Shiatsu

The role of Metal in TCM

2012-01-06T01:24:00.000-08:00

Hi Gina,

With regard to the long term antibiotics and immune system support, I don't think the Metal gets enough attention.
This is how I see it as the specific aid to immune system recovery. Metal is our first line of defence at the exterior boundary but it is also our defence in the interior boundary. While TH communicates chi to the various systems, and Heart blood, metal communicates the sense of integrity of the whole. It is what is revealed when the brimming over of summer ceases with the coming of autumn; the actual form of the person stands proud. While metal shows us the limits of the person it is also the means, the messages by which the body maintains it's wholeness against invasion. Combined with Conception vessel 4 (intersection point of liver, kidney and spleen), I find working the metal channels to be very powerful. Metal gives rise to water through condensation of the vapour and turns it it into a useful form. (pretty good indication of the iron-age origins of this philosophy) It grabs it out of the air, as it where, just as the special exercises of chi gong and t'ai chi extract the energy of the earth-heaven space. The action of Metal is like the spiritual chi gong for the body, re-enforcing it's long term health. So I would definitely use metal to aid in the immune response and to counteract the depression of long term antibiotic use.

Further note on Yin and Yang, and a comment about the symbol of the Crane

2011-04-09T09:49:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

For steve marshall

Cooking for wheat and gluten allergies

2011-03-28T10:14:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

Cooking for wheat and gluten allergies

Tests seem to show that there are many more people with gluten and wheat allergies than thought. These can strike at any time especially in later life and whose symptoms include skin rashes, asthmatic reactions and digestion problems. The reactions occur in the small intestine, and in Traditional Chinese Medicine diagnostics the small intestine is a key factor in wrist, arm and shoulder pains, stiff necks, hearing and vision problems. Wheat-free and gluten-free are not strictly speaking the same since gluten occurs in the wheat family including barley and rye. But on the principle of eating for health it's worthwhile eating non-wheat for only a few days to see if it can really make a difference. IBS sufferers also report improvements on a wheat-free diet.

Wheat replacements can be oat cakes (a Gaelic staple: mix 2-3 cups oats, a cup of rice flour, 15gms self-raising agent and a teaspoon of salt in a bowl, dribble olive oil or melted butter over the mix and stir in until all the oats have been 'wetted' by the oil, then stir in warm water until the whole mass sticks together, roll out as flat as you can on a rice-floured surface and press out round shapes using a small glass, place on oiled flat pan and bake at 220 for 15 mins or so until hard - a little brown is ok); or rice cakes, available (Corte Inglés and Chinese food shops) with sesame seeds and other ingredients, and you can also find bio corn cakes (essentially pressed popcorn) with added sea salt in the Corte Inglés.

Non-wheat rice flour is fine for thickening sauces and soups and can be found in most supermarkets. There is also chick-pea flour (harina de garbanzo) which I use to make tortillitas de camarón (a fritter of tiny shrimps). You can find these as a tapa in most places, but they tend to mix wheat flour into the batter. Make the batter half and half rice flour and garbanzo flour with a teaspoon of raising agent. Put tiny shrimps or gambas in a hot pan and pour in the liquid batter and fry like a pancake. I often make them with chopped onions instead of shrimps. Indian cuisine uses many alternatives to wheat, especially Dosais which are pancakes made from rice and lentil flour, cooked more slowly from cold on medium heat. You can find this flour in the Chinese supermarket near the Corte Inglés, Plaza del Duque.

Potato cakes make from pressed boiled potatoes with a glazing of egg make a good alternative to bread at meals as does corn bread made with corn flour but by adding rice flour or corn starch where the recipes call for wheat flour. You can buy a special corn starch flour mix for making gluten-free bread in the Mercadona supermarket. I use this mix with baker's yeast and oats to make a light bread with at least some fibre in it. I take half the packet (500 gms), add 2 cups of bio oats, 15 gms of baker's yeast, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, enough warm water to make a stiff batter, let it rise for 40 mins or so and then bake for 30 - 40 mins or until a knife comes out clean.

Oats may not be entirely free of traces of wheat, rye or other flours, so you will have to try them and see. They are not recommended for gluten allergy sufferers, at least in the first year of the diet. The only problem with cutting out wheat is that alternatives are high in carbohydrate and low in fibre and vitamin B, so other sources of these should be found in the long term. This kind of diet does mean cutting out foods and tapas cooked in batters, but if an intolerance is established after a period of healing then the occasional sampling of wheat could easily be taken in one's stride.

Dance, attraction and shiatsu

2010-10-06T04:01:00.001-07:00

Dance and attraction

The news this summer that women are more attracted to men who have good dance moves prompted this musing. (Although why this should be news is not clear, since men are attracted to women who have good dance moves.)

You can see everything in how people move.The basic readiness both to act and to defend ourselves is what lies behind our characteristic posture. To have mobility and flexibility in our limbs and coordination in our movements are ways in which we can respond to actions or to survive threats. Blocked movements, especially, show a deficiency in the ability to react to change.

