Life at school was intense. I decided to do the program at a faster pace than most of my new classmates, since I wanted to move back home as soon as I could. So instead of separating first and second year I decided I could do 8 classes a week and travel home on the weekends. I ended up finishing the course side of the program in 9 months instead of 16. There were two major aspects of school life that I did not know until I actually was in it. The first was the nine months of class work. The other was the practicum, which I will explain later.
The first day of class on Oct 3rd I had kinesiology and Shiatsu II with my second year classmates. During the expert shiatsu class I had a smile on my face that went from ear to ear, as my teacher taught us Tsubo points on the shoulder. (Tsubo means important in Japanese.) During the break he came up to me and asked in a gruffly voice, why was I smiling so much. I had been nervous before class since I didn’t know if it was a good idea that I was going to be taking the expert class before I learned how to do the basics. But once I was in the class I didn’t have to worry, shiatsu felt so familiar and comfortable especially what he taught us.
He mentioned a line during class, well he often said this line during the months that he taught us but it wasn’t until I talked it over with a friend did I really get what he said. The line he often said was this… “Its not how hard you press, it’s how you press hard!” Now what does that mean? My theory of the statement is that shiatsu is not about hurting the client and pressing so hard that it hurts the practitioner’s thumbs and arms and leaving the client with intense pain. Often a client will want intense pain and this teacher believed the client just did not understand that the pain is not actually helping the client. Its not to say that shiatsu can not be intense or that practitioners only press lightly on clients. It is about how the practitioners need to press with their body not just their arms and thumbs. Once they have learned to use all of themselves they also must work on listening to the clients’ body and learn to press with the clients’ body and not on their body.
Besides taking a full course load of learning about the body in a western perspective and a little of eastern, since one of our classes was Kampo (Japanese name for traditional Chinese herbal medicine) I also took an introductory Japanese class. Though if you try talking to me in Japanese I will just smile and nod. The school I went to was run by a Japanese man who wanted to help us understand all aspects of shiatsu and where it came from. So we learned how to speak a little and mostly the history of Japan since shiatsu came along in the early 20th century. Most of my classmates were either Japanese or Korean. There were about 35 of us in both my first and second year class. Nine of us were Caucasian.
The style of shiatsu this school taught was the original style named after the founder Namikoshi. My teacher of the expert class believed it to be the only true style of shiatsu. The style that most people in North America know, (and the style my first experience was) is the Zen Shiatsu style created by Masunaga. He was a student of Namikoshi’s. And most other styles of shiatsu all come from students of Namikoshi. The founder of my school was also a student of Namikoshi. He started the school to further the education of the traditional style in Canada.
For my practicum I had to do 300 sessions, with hopefully just as many different clients as possible. We had to work (for free since we were students we didn’t get paid unless a client decided to give us a tip) at the student clinic, so that the school could keep track of all of our sessions. We also had to work at events for approximately 70 hours doing chair massage.
The school allowed us to put our name down on the schedule as much as we wanted. It was our responsibility to know our own limits. Since I was racing to finish as soon as possible I thought I could do 4 clients a day for five days a week, no problem. Well there was a little problem. The sessions were 75-90 mins long and my body was not use to working so much. As well like most new students I didn’t know how to use my body during the sessions I would often press with just my thumbs rather than my whole body. Like many others I would have to stop working because my thumbs became out of commission due to incredible pain. I also would get stressed out since I wanted to finish but my body was just not allowing me to work very much. So I went through different trials of pushing myself too hard to work and then hurting myself and then not being able to work.
It came to a point that I realized I needed to take some time for myself so I left school for five months and furthered my healing by learning to listen to my own body. I realized I needed to heal myself first before I wanted to help others heal themselves. I learned it is important for the practitioner to truly listen to themselves. If we practitioners are not balanced how can we help others become balanced?
I went back to Vancouver after I had taken time at home for myself and continued working in the clinic at a steady pace so I was able to finish five months later. In the end I was able to finish my practicum in 10 months ready to start a career.