ‘normal’ way of moving. But it is her way!

This is especially true of babies with disabilities such as cerebral palsy (CP). In this condition, it’s not the environment that inhibits efficient development but the damage to the brain interrupting the learning of certain movements. But, the way the baby learns to move is her ability not her disability. It is only seen as disability if you have a rigid idea of normality.

Whatever the cause of patterns, they help to form the person’s sense of self. If the therapy tries to undo abnormal patterns and focuses too much on developing ‘normal’ movement, then it can create a deeper sense of being disabled along with feelings of shame and frustration – simply because the patterns that exist are the child’s sense of self and the intention to change them gives them the message that they, basically, are not OK.

Start by Exploring Ability
To a young child, how they are is all they know. The act of comparison with others and the discovery that one is not ‘normal’ is something that only slowly develops after the age of four [[6]]. So it is vitally important that therapy with young children supports their sense of ability rather than trying to change the abnormal patterns. Then the young child has a basic feeling of being whole as they are and this provides a good platform for facing later challenges.

Working with young children with cerebral palsy taught me practical ways of doing this. Instead of starting with the problematic areas, I find a movement that is easy. I praise it and suggest to the child that she does it more and bigger! For instance, if she can open her hand, I sing a song, opening and closing my hands along with the tune and get her to copy me. This initial success is enormously important for the spirit. We then go on to see what other opening movements she can do. Can she open her eyes, her mouth, her arms. If we come up with a difficult area, we can start working with it – she knows what she wants to do and has the positive spirit to experiment. My bodywork is simply helping her to do what she wants rather than forcing her to do something that she feels she can’t do.

I now think that this applies to everyone. If the client and their therapist both focus on the problematic issues then the client is more likely to feel disabled and to remain a victim to their problems needing rescue by the therapist. On the other hand, if the therapy starts by finding where the client’s ABILITY lies then the client’s spirit is strengthened by capability and he is empowered to start exploring himself, even challenging his own patterns, rather than asking to be fixed and rescued by the therapist.

Experiments with Movement
It’s relatively easy to experiment with and explore your movement patterns and postural habits. In my experience, this is often all that is needed to start a process of change in both body and mind. You do not need an idea of an ‘ideal’ posture or the right way to move. All that is necessary is to loosen the domination of the pattern by experimentation and then the organism has the freedom to find new and possibly better ways of doing things.

I find that this is most effective when the client learns how to play with particular muscles. Large, multi-muscle movements are confusing to work with but single muscles are open to change. To give an example, if you find a chronically tense muscle that resists stretching then, if you consciously tighten it further, you are simply doing more of what is happening anyway and so the muscle doesn’t resist. By doing this, you have moved the control of the muscle from the unconscious to the conscious and this opens the door to wider exploration.

Three Pillars of Movement Shiatsu
This discussion illustrates the three fundamentals of Movement Shiatsu based round the central core statement: ” What you are is your ABILITY not your DISABILITY”

Exploring oneself and experimenting with ingrained patterns can be hard work and not to everybody’s taste. The self naturally resists change, even good change. Many people come to a body therapist explicitly to be treated. They don’t want to explore, to experiment and to do work on themselves. This is a totally valid contract but, for some people, being treated is not enough. Movement Shiatsu provides tools for helping a client to do work on themselves through the body, if that is what they want. In my experience there are three groups of people who especially benefit from these tools:

1) People who would be classified as disabled. This classification is insulting to the spirit and the change of viewpoint that Movement Shiatsu gives can validate the person and help them to see their way of being as their success rather than their failure.

2) People with chronic issues, both physical and emotional. Typically, a person with long term physical issues has been to many therapists and tried out many types of therapy without success. This litany of therapeutic failure is depressing and maintains them in a position of being a victim to their condition. Movement Shiatsu changes the goalposts so they no longer see their condition as something to be cured but as a stimulus to deeper awareness. Often the awareness and the explorations it leads to produce a change in the symptoms because the person is starting to be kind to themselves, but that is not the main goal.

3) Old Age, As we age our area of ability changes and it is common for people to lose confidence in themselves because they are comparing themselves with their capacities at a younger age. However, if one keeps exploring one’s current areas of ability, one often finds new capacities developing in older age that one’s younger self could not achieve. This means that your self-image might change but your self-valuation does not diminish.