We see this in the everyday: giving at the knees when you walk over rough ground, shifting one's balance from one leg to another; being ready to deflect a blow or roll with a fall; being able to relax and enjoy the sensations of safety when they are known; being able to communicate one's joy. The body shapes one's state of being. It's what having 'a posture' means.

People who are afraid readily reveal themselves in the use of their muscles and limbs, whereas, someone who is ready to face dangers and the unknown is necessarily more supple and physically adaptable.

We can consider what we as humans do about movement with this in mind. We can appreciate that sport has this agenda not so far from the surface, but more important than all the sporting activities that modern culture has allowed humans to expand into is dance. We love to dance and to see people dance. It belongs in all cultures, in all social levels, ages and epochs and there is a reason for it. Someone who dances, someone who shows their ability to be supple, to move, to respond, is primarily signalling that they are in some unspecifiable way ready to face the unknown and to adapt to it. Women who love dance are signalling to men that they are ready to face the unknowns of mating and parenthood. They dance to show their willingness to accept the dangers that lie ahead for them. The dangers of pregnancy and the risks associated with making a choice of partner is often specifically communicated in dance and dance rituals. When women come of age, dance is one of the most common ways in which this fact is communicated to the community. Men who can't or won't dance - what do they tell us? An unwillingness to go beyond their own boundaries. The unresolved inhibition naturally tends towards rigid, inflexible, probably domineering attitudes since those who won't dance are less likely to confront and adapt to the unknown.

There are shy people, of course, who would like to dance but fear embarrassment or ridicule. In other words, they are already sensitive to where dance can take them. Their to ability to overcome this inhibition is in direct relation to their ability to evolve as individuals.

You can pretty much tell in an individual's posture and the way they move whether or not their the ability to engage with the unknown is firmly established in their mental structure. It is one the things a shiatsu practitioner looks at first of all because it's integral to how we cure ourselves of almost anything.

October 5 2010

Towards a shiatsu manifesto

2010-05-20T08:31:00.001-07:00

http://worthingshiatsu.co.uk/shiatsu-manifesto/trackback/

In response to Tony Brown's initiative blogged above. What to do about getting shiatsu into the public conciousness.

I've written at length about the lack of protection the professional societies appear willing to give to the technique of shiatsu. So I welcome the chance to both coin new ways of describing what shiatsu practitioners actually do, and to find ways of explaining why the general public needs to make use of the techniques for their own good health and that of the society in which we live. Improving society? Is that too bold a claim? I will justify it.

FIrstly, do you recognise any of the following?

Motor heated internal heating elements shiatsu massage cushions for car seats

Therapist Select™ Shiatsu Pillow Model: SP-10H; HoMedics® has taken the moving Shiatsu massage mechanism found in many of their best-selling massage cushions and put it into an ultra plush pillow. This design makes it easier than ever to reach your back, shoulders and neck with a true Shiatsu massage!

Good chairs offers shiatsu massage chair products from panasonic, inada, sanyo, and fujikura massage chair.

We have all seen them. Advertisements making use of the tag line 'shiatsu' to sell a variety of mechanical massage items. A search for 'Shiatsu massage chairs' in Google today produced 293,000 references. One ad I liked especially was by a company called 'HumanTouch' massage chairs!

In my local appliance store you can buy hand gadgets advertised as shiatsu massagers. One device produced by Solac claims on its label: 'Enjoy the true sensation of well-being all over your body thanks to the thousand year technique of shiatsu.'

All of this you know. It isn't just manufacturers of machines that claim they offer a shiatsu treatment, but beautician palors, health spa workers, hair salons, and any variety of natural medicine therapists, who may or may not have a shiatsu qualification.

Does anyone also recognise this kind of advertisement?

Natural Therapist offers Bach remedies, reflexology, acupuncture, healing massage, homeopathy, TCM, shiatsu, Reiki, Chi Gong, Ayurvedic medicine, yoga classes, crystals, feng shui…….

Even if the therapist is strictly trained in all these practices, what kind of signal is this therapist really sending out? To me this message is: I do whatever you want me to do; whatever you have some hankering for I'll do; whatever is the fashionable therapy of the moment, I'm here to do it. Each particular therapy is lost in the background signal of 'here is therapy-plus'. It loses all identity and purpose. The longer the list of therapies I see offered by an individual, the less I can avoid the ungenerous thoughts that none of them have been mastered, and that the list is the result of an opportunistic attitude to the practice of alternative medicine that the public can readily sense.

I am labouring this point, not because I disdain other therapies but because I'm trying to understand this issue from the point of view of the general public. No one is confused about what acupuncture is and as a result acupuncturists can charge vast amounts. In the mind of the public a simple equation is formed: acupuncture is a valuable discipline. Could it be that if there were automatic acupuncture machines readily available (and electrical stimulators are appearing for sale now), and that the practice of acupuncture was taken up by all and sundry, the privileged position of acupuncture in the pantheon of alternative medicine would be under attack?

