Alex Shortland has been working on a clinical level with patients within the National Health Service since 1995. From an interest in holistic therapies, gained whilst studying martial arts, he started training in Zen Shiatsu with the
Shiatsu College Manchester. He qualified in 2007 and since then has been treating family, friends and colleagues around his current employment. Alex kindly wrote the following article for Herts Holistic:
"Communication can only take place when two or more people exchange information with all parties giving/receiving information. Healing is similar in the sense that a therapist cannot heal a client on their own. It has to be a working partnership with the therapist acting more like an impartial guide directing the client to find their own way to improved health. This is only possible through good communication.
One of the problems we face in today’s modern society of hi-tech, high speed communication is that it is easy to forget how to take the time to listen properly. Most people know what they want and will generally want it straight away. Because of this it can be easy to rush in and miss, or overlook, important aspects of a client’s needs.
If you were to stop someone in the street and ask them to describe how they listen, the first thing that you would likely find is that they would immediately stop listening. You would probably then get an incredulous look as if you were being silly. Finally, if they haven’t abandoned you to your obvious madness, they may proceed to talk down to you as if you were a child and tell you they use their ears. Is that the correct answer? Well yes, of course it is. The Collins English Dictionary (2009) defines listening as “to concentrate on hearing something”. Obviously this means we must use our ears, however it also states “to take heed; pay attention”. What then does this mean? That we need to use just our ears to listen? Not necessarily. Every day, without even realising it, we use all of our senses to communicate with the outside world. For example, if we listen to our nose when it smells burning we know it’s time to rescue the toast. If we don’t listen to our nose the toast will burn. It is the same with every interaction we make from the first moment we lay eyes on our client to the point at the end of the treatment when we bid them farewell.
To start with we must listen with our eyes. How does the client look when they walk in, what is their posture/body language telling us? If they look hurried or harassed, further rushing them straight in to therapy mode may cause them to lock up or miss out something important. It would then be prudent to give them a moment to leave the outside world, outside. Greet them with a receptive warm smile and handshake. Without words you have just listened to their immediate plight and reassured them that it is okay to relax. Then give them a few minutes to settle and compose themselves, watch and listen to how they breathe. If the client insists on chatting during this time, reassure them it’s not a problem, sometimes people just need to release and vocalising is a natural and excellent way to do this. When their breathing has steadied and they appear more relaxed it is time to discuss what has brought them to you. Again don’t just hear the words, listen to how the client forms them, the expressions on their face, the way they move their body. These will all give clues as to what is happening on an energetic level. It is vital to let the client know that you truly are listening by being attentive, yest relaxed and by not interrupting. If you need to go back to clarify a point wait until a suitable pause. This will help prevent the client from losing their train of thought as they speak.
In Shiatsu we use a variety of techniques to communicate through touch. On a very basic level a good, simple way of understanding physical communication is to consider the energy exchange that takes place when we shake hands with a fond friend compared with someone we’ve never met before. With the friend there is comfort, an unspoken communication of love and trust. With the stranger there is nearly always a slight coldness that comes with the unfamiliarity mixed perhaps with a slight willingness from each of us to form a basic level of trust. So with this in mind, the first sessions with a new client are often as much about building trust through touch based communication as they are about instigating a particular treatment regime. It is therefore really important to spend time developing the skill of communicating trust through touch, as the information we hear through our physical contact with the client can tell us so much more than the words we were given before we started.
Once the treatment has started we are now committed to working with the client and one of the beautiful privileges of working with a client’s energy is that it is dynamic which means things can change as we work. In order to be receptive to these changes we need to listen. For the most part this is done with a ‘listening’ hand whilst we use a ‘working’ hand to encourage change. At any given time these roles are interchangeable as we listen and form a rapport with the client’s energy. However, it isn’t just on an energetic level that we are working so it is vital we also listen to the physical aspects of the client in order to prevent inadvertently causing discomfort or, worse still, pain. For example, if when applying pressure with the working hand we start to feel tension in the muscles beneath the listening hand, we know to ease back on the amount of pressure being used. If the treatment calls us to work the area more deeply then we can pause a while, and when we hear the muscles relax we can start to go deeper again.
With this said we must also remember to listen with all of our other ‘ears’. So we need to watch our client as we work, see their posture, the colour of their skin and how they move. Hear the noises they make as they breathe. Feel the textures and temperature of them beneath our hands. Finally, when the treatment has finished, we should take notes on how the client felt as we worked. By listening and working in this way we indicate an acknowledgment of what has been said to us on all levels and have thus been able to give the appropriate reassuring responses throughout the whole treatment.
Listening is an ability we all think we possess but in reality when we think about all the aspects involved we find it is a rough edged skill that needs to be honed with continued practice in our everyday activities and interactions, not just when we’re working with clients".
On Friday, I attend the Vitality Show at Earl's Court and felt like a child in a toy shop. The priority for my friend and I was to get our hands on goodie bags and we were not disappointed, the free tampons especially and the chocolate bar were the golden prizes among the 20g pack of granulated sugar (?), the Post-natal Firming Lotion, the Firming Day Cream and the Firming Body Lotion. If nothing else, my skin this week should look firmer.
