Unconditional Loving Touch
Imagine being wrapped in a warm hug, gathered in and reassured whenever you need. You can always be held and loved unconditionally. Perhaps you need a hug because you’re feeling upset about the way that someone has treated you. Perhaps you feel anxious for no obvious reason and you just want to feel loved.
Shiatsu, a form of healing touch, can always give you that embrace. You may not realise that you can give yourself Shiatsu, a warm hug. You have all the resources in you to take care of yourself, you just need support to access them. If you go to see a Shiatsu practitioner they don’t add anything into your body: they support your body to access the resources it needs.
One of the core techniques of Shiatsu is broad enveloping touch: like a warm hug. Place the palms of both hands on your body wherever you want to be held. Perhaps crossing your arms in a hug. Or perhaps you want to hold one hand over your lower back and one over your lower abdomen. Feel their warmth. As in a hug, give broad pressure, perhaps deepening the pressure as you breathe out. Hold as deeply and for as long as you want. You can close your eyes. You can focus on your breath and relax your body with each out breath. Perhaps you feel a circuit being created between your two hands. Perhaps you feel warmth. Perhaps you feel your nervous system calming.
This is the essence of Shiatsu. It’s what I call Foundation touch : simply allowing yourself to hold yourself, or be held by another.
“The heart of Shiatsu is like a mother’s love. Pressure of the finger causes the spring of life to flow.”
A famous shiatsu teacher in Japan, Tokujiro Namikoshi popularized this phrase on a TV show in 1968 and he was right. When a mother holds and loves her baby unconditionally she gives her baby Shiatsu.
Stay with this still, calming touch as long as you want. You can move your hands to touch other parts of your body. Slide one hand to move another area and then rest for a few breaths with this static touch. In Shiatsu a core idea, developed by a modern Shiatsu teacher, Masunaga, is to keep one hand still, giving a stabilising, nurturing anchor – a mother (Yin) hand. This maintains the hug and safety. The hand which moves to another area is the child hand: like a child moving away (Yang) from their mother but always supported by them. By focusing not only on what we feel beneath each of our two hands, but also the connection between the mother and the child hands, we feel the movement between the two. This can be a flow along a meridian, between two points, the tension in a muscle or a connection between two organs.
Explore touching and loving yourself in a reassuring way. Use your hands to envelop yourself in loving touch. Can you allow yourself to fully receive this loving touch? Are you able to relax and let go? Do you feel safe and held?
Touch is your first sense to develop eight weeks after conception. Once you have implanted in your mother’s womb, about a week after conception, you are surrounded by it, held all around your body in an enveloping way, rather like a seed in the earth surrounded by soil. Shiatsu touch can help us access this resource of safety and protection even if your relationship with your mother was emotionally challenging. By being held safely in the present, and being able to hug yourself or to receive a hug, can help you access those moments in your life when you have received unconditional love and felt safe.
Our womb time is the foundation of your life. How you experienced your time in the womb imprints you deeply. That is why I encourage pregnant women to receive shiatsu. This way, they receive loving, reassuring, enveloping, powerful touch and so does their baby. Their baby feels safe and loved. I encourage pregnant mothers, their partners and other close family members to breathe out, relax, hug themselves and then place their palms over their baby’s body and deeply connect with their baby. I encourage them to take the time to sense what their baby needs: how much pressure, how long to hold, how much movement and stroking they may also appreciate.
Once their baby is born, I encourage the family to continue holding them in this way. I love to show them how they can fully envelop their baby with loving touch. We start with the centre of the body, the back or the heart and abdomen. Hold this powerful midline, your nervous system, your Governing and Conception Vessels, with your palms which envelop and calm. As a baby receives love they learn to self-regulate. You can then palm out from the centre down both legs to the feet to anchor and calm. Next reconnect to the centre line and then move from their heart into both their arms to the hands. Respect their position. With a baby I don’t stretch out arms or legs, but envelop them in the position they are in.
Sadly, not all mothers and babies receive this loving touch. Yet, whatever your experience of loving touch as a baby, you can access it now. Many of my clients and students, including me, have found the safe, calming Shiatsu touch to offer healing from challenges in our relationship with our mother, or other complicated relationships we created because our foundation was not stable and secure. Receiving this touch now can help us repattern and heal much within our lives. We cannot change the past but we can change our relationship to it and we can change our present. Life is not a straight line but a spiralling pathway and there are moments when it is easier to transform.
An affirmation for the foundation phase in our life:
I nourish myself from within, whatever is going on outside me.
If you want to read more about this idea of the Cycles of Life and how you can change your present moment, I have a free download on my website. Please visit here to access it. I’d love to have your feedback on what you think of it. This is the material of my new book on the Cycles of Life and the Extraordinary Vessels.
I use this touch with my adult clients. I love teaching this touch in class where I can have two people working together with a third person who receives this enveloping, loving touch like a baby. The ‘baby’ lies on their back or front. In both positions, the two people working place their four hands over the ‘baby’s’ lower back; these hands create the ‘mother hand’: a stabilising, nurturing anchor. They then cup their hand closest to the ‘baby’s’ head, their child hand, on the head, holding it for a moment with static pressure. If the baby is on their front, they move their child hand onto the upper back. Hold a moment and then move down the back slowly. When they reach the lower back they continue working down the leg nearest them. If the baby is on their front, they do the same palming down to the abdomen and then down the legs. I will soon make a video on this touch! Watch out for it.
I’d love to hear your feedback on hugging yourself and also if you try the baby exercise.