Shiatsu is undermined by its uncontrolled spread and exploitation but it is also under attack, not only from the forces of medicine, but within shiatsu itself. There is the division between Namikoshi and Masunaga and the increasing 'modernisation' and westernisation of TCM. Modern acupuncturists no longer use the TCM base of the 5 elements; they no longer consider the energetic state of the whole channel and the relationship between the channels in the way that we do. They focus on points and the particular characteristics they may have. They use the extraordinary points and points that appear to have significance to the nervous system. They are, in effect, taking on western medical attitudes. The Namikoshi school believes in points that have anatomical and nervous system significance and ignore the theories of the channels that Zen shiatsu uses. Many teachers I know shrug about the differences and want everyone to be one happy family. Maybe this is a good idea, but it serves to nebulise the practice of shiatsu ever more. I have had many clients come to me who, although having had themselves experience of 'shiatsu', have no real idea of what it is, and what to expect. How can they choose a practitioner next time? Why, indeed should they bother to make any kind of distinction between shiatsu and other stuff? Hey, I feel like a massage, what shall I go for? Essential oils, swedish, shiatsu, hot rocks, rolfing…. ? While I applaud all efforts of natural medicine I don't see my purpose as lying in this particular list, and to be frank, I do not think my studies, my clinical thesis, my exams, my membership of a professional society, my own consultancy and my practice insurance as putting me on it. I do other stuff for other reasons in mind and I want the public to know this.

So, having outlined what I perceive as the largest problem facing Zen shiatsu practitioners, what can the professional societies do about it?

1. Lobby professional societies to attack the misuse of the name shiatsu. We are bamboozled by the literal meaning of the characters that comprise the word. Yes, 'Finger-pressure', is what the characters mean, but that in no way conveys the meaning of the word than say the literal meaning of 'knowledge' conveys the meaning of 'science'. Because finger pressure can be done by anyone or faked by a machine, the word shiatsu is just mis-used. I don't know why the professional societies have given up their territory so readily, except under a misguided belief that the more awareness of shiatsu spreads the better it is. This is just wrong. The philosophy of Zen shiatsu does NOT believe that mere pressure on a point will do the right job, and any machine that claims it does is false representation. As I have found many times, Hegu. LI4 does not act as an 'aspirin' point unless attention is paid to other channels depending on the situation. Yet this is the single point that sellers of electrical stimulation machines focus on as the one most likely to reduce pain. Until the professional societies understand that their mission is to tell general public that the body's channels of energy are complicated and need special study to understand (which is why we have these societies in the first place), practitioners will remain in the shadows at the mercy of the frivolous.

2. Clarify what shiatsu means. At the moment there are legal stumbling blocks to talking about 'treatments' . Shiatsu is only allowed to be relaxing. We need to lobby fiercely that shiatsu is a unique approach in the treatment of many chronic and complicated conditions. It has a natural holistic philosophy in common with many other methods, but none of them apply our physical and mental attitudes with the empirical science in the the same way. We need this message broadcast. Specifically we need to stress that shiatsu is a mind-body philosophy, a diagnostic process, a therapeutic dialogue, a physical contact therapy, a natural and complementary medicine, and a gateway to health.

4. Open a database of case studies to the public.

5. Maintain a concerted media presence.

What can the practitioners do about it?

1. After the first session, send a welcome email to each client explaining more about shiatsu, what to expect from it, what you as a practitioner want to do, and draw the client's attention to the shiatsu network (see below) and invite them share their experiences, questions and discoveries with others.

2. Join the shiatsu network (see below)

3. Lobby your professional society about the points outlined above.

The Shiatsu network

I propose a (yet) another social media exercise for interested shiatsu practitioners. A Linkedin presence may do it, although I have hopes that the soon to be realised system Diaspora may prove to be more useful for what I have in mind. The shiatsu network is just a place where clients can log into and read what they and the practitioners think about their experiences; where clients can learn about the breadth of action and the commitment of shiatsu practitioners and, most importantly, about its success or failures. I think clients should have the option to talk to others like them, and to make their case studies the core to the appreciation of shiatsu. At the moment no one cares about the clients. I never read about case studies anywhere, and yet these are so obviously the key to shiatsu's progress. Client care, it seems to me, is part of the shiatsu ethic, and a web presence where we can put this into practice might well play a role in this.

Twitter can't play this central role and I don't see Facebook as suitable for such a group.

This seems like a good point to draw breath and invite comments.

