Yoga for the Mind

Health Is in Your Hands: Jin Shin Jyutsu®

SPECIALEVENT AT “TOURNESOL WELLNESS”

March 10th,2015 @ 6 pm– 7:30 pm

26 East 36th Street, New York, NY 10016

(sign up at www.tournesolwellness.com)

Practicingthe Art of Self-Healing: Jin Shin Jyutsu®

                                              with

Dr.Kathrin Stengel (JSJ-Practitioner, Philosopher, Author, Publisher)

What if caring for yourself and others were literally in your hands? This is exactly what JinShin Jyutsu® offers to humanity: an accessible, yet sophisticatedart of healing ourselves and others: physically, mentally and emotionally.

Health Is in Your Hands: JIN SHIN JYUTSU® is a traditional Japanese healing art for harmonizing life energy and empowers people of all walks of life to take charge of their own health and well-being by simply holding their fingers or placing their hands on specific points of energetic density across the body.

In Jin Shin Jyutsu®, our hands work as “jumper cables” that recharge our empty batteries and restore the flow of energy in body, mind and spirit; this, in turn, is key to a healthy and harmonious life. Countless years of study and a vast trove of experience and knowledge have gone into the energetic hand choreographies, the so called “flows,” that Mary Burmeister brought from Japan to the West (modern JSJ originated with Jiro Murai [1886-1960]) and that she presented in such a way as to enable anyone to easily apply Jin Shin Jyutsu to him/herself and others. Because of its effectiveness in pain management and disease prevention, as well as its extraordinary overall health benefits (with no negative side effects) Jin Shin Jyutsu has already been incorporated in the treatment plan of several US-hospitals and is offered by thousands of practitioners all over the world.

Join us at Tournesol  for a special evening with Dr. Kathrin Stengel, Jin Shin Jyutsu practitioner, philosopher, author and publisher of Health Is in Your Hands: Jin Shin Jyutsu- Practicing the Art of Self-Healing (with 51 Flash Cards for the Hands-on Practice of Jin Shin Jyutsu). Dr. Stengel will introduce you to the basic concepts of Health Is in Your Hands: Jin Shin Jyutsu (finger holds, Safety Energy Locks, “flows”, awareness of breath) and afford you, literally, a “hands-on” Jin Shin Jyutsu experience that will start you on your journey of self-healing.

For further information:

Dr. Stengel’s article in Massage Magazine: Recharge Your Body’s Batteries the Easy Way

Dr. Stengel’s article on Tumblr: Health Is in Your Hands

Jin Shin Jyutsu® Organization and Classes: Jin Shin Jyutsu Inc.

Jin Shin Jyutsu® Book and Card Set: Health Is in Your Hands: Jin Shin Jyutsu- Practicing the Art of Self-Healing (with 51 Flash Cards for the Hands-on Practice of Jin Shin Jyutsu). For press materials please contact: [email protected]

Jin Shin Jyutsu® at University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center

Dr. Stengel/ Bio

If you are looking for a helping hand, why don’t you start looking at  the end of your own arm? (Mary Burmeister, co-founder of JIN SHIN JYUTSU®)

                                      Practicing the Art of Self-Healing – JIN SHIN JYUTSU® – begins from understanding the power and magic of our own hands. As obvious as this may sound, and despite the fact that we all know how powerful compassionate touch can be when we are hurting, most of us will still doubt that holding our fingers or placing our hands on the body can be an effective way to treat or alleviate ‘dis-ease’. Can we help and heal ourselves and others through the mere touch of our hands? The answer is: yes. Those of us who practice JIN SHIN JYUTSU® have witnessed countless instances of the power and effectiveness of this innate, ever-accessible, and free ‘medicine’ (no side-effects, guaranteed!): the touch of our own hands. Maybe there is some truth to the saying that what we are most afraid of are our own innate powers. For why else would we come to neglect and distance ourselves from this harmonizing and healing art that is always ‘at hand’?

                        What is JIN SHIN JYUTSU®, and how does it work?

‘Jin Shin Jyutsu’ comes from the Japanese, and it literally means “the Art of the Creator through Compassionate Man.” JIN SHIN JYUTSU® is a traditional Japanese healing art that harmonizes life energy, a ‘physio-philosophy’ that not only alleviates ‘dis-ease’ but guides us to the place where I “now know myself.”

