The Touch of Healing

by Alice Burmeister

  As the preceding stories clearly illustrate, Jin Shin Jyutsu can enable ordinary people to help themselves and others in seemingly extraordinary ways. It is our hope, in writing this book, to provide the reader an opportunity to do the same. As such, we have written it more for the general reader than for the serious practitioner. It can, however, be used as a reference by both.

  What follows, then, is an overview of the essential concepts and practices of Jin Shin Jyutsu, as they were originally set down by Master Jiro Murai. Up until now, anyone wishing to obtain this information would have had to attend an authorized Jin Shin Jyutsu class or else read Mary Burmeister’s writings. For the purpose of communicating these ideas to a general readership, we have attempted to present them in uncomplicated, everyday language. In order to retain the flavor of Mary’s original teachings, we have included numerous quotations from her texts and lectures. These generally appear at the beginning of each section.

  Lastly, we wish to emphasize that this book is not intended as the definitive, comprehensive work on the subject of Jin Shin Jyutsu. The multifaceted, multilayered nature of this healing art makes such an undertaking well beyond the scope of this book. Anyone wishing to supplement the material covered here is strongly encouraged to attend an authorized Jin Shin Jyutsu class. Those interested may contact the Jin Shin Jyutsu office in Scottsdale for more information. The address and phone number are listed in the Appendix.

  For most readers, the basic concepts and exercises that are the focus of this book will be more than sufficient. They will provide you with a wide array of tools to balance and maintain physical, emotional, and mental health. You can use them in conjunction with conventional medicine to help yourself and others facilitate the healing process. Or you may use them preventively, to sustain a sense of harmony and well-being. Ultimately, Jin Shin Jyutsu will restore you to a knowledge of yourself and of your long-dormant innate ability to improve the quality of your life.

  the foundations of the art

  chapter one

  We live in an age of information. The media are able to broadcast global events within seconds of their occurrence. The Internet links us to specialized data. Increasingly, we hope that scientific and technological advances will grant us a better understanding of ourselves, along with the secrets of well-being.

  Our growing reliance upon external information has gradually obscured a simple, innate awareness that all of us have long possessed. Inherent in this awareness are all the tools that we need to genuinely enrich our health and the quality of our lives.

  A student seeking to familiarize herself with the Art of Jin Shin Jyutsu attended her first class.

  During the lunch break, the student introduced herself to the teacher, Mary Burmeister. She confessed to feeling a bit overwhelmed. “I’m afraid that I don’t know anything about Jin Shin Jyutsu.”

  Mary smiled and said, “You already know everything about it.”

  The art of Jin Shin Jyutsu enables us to re-experience this awareness. Moreover, it teaches us how to utilize it for greater physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. No complicated technique or effort is required to apply it. Its seeds have lain dormant within us for virtually thousands of years. In order to revive them, we need only heed Plato’s teaching that “learning is remembering.”

  the life in all things

  In ancient times traditional people saw no distinction between body, mind, and spirit. Consequently, the practices they used to assist the body naturally promoted physical, emotional, and spiritual wholeness. Moreover, people saw their health or “harmony” as dependent upon bringing seemingly disparate elements into balance.

  Jin Shin Jyutsu (pronounced jin shin jitsu) helps us remember that every one of us possesses the simplest instruments needed to bring about harmonious balance—the breath and hands. It reminds us that these instruments are all that we need to enhance our physical and mental vitality, which in turn help eliminate the causes underlying disease, or “disharmony.” Most importantly, it reawakens our awareness of the life energy that permeates the universe. This renewed awareness enables us to send life-giving energy through various locations on the body.

  The concept of a life energy that pervades the universe and gives life to all things is unfamiliar to many of us. In much of the Western world, we’re likely to view life as nothing more than certain chemical processes that make possible the utilization of energy, metabolism, growth, and reproduction.

  This concept, given to us by modern science, focuses on the biological aspects of life. From its point of view, life begins and ends with biology, or with the physical part of life. But practitioners of Jin Shin Jyutsu—and indeed, traditional people everywhere—ask themselves: What powers these chemical interactions? What gives life to our organs and systems? What is the force that brings the body to life?