A New Shiatsu Manifesto

2010-05-12T00:24:00.000-07:00

A New Shiatsu Manifesto

Exercise for the over fifties who have never done it

2010-04-12T09:29:00.001-07:00

When two friends of mine, a couple in their middle forties who do not 'do' sport, recounted their experiences of going skiing for the first time, I had to restrain from expressing my feelings of incredulity.
She so bruised her shoulder falling over in the snow outside the ski outfitters on the first day that she never got near the piste. Her husband, the only pupil in the beginners class, was so bruised on that first morning that he never went out again. They left the ski station, fled to their insurance paid doctor who scanned them, blood-tested them, bandaged them and counselled rest for months. And that is it: the sum total of their sporting experience, never, from what I can gather, to be repeated.
When I though about it more I realised I was being a little unfair. I've been a sportsman all my life so far, so aches and pains are quite normal to me. Bruises and sprains were par for every season. Even serious sufferings in remote terrain have a fundamental normality to them. But for those who have never really used their bodies, the muscle aches and joint pains that come from the first days of the most basic of exercises must seem strange and worrying.
if you have never felt a sore calf, then you must probably wonder if you have done something serious when you wake the next day after your first run and you feel can hardly walk with an ache that perhaps doesn't go away for several days. And it's not just pain that can be perplexing but simply sweating. For many who have never really broken into a real hot sweat from exercise, the experience can be unpleasant. Certainly I know those who, even though they do things like walking or swimming, hate to really sweat. The important benefits of aerobic exercise, or merely stretching themselves, always eludes them.
So for those over fifty who are not familiar with exercising and for whom I counsel regular exercise (with the rider that those who reach 60 years of age at more or less their best weight stand a better chance of surviving well in old age than any other group), I now talk them through all the likely experiences, from sweating to muscle and joint aches and pains. We talk about what they are likely to feel and where. What causes these pains and what to do about them. I explain how to gauge their progress day by day and how to form simple achievable but developing targets so that after several months, they can be exercising in a way unimaginable before they started. Most of all, I believe that before we train hard we should aim to extract energy from the environment to boost one's own with Chi Gong and T'ai Chi, rather than in the Western view we must exhaust ourselves in order to build up (!) our stamina.
I point them towards Danny Dryer's pain free Chi Running (chirunning.com)as being one of the best introductions around to the art and the fun of running. But most of all I have to reassure them that aches and pains are pretty normal in the way of things and should not in the general case be thought of as an excuse to give up.

What my clients don't see

2010-02-14T08:14:00.001-08:00

I wonder if I should reveal to my clients what they don't see about my work in the Shiatsu clinic.

They don't see my half hour of daily T'ai Chi health maintenance.

They don't see me doing the daily sweeping and cleaning and arranging the treatment room, and even if they did, they probably wouldn't see it as one of the necessary meditations I do to keep my mind on my work with them.

They don't see the Chi Gong warm up exercises I do before the first client of the day and sometimes in between clients to shake off uncertain energies and to re-vitalise my own.

They don't see the four pages of notes I produce to begin with on each client and his or her situation, which grows page by page into quite a little booklet of symptoms, diagnoses, background, ideas, treatment plans and suggestions for action.

They don't see the 10 mins upon which I reflect upon each case before I begin nor do they see the 10 mins of reflection and write up after their session.

They don't see the yearly workshops I do with shiatsu masters.

They don't see, or rarely see, the articles I write, the correspondence I enter into with other practitioners.

They have little knowledge of the experiences of other clients, except that of the client or contact that put them my way in the first place.

When you come to think of it, the clients are courageous to put themselves into a situation about which they know so little. Their trust is humbling.

You can never take a client's attitude for granted.

Re: Why can we not change?

2010-01-25T02:43:00.001-08:00

Hi Marcus,
Thanks for message.
Why people won't change?
A key question.
Here are some stories from the consulta:
A women had a shoulder that bothered her. In general good health; a gym-goer, in her 40s, somewhat passive. She liked the first session very much came back. We examined her typical postures. I asked her to change the side of the bed in which she slept. Her face fell. No she couldn't that. Her husband needs to sleep on his side. There you are. A rigid relationship, a dominant husband, a freezing up of metal's power to clarify and to expel confused energies.
I have a friend who is a marathon runner but who has always had problems with her weight. Her Earth is like a marsh. She binges on ice-cream and cake. I worked with and we got her through the New York marathon last autumn. Her husband, for reasons I won't bore you with does not like her independence and is always putting her down. He is trained as an emergency nurse for the Firemen and is the medical authority in the house. He goes on and on about how running is ruining her body. There are class issues between them and the husband wants a wife who is beneath him in attainments. Trouble is, she believes him and cannot free herself from his controlling influence. I can keep her slim and keep her running, but she does not trust me. She believes her husband is right and that she should stop running now that she is 40.
You see, we do not live in ourselves, we live within a social context and especially within the context of an intimate relationship. We are like Venn diagrams. All the important action happens where we overlap.
So,
Yes, we are afraid to change because of what it means for our partner, parent, child etc.
Yes, we hang to our problems because they are often easier to use to define our individual territories than successes which may be few and far between.
Yes, we are ignorant of own powers
Yes, we lack faith that change can be made because other opinions seem more powerful than our personal hopes and expectations.
best regards
Andrew

On 24 Jan 2010, at 19:31, Marcus wrote
> Hi Andrew
>
> While I'm walking through your book, reminding myself that 1st I have to forget everything I know in order to fully appreciate the picture painted by you.
> I'll get back to you on due time (nodding down a few questions while going on reading).
>
> 1 thing i would love to have your feedback on:
> During your practice, what was the main reason that kept people back from changing themselves?
> - fear of what they might find underneath?
> - fear o loosing s. Th.
> - ignorance
> - beig unconscious that there is help for changing
> -other?
>
> Hope u had a great WE
>
> Marcus
> iPhoned

