Shiatsu and the Knowing Body: Connecting to children with Special Needs
I am using Shiatsu with children with complex genetic conditions and altering the look of it whilst staying true to the energetic insight which is at the core of this work. Children move. Quietness and stillness is a consequence of this full-bodied exploration and a time for integration. Movement and pause then are the pendulum extremes that are never absolute in any life but are always known in the body in relation to one another. The only time when there is not movement over prolonged periods of time is in critical ill health.
Shiatsu uses touch as a practice of insight to look for movement and address stasis through a living form. The touch may occur at the surface of the skin but it follows a movement at many levels and questions a blockage by re-affirming this inherent capacity to move in the breath, in the stretching out of limbs, in the release from seizure in confined muscle-groups. As a practitioner’s hands connect through these volumes of experiences held over time in a child’s body there is a powerful tool and acknowledgment coming to the fore. This is a pre-disposition to treat the inherent capacity of the breath to flow and distribute as a pre-cursor to a more effortless vital and easy form in which contact is the norm.
The ability of a child to self-correct either in the subtle re-emphasis that occur in relative stillness or through dynamic fine-tuning when the body is in motion, comes about because the practitioner is not working only technically on a mechanical level but with the breath as a pattern of continuous regeneration. In a sense the breath affirms the livingness of the body yet the body structure as a real form needs to act as a regulator and conductor in order to allow the uninhibited passage of this breath so that it may feed into the various transformations that support and reaffirm the body as it is lived. To set this instrument for optimal ease, it needs to hold fast in a core placement based in the lower abdomen and lower back. This knot is necessary as a base and is the deepest gravitational point in a healthy child out of which the motivation to reach out through the limbs and the voice are always present.
A Shiatsu practitioner works in a very practical and physical way yet touch is adaptive, nuanced and constantly sensitizing to the small shifts occurring in the way that a child breaths in and out. Shifting the role of touch continually not in order to cure or fix but in order to warm where warmth is needed, to give space in the rhythmic counter-point of the Off-touch where that is needed, is to stay present by adapting to the circumstances of the moment. Working between finger tips and palms at varying intervals and varying depths allows for a steady contact through a series of gradual two-way accommodations. Witnessing facial expression in relation to the body as a whole; a yawn, a sigh and the small accommodations in muscle tone as the breath deepens creates a global attention where information travels rapidly through tiny adjustments between eye and hand informed through the bodily responses in a child as they gather and ripple out. It is working with a pattern that is occurring so rapidly that it is never caught in any cauterized sense of a person cut off from the wider connections in which they live.
Working with the principles of Shiatsu which is essentially about alignment and right timing is to work with what is relevant and tangible for the child. One uses what is absolutely at hand to work with patterns of association in the shifting attention of the child that may be so distributed throughout the body of the child or in the room that at first they appear unrelated and even as distractions. The proof is in how change occurs in leaps in which many capacities and interests seem to pool together and move to a new level all at once; moving with spontaneity and interest, engaging joyfully with others, ability to deeply rest and be in quiet presence, posture and sense of settlement, expressiveness and variation in gesture and intonation, awareness and sense of body in space, sense of expectation and timing in response to contact in order to take play further.
Shiatsu with its understanding of the Meriden networks that fold back and forth to reach inwards and outwards is a living map and an attitude towards being human. As a pattern that is made between living forms it could be called an embrace. By opening up the capacity for attention as an active affirmation- to hold many things together at the same time without one thing needing to cancel out another- a situation of openness, tolerance and warmth begins to be generated which will feed into a child’s sense of their body and their relationship to others.
With some children the session looks very much like what one would expect to see in a regular Shiatsu treatment- a child lying on a mat receiving touch in specific and timed ways. The child who receives Shiatsu in this way is often too ill to move a great deal. Then the movement that a Shiatsu practitioner is trained to see, goes on as a circulation within the child’s body and as a connection that moves between practitioner and child. Yet from the outside this movement is barely visible. Tiny thresholds in feeling-response are witnessed by the practitioner and linked back in to a wider circulation that the child also follows. This creates a landscape of interest where the body’s potential is set in motion without the child ever changing position. Yet the drama is unfolding nevertheless and a child who may seem passive begins to notice that their small indications in breath and eye movement and muscle tone are becoming the heart of the conversation. This begins to widen attention and gradually as this attention expands into the small and sometimes neglected pockets of rigidity in the body, the child makes a more settled contact with the mat and then begins to spontaneously stretch, yawn and utter sounds. The hyper-flexion in the hands becomes now a grasp/un-grasp that is a timed response of high activation and then release. A reflex starts to become a game as the timing of action/rest is played out in every new cycle of a movement or composure, and a facial flicker becomes a smile even before it registers on the face.