  In seeking the answers to these questions, traditional people learned to look beyond to the underlying energy that vitalizes the physical body. They see life as pervaded by a single living force, manifested in every individual organism—plants, insects, animals, and human beings. The ancient Greeks referred to this energy as pneuma; the Hindus call it prana; the Chinese know it as chi (also qi), and the Japanese, ki.

  The recognition of a life energy that animates all living things is not merely a philosophical belief. It is also a practical approach to life and healing. Indeed, virtually all traditional healing systems—from Ayurvedic to Greek and Chinese—are founded on the principle that in order to heal the body, the person must strengthen and harmonize the flow of life energy within. This principle provides the basis for such arts as acupuncture and acupressure, as well as for the healing herbs and foods of Chinese medicine.

  Mary Burmeister, who introduced Jin Shin Jyutsu to the Western world more than forty years ago, illustrates the importance of life energy by using a simple analogy: “What makes a car engine start when you turn on the key? The battery of the car. The battery is the necessary energy source for the various functions of the car. Now, what makes a heart beat? What makes breathing possible? What makes digestion possible? The Battery of Life. An energy source is necessary for the body to function. That source is the battery of life.”

  Our health or harmony depends upon the free and even distribution of this life energy throughout our body, mind, and spirit. When the stress and strain of daily living disrupts the movement of life energy, our mind, body, and spirit are all affected. Not only do we succumb to worry, fear, anger, sadness, and pretensions, but we increase our tendency to become ill or “out of balance.”

  Quite simply, Jin Shin Jyutsu is a way to balance the life energy. It shows us how to use simple hands-on sequences to restore emotional equilibrium, relieve pain, and release the causes of both acute and chronic conditions. It can be used safely in conjunction with any other therapy or medication. Furthermore, its benefits are cumulative, so that the more we practice it, the greater is our vitality and self-knowledge.

  Jin Shin Jyutsu can be used anywhere and at any time. Its methods are so easy and unobtrusive that you may use them on yourself in a crowded bus or in the middle of a difficult meeting. The only thing people may notice—if they notice anything at all—is a more balanced demeanor, an aura of relaxation, and—upon closer examination—that you are holding one or more of your fingers.

  the forgotten art, recently remembered

  The name Jin Shin Jyutsu means “The Art of the Creator through the person of compassion.” The healing art that those words represent is based upon our own natural, innate ability to harmonize ourselves. For thousands of years, ancient peoples used this awareness to heal both themselves and others. But with successive generations this awareness grew dimmer until it was all but forgotten. In the early part of the twentieth century, a Japanese sage named Jiro Murai recovered Jin Shin Jyutsu—out of necessity.

  Jiro Murai was born in Taiseimura (currently Kaga City), in Ishikawa Prefecture, in 1886. He was the second son born to his parents. Jiro’s fa
ther, like his father and so many of his ancestors, was a medical doctor. Since Japanese custom expected that the eldest son would follow in the profession of his father, Jiro was free to choose his own path. He started out as a breeder of silkworms, but he had a reckless nature and overindulged in food and drink—even to the point of entering eating contests, in which he was awarded cash prizes for consuming huge quantities. By the time he was 26, he was seriously ill. A succession of doctors treated him, but his condition only worsened until he was pronounced incurable and given up for terminally ill. As a last request, he asked his family to carry him on a stretcher to their mountain cabin and to leave him there alone for seven days. He asked that they return for him on the eighth day.

  There in the cabin Murai fasted, meditated, and practiced various finger postures. During this time he passed in and out of consciousness. His physical body grew colder. But on the seventh day he felt as if he had been lifted out of a deep freeze and thrown into a blazing furnace. When the intense heat subsided, he experienced a tremendous calm and inner peace. To his great surprise, he was healed. He dropped to his knees, gave thanks, and pledged his life to the study of healing.