Rediscovered in the early 20th century by Jiro Murai (1886-1960), who cured himself of terminal illness by practicing traditional Japanese hand postures known for their healing power (the so-called ‘Inju’s’), JIN SHIN JYUTSU® was brought to the West by Jiro Murai’s devoted student Mary Burmeister. Thanks to Jiro Murai’s and Mary Burmeister’s lifelong study and practice of JIN SHIN JYUTSU®, and thanks to the devotion of the many JSJ-students as well as all JSJ, Inc.-authorized instructors, this art of healing through the innate curative power of our own hands has been passed down through several generations, helping thousands of people in the US and all around the world to heal themselves.

How to practice JIN SHIN JYUTSU®?

JIN SHIN JYUTSU® can be easily practiced by placing our hands on specific points on the body – the so-called ‘Safety Energy Locks’ (SEL) – which sets the healing flow of energy in motion. This creates harmony and supports inner balance in body, mind and spirit. This choreography of touch, as well as the holding of individual fingers, dissolves physical, emotional and spiritual blockages and opens up energy paths, thus restoring our overall harmony and health. Our hands ‘jumper cable’ our life energy, as it were, thereby recharging our ‘battery’ and, consequently, the whole person.

           Most recently, Waltraud Riegger-Krause, a long-time student of Mary Burmeister and authorized instructor of JIN SHIN JYUTSU® has created an easy-to-read-and-use book-and-card-set that allows us to quickly find the appropriate self-treatment (a symptoms index is provided as well) and, thereby, to immediately benefit from JIN SHIN JYUTSU’s therapeutic powers, while also gaining an in-depth understanding of its profound wisdom. This book-and-card-set is nothing less than a veritable JIN SHIN JYUTSU® First Aid Kit together with a thorough presentation of this healing art all in one. As Jed Schwartz, a fellow instructor at JSJ, Inc., so poignantly puts it: HEALTH IS in YOUR HANDS: Jin Shin Jyutsu® – Practicing the Art of Self-Healing is a “must for anyone wanting to learn how to help themselves and those around them, for anyone seeking personal empowerment in their own health.”

                              I recently saw Sarah Polley's 2012 film Stories We tell - half documentary, half feature film posing as documentary - about her discovery, after her mother's death, that she is not her father's biological daughter. In fact, I watched the film twice in a row so as to be able to begin wrapping my mind around the sheer beauty of its complexity. What does it mean to be your parent's child? What does it mean to be your child's parent? What does it mean for the child to find out that one of your parents is actually not your biological parent? And what does it mean for the parent to find out that your child is actually not your biological child? These are some of the questions Sarah Polley raises in the course of uncovering her origins and retracing, across several decades, the lives of her parents: actors Diane and Michael Polley and ... producer Harry Gulkin, who turns out to be her biological father.

In what I take to be the film's key scene, Sarah's father Michael reflects on the impact that learning - many years after the event - that Sarah is not his biological kin, but rather the fruit of an extramarital relationship, has had on him:

"I sometimes stop and realize that something inside has for the rest of my life changed. A certain cord that runs between Sarah and me has been severed, and I am powerless to join it together. It's not a real thing. It only exists because we have developed this facet called imagination - and that is all too real and tangible. It gives pain ... How ironic it is that the final revelation and its aftermath have brought Sarah and I closer together."

Could this be the essential paradox of parenthood: that the cord that runs between us and our children is spun from the yarn of imagination, which is both not a real thing and all too real at the same time? So real that it hurts?

The physio-philosophy of Jin Shin Jyutsu is a traditional Japanese healing art for harmonizing life energy. Placing your hands on specific points on the body - the so-called Safety Energy Locks - sets the healing flow of energy in motion. This creates harmony and supports inner balance. Jin Shin Jyutsu is a self-help method that can be easily applied in daily life. Jin Shin Jyutsu promotes physical, emotional and spiritual harmony. As my hands are always with me, I can help myself and others whenever needed. Never again will one stand by helplessly when children or loved ones suffer - from growing pains to nausea, from the common cold to post-op recovery, from headache to depression, from menstrual cramping to menopause.

"...We owe our children everything and our parents nothing. To give ourselves to our children is an obligation, to give ourselves to our parents a gift."

   Q & A with Michael Eskin, author of The Wisdom of Parenthood

What, would you say, is the main or most important insight, thought, or proposition of your book?