It is something very special to work with a child such as this and to pass on this way of noticing and interacting to learning assistants who perhaps before have felt guilty about being with such a seemingly passive child and “doing nothing” on such a busy day. This is where a child who has lived their life very much at the interior level of temperature gauges, breathing cycles, rhythm and visceral awareness become a key part in teaching their Carers how to notice these small markers and indications that are so precious but at times may seem so enigmatic.
To talk about these things whilst also practising in a cooperative touch and movement dialogue between child and adult is liberating and many of the Learning Assistants I have worked with are really excellent at simply doing what works. There is such a divide in our culture between what is perceived as Care duties versus Educational concept learning that it is rarely acknowledged that awareness is built up out of an interest in very tiny differences in sensory and visceral affects that are happening all the time. As we address these things we begin to become more present to each other.
With more robust and active children the sessions are sometimes extremely dynamic involving setting up a kind of textured multi-levelled landscape with various enclaves of interest and varying possibilities for rolling, swinging, bouncing and making sound. I am continuously altering the interval and tempo of my engagement with a child incorporating the whole room and the distances between objects and using sound and music as a tangible means of forging brief shapes together in an exchange even from opposite ends of a room. Sometimes I am witnessing sometimes following or joining creating sudden tensions, give-way points or counter-weights and using my physical engagement as an added surface or interface for testing angles, swinging, rotating, springing and sudden stopping. The sessions are about action and pause and the more that one plays in the tiny gaps between these transitions the more Shiatsu becomes an attitude of address that finds pause and spaciousness even at the heart of full-bodied play as it finds meaningful integration even where the intervals between bodies seperate them from physical touch. This is helpful to a child who is learning to pace their most extrovert movements with an ability to stay present, open and ready in a deeply relaxed attitude. This quiet sense of readiness is about facing others through one’s whole body because one is already involved in a pattern of shared practices which are familiar but are never entirely given.
Through this work I have seen particularly in young children, that there is a very strong link between practical movement aided by touch and structural/energetic integrity. It is not that we have a body and if it works it does certain things and obeys certain functions but rather that through this act of doing, the body begins to work and organize itself as it patterns interests, expectations and sequences of occurrence that are played out over and over again. Just as a child learns speech in this process of echolocation through repetition and adjustment so she learns to organize her body in these wavering wide angled moves; from side to side, backwards/forwards, up and down, round and round and so on. Where a movement suddenly stops this creates a very strong affect in the contrast as the vestibular system is suddenly halted whilst the senses are still geared in to the movement. This is a point of heightened consciousness that can sometimes become frozen through fear but is the basis of interest and engagement when one is supported to move through it. It is a crucial threshold for marking experience and revisiting and altering performances which are never as cut and dry as being “right” or “wrong” but are always different versions of one another that throw each other into relief. The body as it plays into its full range fine-tunes specific and apt moments that are then known as up-rightness, pause or centeredness. Capacities actually cohere out of this far wider atmosphere of flying, falling, tilting, rolling, swivelling and rocking that is the preference of any child learning to engage through their body.
Shiatsu is using this same twinned potential of contrast between compression and expansion out of which every kind of movement and pause play out. This is what On-Off touch involves and the ease of movement that it supports is not about direct or specific functional correction but about the spontaneous levity and spaciousness that any slight compression allows when in the next moment it is released to give a sense of enhanced freedom. This is felt in the levity of the legs, the chest, the arms, the fingers and the head which may be used as investigative tools of curiosity rather than as crutches that stiffen against a falling body.
There is a certain point where an effortless stillness which is a balance point between many variables is found. This could be a boy with Cerebral Palsy standing with limited support at his pelvis after swinging, twirling and rocking on and off a balance point or a child on an exercise ball, suddenly letting go of the tension in her arms and legs because she feels secure and fully supported at a specific angle where all her weight is aligned and pouring through the ball into the ground below. These are moments of heightened awareness and out of them vey deep connections through Shiatsu contact can then be made. At these optimum moments Shiatsu becomes a swiftly drawn graph that highlights the main areas of alignment. These are never abstract but always relate to the child in motion and in connection with a wider pattern of interests and practices in which they are already involved. An alignment from the head down the spine binding at the sacrum, hips and abdomen creates a fine tuning capacity and can be adjusted discretely with small tilts and accommodations at the mid-line through touch and micro levels of traction and release as the body moves and rests.
The kind of Shiatsu I am beginning to develop is a way of working through body practices as a means of drawing on awareness that is not just the Childs or just the Practitioner’s but through which the practice itself opens up into a given connection. This genuinely brings joy because it is about noticing what is happening already in the easiest possible way.
2012
Ruth Solomon, BA, MA
Shiatsu Practitioner
T-I-L-T Touch Interaction Learning Trust
Below is a Gallery of rapid sketches and art-work that are done as part of my research into the moving body