Migraines and the problem of not eating in time

2009-12-02T05:03:00.001-08:00

Migraine affects up to 15% of the UK population - around two thirds of
sufferers are women. An attack can last up to 72 hours, and sufferers
experience an average of 13 attacks a year. A German study published
in the Lancet in 2006 recognised that while acupuncture was successful
in halving the days of suffering, there was no single treatment that
fitted every case.
With this in mind I will talk about what might be called a subset of
migraine sufferers. These are the people whose headache kicks in when
they miss a meal - and almost always when they miss lunch. I have
several friends, men and women, with this condition and have treated
several more.
Most migraine studies revolve around what the sufferers eat, and there
is a large list of possible triggers for the 'ordinary' kind of
migraine - the most well-known being things like chocolate, hard
cheese, caffeine, red wine, cigarette smoke and tannin-containing
foods. The problem with nailing the sources of migraine down is that
often such 'triggers' don't act, so that evidence-based research is
left with the same puzzle it began with since, the onset of migraines
is not predictable with anything like 95% certainty. No one seems to
have studied the timing of food intake and the reasons why it plays a
role in migraine onset.
With the subset I have been observing, however, food timing is
everything. Every sufferer I have dealt with claim that missing a
meal is the almost certain trigger for a headache that will last
easily through into the next day. The headache can be headed off by
taking almost any kind of food in place of the meal they missed -
sweets, potato chips, it doesn't matter. They just need something in
their stomachs within a certain length of time. Is there an element of
psychology in this need? Could it hark back to the stress of missed
feeds when a baby? Hard to examine this scientifically, but it's a
thought. For example, a brother and sister I know well both suffer
this type of migraine. If they do not share a similar pattern of
feeding when babies then maybe they share genes, in which case, this
particular onset of migraine would have a genetic component to its
cause as well as be connected to the state of the stomach.
Not being able to explore genetic causes or those related to
upbringing, what can we sensibly say about this particular form of
migraine from the TCM perspective?
Acupuncturists distinguish between several types of headache pain,
from stabbing or boring to dullness, heaviness or stiffness, and they
see several causes to them. They regard the emotional causes of
headaches as anger, worry, fear and shock; the physical causes as
overwork and excessive sex or, for women, too many children born close
together, and diet. There may also be lingering trauma from head
injuries or invasions by wind and damp. The typical headaches,
however, are caused by the liver-yang energy rising into the head.
For example, if the liver blood is deficient, then the headache will
be at the top of the head; if the headache is the side or in the
temples then this is usually due to an excess of liver-yang or liver-
wind due to deficiencies in the gall-bladder. A migraine occurring
behind the eyes would be due to liver-yang rising or blood deficiency.
(Though headaches in the forehead are said to be due to either stomach
deficiency or stomach heat, or to phlegm and damp; a consequence of a
cold.)
Generally speaking, pain is the result of local kyo conditions, where
Qi is not moving, but migraines are generally sharp sickening pains
with feelings of nausea. The sufferer needs to lie down, since
activity worsens the pain or is just not possible, and they often feel
attacked by bright lights and sounds. Such a condition certainly
suggests yang fire: anything that raises yang, like physical activity
or 'attack' would make matters worse.
In the Qi cycle of movement around the body, the metal yang channel of
the Greater Intestine brings Qi to the head. The head is the place of
most yang in the body, and the energy flows from there, from beneath
the eyes, through the stomach channel to the feet. This pairing of
yang channels is called Bright Yang. In the subsequent movements, Qi
flows towards the face along the Small Intestine channel and then away
from the face and down the back through the Bladder channel. This
pairing is called Greater Yang. The third yang paring in the face and
head is with the Triple Burner and the Gall Bladder, called the Lesser
Yang.
In TCM the Small Intestine is not often considered alongside the
stomach meridian, even though the SI belongs to the Fire element and
is part of the process of bringing earth into being. But it's function
is an essential companion to the assimilation and making use of the
external influences of the world. With the stomach, we digest events
and extract the nourishment we need to pursue our goals. The small
intestine separates the pure fraction of the Qi obtained and passes it
first to the spirit or shen soul (heart) - the emperor - who uses it
to integrate all the five souls together and to create our awareness,
intelligence and, most of all, insight (insight being a function of
yang). When there is heat in the SI, this influences the heart and
produces agitation, and a sense of 'dismemberment' in one's
perceptions. (The impure fraction is passed to the bladder.) This is a
key point since many of my clients report that one of the sensation is
of being 'torn apart' by noise and events around them.
So, in the shiatsu, and in the absence of counter-indications, I look
for signs of jitsu in the stomach channel, paying attention to S20 and
S12, and to SI, especially points SI16,17 (Heavenly Reception), and 18
(meeting point with TB and GB) . I also give deep hara massage
circulating clockwise, and stimulate the Bladder channel to expel.
So,are there any conclusions we can draw about the physiology of the
pain. Is it in the head or does the pain originate in another part of
the body? The stomach is fed by the celiac artery direct from the
heart. The first branching of the artery occurs at the stomach. The
stomach veins connect with the portal vein which empties into the
liver, but in amongst all this is the vagus nerve which connects the
brain with the lungs, the esophagus, the stomach, the small intestine,
the pancreas and the large intestine and colon. It affects the
function of diverse organs like heart rate and the workings of the
larynx. If the vagus nerve is implicated in migraines, then it
suggests that some other actions for the patient to take on his or her
own to try to relieve the headache. But this, I will leave to the
next blog.
Please don't hesitate to comment on this article, and especially if
you disagree with my conclusions.
Here's a good read. My latest book:
Essential Personalities, and why humans found love, adapted to
monogamy and became better parents
ISBN 9780954483142
Gravity Publishing
+44 7092 119084
see it here on Amazon http://tiny.cc/paeGD
or read the beginning chapters here on Scribd.com