Adoption is the truth of parenthood. This proposition is the nub of The Wisdom of Parenthood. And while it may sound counterintuitive and all too provocative, it makes perfect sense if you consider the following:

1. Since paternity and maternity do not necessarily lead to parenthood, being biologically related to our offspring cannot be an essential component of parenthood. For if it were, only biological parents could be considered parents—which is an untenable (if not absurd) proposition in view of the countless biological ‘parents’ who have abrogated or defaulted on their parenthood throughout history, and, conversely, in view of the countless biological strangers who have been de facto (if not always de jure)parents to myriads of children.

2. Thus, whatever parenthood is, it cannot be a function of biology and procreation. This doesn’t mean, of course, that parents cannot also be, and often are, biologically related to their children; it only means that it is not biological kinship that makes a parent (—just think of all the egg and sperm donors who are biologically related to children whom they will never parent). So what does make a parent?

3. What makes a parent is the irrevocable commitment to and assumption of responsibility for another human being. And this is most saliently and poignantly evidenced in  adoption—understood as a cultural/legal practice and, more importantly, as a way of living and being, as an ethic—precisely because, unlike the propagation of the species through procreation, adoption is by definition not a natural/instinctual necessity, but an act of absolute freedom, pure choice, a true gift.

It is in this sense, then, that adoption can be said to be the truth of parenthood: we first become parents in and through adopting the children we have been entrusted with—be they our own or someone else’s biological offspring. We must ever adopt the children we parent if we want to become their parents.

So, are you suggesting that biology has nothing to do with being a parent?

Yes and no. It would seem to have a lot to do with parenthood in those instances where the parents happen to be biologically related to their children and think that they love them because or insofar as their children are their “own flesh and blood.” In those instances, however, where the parents are not biologically related to their children, biology has obviously nothing whatsoever to do with parenthood. Now, if we concede that biology bears on parenthood in some instances and not in others, we must also concede that it is merely accidental to the concept and overall practice of parenthood. In other words, parenthood—even in biologically related families—is functionally independent of blood kinship, of paternity and maternity. It unfolds in a register utterly distinct from biology, instinct, and drive: Parenthood is an ethical category, it is part of what the Greeks called bios—the life world we create for ourselves; whereas paternity and maternity are part of what the Greeks called zoe—biological, physiological being, life in the purely material sense.  

1.     What inspired you to write about ‘parenthood’ as you did in The Wisdom of Parenthood?

As a father of three, I felt the need to articulate my views on what it means to be a parent to my children—to give them something that would not only allow them to better understand me as their father, but that would also be something they could turn to for inspiration and guidance should they ever choose to and be fortunate enough to become parents themselves. Laying out what I take to be the essence of parenthood—irrespective of how our children come to us, of how we become parents—was particularly important to me in light of my experience as both a biological and an adoptive parent confronted with our society’s deep-seated—if not always overtly expressed—bias in favor of biological parenthood as the only real kind parenthood.

What do you hope to accomplish with The Wisdom of Parenthood?

It is my sincere hope that my book will start a serious conversation about the very meaning and practice of parenthood and contribute to making our world a more hospitable and inclusive place for all parents and children, irrespective of how any given child may have come to its parents. For it is anachronistic, misguided, and discriminatory to hold onto the biological view of parenthood in the age of assisted reproduction, in vitro fertilization, gestational surrogacy, “third-party production,” international adoption, and the continual rise of same-sex and LGBT parenting.  

(Michael Eskin, The Wisdom of Parenthood, UWSP 2013)

Have you ever seen Don Hartman's 1949 film Holiday Affair, starring Robert Mitchum, Janet Leigh, Wendell Corey, and Gordon Gebert? If not, I wholeheartedly recommend that you rent and watch it, as it is contains, among other things, a most incisive, head-on treatment of the very meaning of parenthood.

Here's a brief synopsis of the relevant aspects of the plot: Connie Ennis (Janet Leigh) - a war widow and mother of eight-year-old Timmy (Gordon Gebert) - has been dating Carl Davis (Wendell Corey), who is eager to marry her, for several years when she meets Steve Mason (Robert Mitchum) and quickly falls for him. In an early scene in the film, when both men happen to be in Connie's apartment at the same time one night and Carl - acting as the boy's parent-to-be - is about to discipline Timmy, Connie exclaims: "Get your hands off my boy!" - at which point Carl immediately lets go of the boy and leaves the apartment ... We next encounter Carl and Connie at a reconciliation dinner at a high-end restaurant. And it is in this key scene that the most remarkable short dialogue unfolds, after Connie, who arrives late, thanks Carl for the flowers he had sent and sits down at the table:

"Let me tell you how I feel about it," Carl says. "If we were to get married - and I hate that 'if' - Timmy can be one of two things to me: He can be your son that lives in our house, and I'll be very nice to him. Or he can be our son. In that case, I'll bawl him out and spoil him and worry about him and love him." To which Connie replies: "If we do get married, Carl, he will be our son."

