Five Elements Shiatsu

Traditional Chinese medicine is one of the oldest medical systems in human history. Its written tenets date back almost 2,500 years. There are traditionally several branches of Chinese medicine. These include meditation, diet, exercise, massage, acupuncture, moxa and herbal medicine. Chinese medicine was created by the best and brightest scholars of the day. There are probably somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 books still existing on the subject, all written before the beginning of the twentieth century. Thousands more have been written in more recent times. Nearly one quarter of the world’s population relies on Chinese medicine.

Traditional Chinese medicine is a holistic form of medicine. It strives to understand the relationship between the parts, and the relationship of the parts to the whole. Health and disease are thought about in terms of the context of the entire person as a system or as a whole. Chinese medicine treats the body as an energy system that is always in flux, shifting from harmony to disharmony and back. Energy pathways called meridians or channels run throughout the body and circulate energy, which is known as qi or chi.

Traditional Chinese medicine recognizes that the body is part of nature and its environment. The body’s environment can be thought of as too hot, too cold, too dry or too damp. Together with summer heat and wind invasion, these comprise the six pernicious influences. Traditional Chinese medicine also takes into account the emotional landscape as a key variable in determining the body’s balance or lack of energy balance.

Joy, anger, worry, excessive thinking, grief, sadness, fear and fright are the seven emotions, and have a significant impact on a person’s state of health. They affect the balance of energy in terms of yin and yang, and the condition of the blood as well.

Five Elements Shiatsu refers to an additional way of thinking and diagnosis in the practice of shiatsu. Shiatsu is a traditional form of hands-on massage therapy. It originates in Japan. There are two main schools of thought in shiatsu today. One is based on western anatomical and physiological ideas. The other is based on Chinese traditional medicine. Five Elements Shiatsu is based on the latter.

The Five Elements, or Five Phases, refer to another way of thinking about diagnosis in terms of traditional Chinese medicine. According to this system, the practitioner considers the balance and interplay of these five phases of the body: earth, fire, metal, wood and water. Each of the elements correlates to many parts and areas of the body.

The elements can be seen as qualities and functions in the body. When they are in harmony, they are equally balanced. When there is disease present in the body, it can be seen as an imbalance between these five elements. It is thought that in health, fire will nurture earth and earth will nurture metal, which in turn will nurture water, and water will nurture wood, and wood completes the circle by nurturing fire. This is called the Nurturing Cycle.

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