Fitness and ageing

2009-11-04T10:02:00.001-08:00

Here's a good lead in to the topic http://tiny.cc/Pb9N6

TCM practitioners are going to have a much greater role in alleviating the problems of getting old, and that shiatsu practitioners should seize the high ground, as it were.

Techniques like shiatsu are exactly right for improving the generalised problems associated with an ageing population, especially musculo-skeletal problems brought on by diseases like arthritis and by lack of physical fitness or by prolonged physical labour and sport, by prolonged postural inbalances, or by the long-term consequences of poor or inappropriate diet, and by the debilitating effects of stress through work and parenting. As we live longer, we are likely to suffer from more surgical trauma and need long term re-habilitiation and pain management. The generally higher use of drugs in this age group will also create the need for better management of the drug's side-effects.

Even though people will have to work longer in the future, they also will survive for longer. Retirement can easily run to 20 or 30 years, and the mental disharmonies associated with such a long but often reduced life as a widow or widower and without the purposes to life that work or raising a family can give is likely to figure strongly in the retired population.

Shiatsu practitioners can do vital work not simply in maintaining the health of this third age group but in assisting people through the transition from working to retirement. It has been observed that those who reach the age of 60 at or around their ideal weight survive into retirement better than others and have a better quality of life.

Shiatsu doesn't have to act solely upon the body, or even upon the state of awareness of the individual, but can be used to modulate what TCM calls the five 'souls' of a person - the soul of the mind/spirit; the dreaming, visionary instinctive soul; the soul of movement and agility; the soul of concentration and the intellect; and the soul of the warrior, and the individual will.

An individual needs to find harmony in all these areas if he or she is to survive the years of retirement and to learn to channel his or her essential energies not simply into fresh purposes but also into an acceptance of life as it has become.

Happiness

2009-10-16T04:33:00.000-07:00

I think of early hominids. Were they happy? Is it meaningful to talk about their happiness at all? Can the determined process of surviving produce happiness? Can the mere fact that we survive from day to day be the root of our happiness? I think the quick answer is no. Mere survival is not happiness. There's more to it. It's qualified survival. Certainly surviving some events or achieving some kinds of successes will produce elation for a time, and the body is geared to produce the sensation, but that's not what we mean by happiness.

I find its useful to think about happiness as day to day surviving in some kind of 'style', or attitude that is not derived from the mechanics of the survival but connected to it through our self-consciousness, through our instincts for self-expression. How to characterise this? There has been a lot of research into happiness with few results to be sure about except, perhaps, that one's level of happiness is related to the number of friends we have, and that happiness tends to give us longer life.

That we have friends at all - as distinct from just mates - is a big clue, I believe, to what is going on in humans when it comes to happiness, not just for women but for everyone. The human personality is, as I argue elsewhere, a relatively recent evolved trait for the purpose of making us happier. How does this work? The human personality is a system for making bonds. The mating bond especially becomes deeper and longer lasting, giving parenting more strength, with the resultant improved fitness that bringing up healthy children to reproduction gives individuals.

The key, therefore, to happiness lies in the understanding our personality, in expressing it, and in being able to read correctly the personalities of others.

If this ability is an evolved trait, however, how is it that we seem to be so bad at it? Half of all marriages wouldn't fail and lonely hearts columns in newspapers would have few items in them. Well, culture obscures even the best efforts to be ourselves, and can readily be used to disguise who we really are. Goods have meanings over and above their nominal function, and much culture propagates these meanings rather than the underlying reality When you fall in love with the boy next door, is it because you love him for himself or because he has a Porsche and an iPhone? This is not a trivial question, and we do need to recognise that we form relationships on bases other than our innate natures.

Humans do not form a set of entirely individual personalities. True individuality does not exist. Rather, all humans have a nature that varies in a regular systematic way. We need to ditch the idea that we are all fundamentally unique individuals, and learn instead how the human personality has limited variations, and that we are more alike than we dare to think. To cut to the chase. Our very best partner, then, becomes someone like ourselves, because that is the only situation in which we can grow fully and realise the quality of self-expression that creates happiness out of surviving.