What strikes me as truly noteworthy about this brief exchange is Carl's intuitive understanding of the specific love animating parenthood as one born of the decision to wholly commit oneself and assume full responsibility for another human being. In other words, and contrary to common belief, what Carl's words signify is that the love we take to be a defining feature of parenthood - the love beyond the vagaries of emotion, the love that doesn't run dry and that we don't fall out of one day - is a function rather than condition, of our fundamental commitment and fidelity to our children.

Those who instill fear end up fearing

those who fear them.

                                     - with W.H. Auden in mind

This aphorism by Julien David expresses to me in a nutshell of what happens to writers who oppose totalitarian regimes.

(from: Julien David, Philosophical Fragments of a Contemporary Life [UWSP, 2008], p.29)

You first realize that you are getting old

when you begin feeling that you would like

to be young again.

(Julien David, Philosophical Fragments of a Contemporary Life [UWSP, 2008], p. 39)

  so much depends

upon

a small dotted

-i-

beside the Book        

the Mac

the Pod and

the Phone

...for it was made for you!

                                                                                             For J.-P.S.

(Julien David, Philosophical Fragments of a Contemporary Life [UWSP, 2008], p. 60)

No contemporary writer I know of stages the question of parenthood with such originality and perspicacity as J. M. Coetzee in his most recent novel, The Childhood of Jesus. Throughout the novel, a distinction is made between "real" parenthood and "true" parenthood. "Real" parenthood designates the merely biological fact of being "engendered" and needing "a mother's womb to come into the world." "What the child needs from then on," however, "is love and care" - to be "care[d] about and care[d] for and take[n] care of," all of which is not a function of biological kinship, bespeaking, rather, what the novel categorically demarcates as "true" parenthood. Harking back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's famous dictum that we are all "born, so to speak, twice - born into existence and born into life, born human beings and born men," The Childhood of Jesus reminds us that in order to become our parents' "true" children and, concomitantly, in order for our parents to become our "true" parents, we must, paradoxically, ever again be "born to [them]."

"Surely there is such a thing as overvaluing the biological," the novel's main character says in what to me is one of the novel's philosophical key scenes.

I recently watched Paul Weitz’s 2013 feature film Admission, in which Princeton undergraduate admissions officer Portia Nathan develops parental feelings for one of her applicants—whom she experiences no special bond with when she first meets him in person early on in the film—after being told that he is the son she had borne and given up for adoption in college. That, toward the end of the movie, the applicant turns out not to be her biological son after all doubly underscores the power of language to induce belief and create ‘reality’: For we don’t love our children because they share our DNA—even though we often think we do; we love them insofar as they are ours, which can, but doesn’t have to, be premised on biological ties. While it is true, then, that we often consider our children ours because we (think) we know or believe that they are our biological offspring, what makes them truly ours, what makes us actually and truly love them as ours is not biology at all (otherwise all sperm and egg donors would necessarily love all the children they contribute to bringing into the world) but our infinite commitment to and responsibility for them. Our love for our children is born of our responsibility for them and not the other way around. 

Few authors have staged the question of parenthood, parental love and responsibility with such poignancy and incisiveness as Edith Wharton in her 1922 novella The Old Maid, which is set in mid-19th-century New York. Here's a brief summary of the plot:  Tina is raised by two cousins, Charlotte and wealthy Delia, one of whom, Charlotte, is her biological mother - a fact kept from Tina and the world at large throughout the novella, since she had been born out of wedlock. Following the example of Delia's two biological children, Tina, who is officially known to have been abandoned and taken in by Charlotte as a toddler, grows up calling Delia "Mamma" and Charlotte "Aunt Chatty." Toward the end of the novella, Delia adopts Tina in order to confer upon her her good name and status, thus enabling her to enter into an advantageous marriage and lead a comfortable and successful life. "I have always thought of you as my Mamma," Tina tells Delia, "and now, you dearest, you really are" ... Charlotte, however, who has been chafing under the necessity to keep her real relationship with Tina secret, experiences her daughter's adoption, which she agrees to with her child's best interest in mind, as a loss: "I have no rights, either before the law or in the heart of my child," she despairingly utters to Delia. It is at this point that Wharton's probing imagination allows us to ponder the very depths of what it means to be a parent and love one's child: "Can't we just go on loving her together?" Delia asks Charlotte, suggesting that parenthood is not about official (legal, biological) status so much as about doing and being a certain way (not to mention the reality created by the fact of being thought of or called a parent).  "Which of us is her mother?" Charlotte asks on the eve of her daughter's wedding, thereby underscoring the notion that parenthood is not an ontological given but an ethical task.

