Clinic Tales

Shiatsu clinic was beautiful tonight. I worked for a second time with a hearing-and-speech impaired woman who has mild MR. She came in hot from the day, cheerful, and a little hyper--though that's not quite the right word--and breathing shallowly. We connected, somehow, in that magical qi way; I could feel her entire kidney meridian through any given tsubo, and as she relaxed, her breathing grew deep and her face, less flushed.

Then I worked on a 61 year old woman whose son died this year. She's been coming for shiatsu since, thought I've never worked with her before. Shiatsu has already cured her sciatica, limbered up her joints, and made her fingernails grow strong. All that was left for me, clearly, was to work on her emotional suffering. I used a technique the clinic instructor had taught me, extending my spine and moving my qi our beyond the wei chi, or protective level, of her energy field. From there I enjoyed a bird's eye view of her psychospiritual being. I worked out at that level for the entire treatment, and my client danced out of the session, happy! It felt perfect to me, but my clinic instructor, who knows where we should be heading to with our shiatsu, told me I need to ground more when using that technique--I extended back too far without also extending in the opposite direction.