Variocose veins and allopathic weaknesses - a personal account

2009-10-05T12:19:00.001-07:00

I'm about to describe an experience that evidence-based medicine will hate because it does not grind down the treatment to single influences . The idea that there is a single originating cause for a condition and that there is a single treatment for this cause is allopathic medicine's first great weakness, even though it's driving the genetic research that thinks of fixing a single gene for a single malady. Its second weakness is the disallowing of patient testimony about their own conditions. Double-blind science experimentation about me would regard my opinions as to what works as tainted. I cannot be a witness to my own body's recoveries.

Many years ago, at the age of 37, I smashed my knee on rocks skiing. In spite of the opinion of the consultant at Charing Cross Hospital, London, who told me that's end of sport for me, I re-habilitated myself and went on to play some more 'old man's' rugby and continued to mountain walk. Thanks to strenuous working summers on a hill farm the deformed knee still works very well, and thanks to shiatsu I have increased the suppleness of the joint. There was a growing problem however, with the veins in my leg. Varicose veins in the operated leg began to appear. I had further accidents to shin and ankle that damaged capillaries, and the lower leg began to retain fluid. The threaded knots and meanders of vein in the calf stood out like a 3-D map, and the veins over the ankle and foot were often similarly and disturbingly swollen. Cycling occasionally seemed to reduce the prominence of the veins during the day but was clearly no remedy, and the condition was getting worse. Always susceptible to cramps, I would get really vicious cramps in the damaged leg almost every night. An allopathic doctor shrugged and said it was likely as not a hereditary weakness. When I pointed out to him that the other leg had no hint of varicose veins, he shrugged and said I could have the vein taken out. This solution seems like curing traffic congestion by removing a road.

So, two months ago, I took matters into my own hands. I went to my favourite acupuncturist and took two sessions with him. He gave pretty much the standard treatment, mostly spleen-channel points, to which he added L8, and the divergent point E34 for the knee. It is my own feeling that the classic varicose vein in the calf is more associated with the liver channel and with repressed energies of action and command, so I treated my liver to a new diet. As a family, we eat modestly and well, but I decided to do what I have been meaning to do and finally eliminate all bread, dairy, sugary treats, all meat and eggs but free range chicken, drink only green tea and eliminate black tea.( I think tannins may have a negative influence on the liver and inhibit the return of fluids to the centre.) I take 120 mg standardised extract of ginko biloba every morning and I take the occasional N-acetyl cysteine with 500mg of Vitamin C (that protects the liver from NAC's action) before bed to keep the lungs working well as I sleep. It has the added bonus of preventing apnea. For the cramps, my acupuncturist suggested the homeopathic remedy cuprum metallicum 5ch. I took two granules at bed whenever a hard working day would suggest the onset of cramps later. I do T'ai Chi and Qi Gong exercises almost every day

Then, ten days ago, my wife persuaded me to enter the traditional 10.5 kilometre night race (carrera nocturna) (about 6 1/2 miles) along the city's river. Even when I was in training, I hated running. I can rugged-mountain walk for hours but running dispirits me in ways I cannot explain. I probably hadn't run a similar distance since my school days 40 years ago. But, what the heck. Let's do it, I said. So we did. We ran together and, with a little walking towards the end, made the finish in the Olympic Stadium. It took me two days to realise that my varicose vein had disappeared. Well, it has not disappeared - that would be too magical. It has lost its prominence. It no longer breaks through the skin like an eerie inverse of a Martian valley. The skin of the leg is smooth. You can still feel the vein under the skin with your finger tip but its 'anger' has calmed completely. The other veins of the foot and ankle have similarly returned to normality. I still have a little puffiness around the ankle but that, too will go with time. I don't get cramp. I took the homeopathic granules after the race. No cramp. Neat, huh?

Allopathic medicine still has not yet got to grips with this sort of story. Since the actual cause of the improvement cannot be traced, it may as well not have happened. All of the things I did are part of the solution. Your allopathic practitioner fails to take this synergistic environment into account. By environment, I mean not simply the spaces, materials and events of where we live but also the psychic actions of what we know that also surrounds us and communicates to us and with us. It's an environment that is not susceptible to scientific reductionism because it is, by definition, everything else that matters.

Recipe for the healthiest dish

2009-09-22T23:31:00.001-07:00

Someone who wanted to change their set of eating habits asked me what's the healthiest dish.

There have to be a lot of candidates for the healthiest dish, but for me, I would put forward humous.

Crushed raw garlic, lemon juice, sesame oil, virgin olive oil, cooked chick peas and a pinch of rock salt.

Served with some coriander leaves and slices of raw vegetables. Great with tomatoes and wholewheat bread.

Sesame oil has wonderful properties as an anti bacterial, anti-inflammatory agent see here - http://tiny.cc/OkIIy

Garlic and olive oil we all know about.

Chick peas are high in protein and also supply zinc and folate (B9)

Rock salt for essential minerals.

Here's my recipe:

Into a mixing jug, blend

one fat garlic tooth or two or three small ones depending on taste peeled and crushed,

three soup spoons of fresh lemon juice,

two soup spoons of sesame oil

six soup spoons of virgin olive oil,

and a pinch of rock salt.

Then add a jar of drained and properly rinsed (until drain water is pure and without any foam - very important) cooked chick peas (about 400 gms)

and blend all together.