Fairness is a tactical notion. What is and what is not considered fair depends on four factors: the situation, the parties involved, the framework of distributive justice in place, and those who have the power of decision. Because one can never be certain that the parties involved, or those who have the power of decision will be inclined toward fairness, it is fair to say that life is not fair.

                                        The New York Times, Draft, August 4th, 2013, p. 12

I have always thought that we should create three-dimensional models of philosophical books, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in particular, come to my mind. Last weekend I stumbled upon the work of Matteo Pericoli, who, with his students at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, has built architectural models of novels (The New York Times, Draft, August 4th, 2013, p. 12). His “Laboratory of Literary Architecture” offers fascinating examples of the inherent spatiality of literature. If literature shines in this three-dimensional rendition, philosophy could do so even more. There is no philosophical text that doesn’t seem to suffer from its imposed linear structure, a necessity of writing that covers up the deeply spatial and three-dimensional structure of many a philosophical argument. There is a reason Kant surmised that “human reason is by nature architectonic” (Critique of Pure Reason, A 474). In fact, not only is human reason by nature spatial, but Kant’s own writing follows a three-dimensional construction plan as well. Hence, it makes sense that although in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason he acknowledges all changes to the text, he feels the need to emphasize that due to the fundamental soundness of his blueprint nothing was changed concerning “the form and completeness of the architectural plan”.

In the last few days, all of us have become more or less shameful victims of our own ignorance when it comes to calculating and understanding probability. Why don’t you try the following experiment and ask a random person at the next party you attend what it really means that Angelina Jolie had an “87% risk of developing breast cancer” prior to her double mastectomy. You will probably make even your mathematically-minded friends stumble, while uncomfortably reminding others of hated SAT math problems (yes – ‘tis the season again).

Let’s imagine you put it like this: “There are millions of women, and 1% carry a mutated BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene, and those with the mutated gene are five times more likely to develop breast cancer. What exactly does this mean? How many of those women who have the mutated gene do develop breast cancer? If, according to the NCI (National Cancer Institute), the likelihood of the average woman developing breast cancer is 12%, the chances for women with the mutated gene are up at 60% - still, how many women are we talking about? As the NCI reminds us, not every woman who has a harmful BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation will develop breast and/or ovarian cancer.

Let us also consider that mutational flaws in BRCA1 or BRCA2 are only responsible (if at all) for 5%-10% of the cancers you could develop. Angelina’s mutated gene is, thus, only responsible for 5% of all cancers (or would it be 2,5%, as she only carries one mutated gene?) she could possibly develop. How high are Angelina’s chances to develop any other form of cancer either caused by the mutated gene or something else (as we are told on the NIC website “harmful BRCA1 mutations increase a woman’s risk at developing cervical, uterine, pancreatic and or colon cancer”!)

A double mastectomy slashes breast cancer risk for every woman by 90% - leaving a 10% risk for still developing breast cancer. Why does it reduce Angelina’s risk to 5%?

The big question, it seems to me, is ultimately (and that would of course not be part of the SAT) whether statistical facts ever really translate into statistical knowledge even for an intelligent and educated audience. And even more so, whether the faulty translation of statistical facts into existential truths, predictions for the future, and justifications for certain actions isn’t one of the darkest areas of our enlightened and “rationalistic” age? Nowhere did I find this underlying philosophical question discussed in a more intriguing way than in H.M. Enzensberger’s “Fatal Numbers. Why Count on Chance.” (UWSP, 2011) – an insightful, funny and provocative essay on our emotional almost religious attachment to statistics. Let’s be honest: do we really know what these numbers mean?

Posted by: Kathrin Stengel

http://westside-philosophers.com/publishing2/book_pages/fatal_numbers.phpSource: