While I was growing up I had no contact with complementary health but then again I did inherit a lack of trust in mainstream medicine, or at least my mother was very wary of bothering the GP or taking pills. It wasn’t until I was living in Bristol and basically unemployed, feeling very low, that 3 different people mentioned Shiatsu to me and by the third time I did hear it! After one session I was smitten. I had been trained and working as a dancer and dance teacher and having Shiatsu was like being danced by someone else – heaven on a futon!
Then the practitioner, Sandra Reeve, asked me about my health history and I told her the story of my ‘curse’. (Quite a few of us were taught to call our menstrual cycle this in those days – hopefully no-one does now.) I explained how I had been rushed to hospital twice, and suffered days off school every month as a teenager,and all about the pain. She said, as far as I remember now, 24 years ago, that ‘Shiatsu should help with that’, and she was right. After 2 sessions I had no more pain. It felt no less than a miracle. She did give me homework to do (sitting on a tennis ball which was agony for my very tight dancer’s perineum!) which I dutifully did, and I had a pretty bad period after the fist session, but then I was pain free and have been ever since.
I never thought I would do anything other than lie down and receive lovely acupressure, and when I moved to Cardiff I made sure I identified another practitioner, and spread the word to all my friends. It was later, when I was planning to move back up to Edinburgh, that she said didn’t I think now was the time to start to train to do Shiatsu myself. She recommended Elaine Liechti at The Glasgow School of Shiatsu and I enrolled. Luckily I did this before starting my incredibly full-time job (Dance Artist in Residence for Edinburgh) or I don’t think I would have found the time and energy. So I started the Foundation course.
I do remember my first class because it was in direct contrast to my dance training. As a trainee dancer I was told that I would never be good enough, that I could always get my leg higher, or leap further, or spin faster. In that Shiatsu class, however, I caught myself thinking ‘I can do this’. Instead of negativity and constant striving, I felt positivity and empowerment. Needless to say, I decided to do the intermediate course, and the advanced one, and even though I had my first baby at the very end of my second year, I was amazed to find that I had graduated just as I was about to go part-time at Dance Base.
While I had been training, the wonderful people at The Shiatsu Society were busy ‘changing the goal posts’, and the 250 hours I had been told I needed to become a practitioner were doubled, and then the 2 years I had taken to learn my new profession were elongated to 3. Ah, but The Glasgow School didn’t offer a third year. So off we went, I and my keen friends, and we arranged our own third year with amazing teachers like Michael Rose, Nicola Pooley, and Bill Palmer who all came up to Scotland to work with us. It took 5 years actually, which wasn’t unusual in those days, but I did it. I got my MRSS (member of the register of the Shiatsu Society) in 1995!
