“Really doesn’t do much does it?”

When I give a JSJ session, I use my light touch and listen to the energy of the body with my fingertips. Our fingertips have more nerve endings than any part of us, making them a magnificent tool in evaluating and working with our world. Anyone with neuropathy will tell you how much more difficult working with their hands is when they can’t feel their fingers.

 Sometimes we also feel an energy pulsation, which can often feel like a heartbeat. We can feel textures that indicate what is happening energetically in the body and at what depth from skin surface to the deepest bone. We give lots of descriptives to these textures such as smoking, buzzing, pounding, static, sluggish, sticky and like bubbles floating by under ice. Each descriptive gives us information as to what is happening in the harmonizing of the body.

 We also can feel movement, which I describe as a spiraling effect. As energy moves along pathways it also is moving from the most surface levels to the deepest and back in a spiral. I experience it as a continual movement. The spiral goes downward and then rises up, but it doesn’t do this by reversing. It is a continuous movment that takes place. I’ve read this description in my kids science books describing string theory, though I think the theory has the spiraling wrong as it doesn’t align with what I feel.

 What we feel as practitioners is very different than what the recipient feels. Its as though we are not privy to their entire experience. Clients will often ask “Did you feel that?” or describe changes that I didn’t pick up on physically or emotionally, but that is not unusual. It is as if there’s a veil between us. On the flip side, on occasion I receive intuitive information about a client as we work that has assisted my session.

 When I volunteered for Hospice here in Lexington, I was sent to visit with an elderly woman under their care at her home out in the country. She was friendly and frail but able to get up on my table on her own. Pain was her primary complaint along with her wish to just generally feel better and have a bit more energy. 

The session was profound on my end. She drifted blissfully to sleep. I could feel so much movement. It was if the clouds of heaven opened up and she was connected to all that is. I really have difficulty putting it into words. When the session was finished she awoke excitedly and said “That was really something! I want you to come back next week!!!” She was elated with how she felt and appeared to feel very energetic.

The next week I arrived and we went right to work. This session felt even more powerful than the first. She drifted into an even deeper state than the previous week. To me it felt as if she was connecting at a level that I’d never felt before. The power of this session actually amazed me. 

 When she awoke, she turned her head towards me and uttered words that surprised me. “Really doesn’t do much, does it?” She was actually a little irritated. I was dumbstruck and didn’t know how to respond. I’d felt so much and she’d felt so little. All I could tell her was that each treatment can feel differently. It didn’t feel appropriate to tell her what I’d experienced.

She never requested Jin Shin Jyutsu again.