Keep in a container with a lid. Eat quickly; not that you'll be able to stop yourself from finishing it off.

Yin and Yang in diagnosis

2009-09-04T05:19:00.001-07:00

To pick up on some of the ideas we were discussing. In the traditional Chinese view, the energy we have comes from three sources: our natural inherited constitution which gives us our essence, from food and from exercise (especially breathing). In practice, it is very difficult to improve upon your inherent energy, but by careful eating and exercise one can slowly raise it. In the view of TCM, exercise is designed to capture energy from the earth-heaven connection while in the western view exercise is about expending energy in order to get fit. There may be a temporary gain in hard training but it is very easy to lose the fitness one gains (this is a big clue), and the body suffers in the end with injuries and pain. It's a fact that most athletes stop their sports when the pains and injuries become too much. The TCM object is to live long and prosper without suffering from pain and damage on the way. One captures energy from the earth and sky through things like Qi Gong, T'ai Chi and also yoga, and the principal quality to these is slowness of movement and slowness of breathing. Most of Qi Gong should be done at the rest breathing rate which is definitely pretty slow and hard to maintain. My view is that the slowness acts on both the tendons and muscles: lengthening the tendons and increasing their capacity, warming the muscles without any of the stress byproducts that usually accompany hard exercise. There is also the question of yin and yang elements in the exercise. Too much stressed exercise raises yang levels at the expense of yin, leading to shrinking and tightening of organs and loss of fluids - including nourishing essence. The body manages for a while on raised yang but eventually the system has to relax and with generally bad results.

To talk about yin / yang in the diagnosis.

Yin and yang are two principles of energy and matter that co-exist in the world and in all processes of life. As change happens, yin becomes yang and vice-versa. In any process there are harmonious levels of each, and the level of either is related to the other but is also independent of the other. In the organs of the body, for example, there can be harmony between yin and yang (i.e. the appropriate level of each); an excess of yang with normal levels of yin; debil yang with normal levels of yin; debil yin with normal or excess yang; or general debility. The levels of each are generally dictated by the three origins of energy mentioned above, and by illness. There are basically two origins of illness: damaging invasions from the outside by excesses of one of the five elements (like too much heat) or from external pathogens, and damaging energies from inside the body which come from disturbances in one or other of the seven emotions.

To illustrate how we might use these ideas to diagnose someone. An inflated balloon has yang in the tension of the skin, while its capacity say, is yin. When the neck of the balloon is open, the yang expels the air. The tighter the balloon, the more yang there is in the skin's tension, but, at a given energy of inflation, it also inflates less and therefore holds less. Thinking of the human bladder then, someone with an excess of yang is likely to urinate more often, while someone who has less yang or who is dominated by yin - say someone who tends towards passivity, stillness or who eats yin-stimulating foods - will urinate less often. Temporary higher levels of yang in the body can have many causes, but long term elevated levels of yang are likely to be the result of disease that has invaded and gained a foothold in the interior of the body or by lesions in the emotions. The bladder is the yang component of the water element in the body (the yin component are the kidneys. Sounds contradictory since the kidneys do lots of work, but the action of the kidneys is to gather and supply the interior of the body whereas the bladder's job is to expel, hence relative to each other, the bladder is more yang than the kidneys), and the water element governs the emotions of fear. Hence if someone was very fearful say, that might also cause a rise in bladder yang.

Of course, the elements in the body all act on each other in several ways, so a rise in bladder yang could be caused by a failure of the earth element to control the water element. Each element is made up of yin and yang, and the 'earth' organs are the stomach (yang) and the pancreas/spleen (yin). In this case, the yin organs may not be supplying enough yin to soften the bladder yang and to improve it's capacity. Foods like sugar while seeming to give energy actually reduce the nourishing capacity of the pancreas/spleen and tend to induce more urination. Urinating often may well indicate a problem with the pancreas. If the yin component of the earth element is weak, then the stomach may not digest properly and acid may rise. Since earth nourishes metal and metal controls the action of the large intestine and hence the absorption of water, in the absence of signs of pathogens, loose bowels and frequent urination may indicate a problem with the pancreas, or inappropriate diet and incorrect exercise. If someone who is passive suddenly starts to urinate frequently, then that would suggest the invasion of illness. Someone who urinated frequently but now urinates normally is probably a lot happier than they were or has changed their diet.

The diagnosis looks at many signs in the body as well as the declared symptoms, to find the root cause of the disharmony. A person, however, exists in a milieu. An illness within may cause behaviour that results in external effects that return to further damage the individual. A disturbance in the liver, for example, may cause anger, with subsequent reactions from those with whom the person deals, increasing the stress on the heart and other fire organs. A person lives in an environment, and stress like wind and damp can readily invade the body and produce not just physical symptoms but psychological ones as well, and which have to be taken into account.

Thus, there can be several reasons, internal and external, for an illness or problem. The essence of shiatsu is the diagnosis. Once the correct diagnosis has been made, the practitioner is relatively free to plan his treatment of the disharmonies, looking for the long lasting correction of the problem.