Life as a Course of Lessons
In the last few decades a culture has developed where therapies are largely judged by how successful they are at fixing problems. But, then the only option for people whose issues cannot be fixed is ‘condition management’, which is a way of giving up hope and, when hope leaves, the life spirit often goes too.

Life can be seen as a series of challenges and lessons to be learned by meeting those challenges. Getting rid of someone’s problems for them might also take away the course material for their lessons. If one can help the client to become an explorer, seeing their disabled movements as successful abilities and helping them to see their difficulties as lessons then I feel that means that the therapy is strengthening the spirit as well as giving the best chance for deep change at the physical and emotional levels.

Dedication:
This article is dedicated to my friend Joanna and her daughter Fae. Joanna taught me, through the way she died from cancer, that a successful life is nothing to do with being healthy but depends on meeting its challenges with spirit, love and grace. Fae, though people would perceive her as severely disabled through cerebral palsy, is one of my strongest teachers, showing that seeking normality is crazy in a “world run by maniacs” (in the words of John Lennon) and that a person can be whole, able and beautiful however different they may be.

[1] Moshe Feldenkrais – Awareness Through Movement 1972

[2] Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen: Sensing Feeling and Action. Contact Press. 1990

[3] Muller_Busch: Die Therapie des Facio-Oralen Trakts nach Kay Coombes 2015

[4] Bill Palmer – The Six Divisions – Journal of Shiatsu and Oriental Body Therapy 1994 Issue 5

[5] Bill Palmer – What is Qi: Journal of Shiatsu and Oriental Body Therapy. 1996 Issue 8

[6] LaRue Allen and Bridget B. Kelly: Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation 2015

In this blog I will be exploring the body, the muscles, nervous systems, fascia and organs and seeing how they all relate to each other.

I’m going to try to put up a new article every week or two.

This week I want to make a general point, which you might say is political. Is our body organised democratically?

Psychologists, Neuroscientists, Biologists and Physiologists all agree that there is no such thing as the individual. Descartes thought that there was – in fact he famously said “I think therefore I AM” and he even identified the seat of this central “I” to be the Pineal Gland in the centre of the brain.

Read Daniel Dennett’s book “Consciousness Explained” for the latest evidence to show that Descartes was wrong. A multitude of experiments show that, when we make a decision, many different autonomous impulses are competing with each other and the winner comes into consciousness. We actually make the decision a few seconds before we are conscious of having made it.

Neuroscientists are exploring how different parts of the nervous system are actually autonomous agents, like separate people, who communicate with each other. Oliver Sacks, in “The Man who Mistook his wife for a hat” writes about the weird and wonderful things that happen when this communication breaks down. For instance, people who have had their corpus callosum severed (which used to be done to treat epilepsy) find that the left and the right halves of their body are feeling , thinking, sensing and interpreting different things. But the people concerned don’t notice – they maintain the illusion of being one person.

Psychosynthesis has coined the term sub-personalities for almost autonomous aspects of ourselves. So one day we might feel and act like a hurt child, the next we might be a hard-nosed businessman, the next a loving father. All of these are me – I am a community. Deeper than these, there are other members of the me-community: Carl Jung described Archetypes which can be seen as aspects of personality which are common to many humans – sort of like ‘human instincts’. Just as a horse knows how to walk without being taught (and can do so within minutes of being born) – so a human knows how to be a Mother (nurturing, supportive, non-judgemental) or a Hero (brave, self-sacrificing, resilient, on a quest). You can see these appearing in children’s play. “I’m the king of the castle”, “Doctors and Nurses”, “Mummies and Daddies” etc.

But even deeper, the Enteric System is a network of 500 million neurons wrapping round the gut. It acts as a separate brain, which knows what the body needs and creates moods and hungers to satisfy them. The heart beats even if disconnected from the brain. Organs function fairly autonomously, they are not controlled by some central controller. Each cell only communicates with its neighbours and decides what to do from the feedback it gets from these close companions, not from some global system.

So I am a community.

The question is, what is the politics of the me-community? Is it an autocracy or a democracy?

In many cases only a subgroup of this large community makes decisions and has a voice to express itself. This means that the needs and desires of the other members of the self-group are ignored and suppressed.

This is the cause of many many physical and psychological problems.

So I think that one of the main aims of therapy is to help the person to be democratic within themselves.

That’s the point of this blog – to explore how to give voice to all the members of one’s community and to help them to communicate and cooperate with each other.