When I lived in Japan I was fortunate to study Shiatsu with a master. He taught me how to feel chi, at least a little, and the fundamentals of how to apply pressure so that a body would accept it. This meant to be as completely relaxed as possible, using my body weight rather than force. If you touch someone with tension in your fingers their body will react to the tension and bracing against it, blocking all communication and access.
Years later I worked on a woman whose body was worn out with holding all that she was carrying in it. She told me, “don’t try to fix me” as apparently others had done so and she knew how stressful that would be. I spent the first session just saying hello to her body, reassuring it that I wasn’t going to move anything that it wasn’t ready to release. My guidance showed me that I easily could move quite a lot, but that would ignore her being, overtax her exhausted body, and be seriously counter productive.
Judging someone as being broken and needing fixing, like pressing with tension, is unconsciously felt as an attack and is automatically resisted.
When I was in class training to read energy the question came up, “What do you do if you see dark black energy in someone’s space? do you tell them or not?” The answer is, if you can be neutral to something, you can speak what you see. It is amazing what people can hear if you are neutral. But if you are in judgement of it, keep quiet. They will not be able to hear what you say, any more than my client could have received my wanting to fix her, or a body will receive tension in your fingertips.
If you have ever done something that caused a friend to get justifiably angry with you, you know how hard it is to apologize while they are in your face. As long as someone is yelling at you, you automatically react to that angry energy, and you can’t apologize while doing that, no matter how sorry you are, or how clearly you know you screwed up.
Any level of judgement will always interfere with or block communication, connection and intimacy. The act of making something or someone wrong, cuts you off from that other, and negates any other positive action or intention. It implies separation rather than connected relationship on your side and will be echoed in their response. Anything after that will be about power and competition no matter what you think you are doing or how different your intentions are.
The power of compassion, the ability to allow things to be as they are, is the opposite. It brings you into relationship, opens communication and connection, allowing change to take place. This is one of the great paradoxes; only by accepting what is, can you come to a place of being able to change it, and is just as true in relationship to aspects of your self. Press without tension and you can feel a person’s chi and send your own in to dance with it. Look without judgment and you will see with discrimination and others will hear truth. Look into your heart with compassion, allowing it to be present as it is, and your inner wounds will desolve into love. Bring that out into the world and healing will sprout around you like flowers in the spring.
(© 11/2012)