  Murai’s commitment to understanding the causes of disharmony was profound. Gil Burmeister remembers him as a man obsessed with the pursuit of knowledge: “Jiro did his research among the homeless in Wano Park, in Tokyo. A large population lived in the park. Jiro would take care of the people there and study the incredible variety of illnesses that these people presented. I remember that he went through a period of studying ear problems for a while. He wanted to work on anybody who had any kind of ear complaint. Once he understood ear problems, he’d go on to something else.” Murai’s prodigious research led him to an awareness of a healing art that he called Jin Shin Jyutsu.

  As Murai’s understanding of the Art deepened, the meaning of the name Jin Shin Jyutsu evolved. At first, he used the words to mean “the Art of Happiness,” later “the Art of Longevity.” The meaning further evolved to “the Art of Benevolence” and ultimately to “the Art of the Creator through the person of compassion.”

  Insofar as anyone knows, Jiro Murai never left Japan, but he wanted to make the practice of Jin Shin Jyutsu available to the world. To do that, he selected a young Japanese-American woman named Mary Burmeister.

  Born in Seattle, Washington, in 1918, Mary Iino (Mary’s maiden name) arrived in Japan in the late 1940s to serve as a translator and to study diplomacy. Highly intelligent and a dedicated student, indeed a natural scholar, Mary had ambitions of entering a Japanese university. In addition, she had the incentive of wanting to overcome the prejudice that was directed against Japanese-Americans in Seattle, and specifically against her family and herself. “I had a chip on my shoulder,” she recalls.

  Mary knew little of the healing arts when she met Jiro Murai at a mutual friend’s house. Murai approached her and offered her a life-altering invitation: “Would you like to study with me to take a gift from Japan to America?” Mary, though taken aback, was strangely open to the suggestion. “Yes” was the only thing she could think to say.

  Mary studied with Murai for the next twelve years. Yet shortly after her studies with him began, she fell ill. She was in tremendous pain and weakness and could not get out of bed. Whenever friends came to visit her, they left weeping, uncertain if they would ever see her again.

  For more than a month, Murai treated Mary three times each week, riding the train an hour and a half to her home. Because Mary was so depleted, he would treat her for only five to fifteen minutes at a time. One day after treating her, he told Mary that the next day she would be well. Still weary and in pain, she could hardly believe it. Nevertheless, she awoke the next day without any discomfort and realized that she was completely healed.

  Mary later recalled how that illness profoundly shaped her. “Until then I never experienced sickness, never had as much as a headache. In fact, when people had them, I thought to myself, ‘cop-out,’ that it was a way of avoiding responsibilities.” Afterward, she understood that suffering is not feigned. This realization infused her with the compassion necessary to pursue a life devoted to helping others.

  For the next forty years, Mary was never again ill. In 1954 she moved back to the United States and settled in Los Angeles, but it wasn’t until 1963 that she began to practice Jin Shin Jyutsu actively.

  Mary has more than fulfilled Murai’s hopes for her. Since the master’s death in 1961, she has been the world’s foremost teacher of Jin Shin Jyutsu, as well as the embodiment of all that the Art offers. She has tirelessly practiced and taught the Art of Jin Shin Jyutsu throughout the United States and Europe.

  Mary describes the essence of Jin Shin Jyutsu with the phrase “TO KNOW (HELP) MYSELF.” As she wrote in one of her texts: “Through Jin Shin Jyutsu our awareness is awakened to the simple fact that all that is needed for harmony and balance with the universe—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—is within myself. Through this awareness, the feeling of complete peace, serenity, security, the oneness within is evident. No person, situation, or thing can take these away from me.”

  (PHOTO BY RON THOMPSON)

  the foundation concepts

  By way of introduction, we will now explore the core concepts that form the foundation of Jin Shin Jyutsu. These concepts can be summarized as follows:

  • There is a life energy that circulates throughout the universe and within each individual organism.

  • This universal life energy manifests itself in varying levels of density. These levels are referred to as depths. There are nine depths. At the ninth depth the energy is expressed in its most infinite, undifferentiated form. As it proceeds through each of the successive eight depths, the energy grows denser and gradually encompasses all of the spiritual, psychological, and physical aspects of our existence.

  • Breath is the basic expression of the life energy. It enables us to unload accumulated stress and stagnant energy via exhalation. With each inhalation, we receive an abundance of fresh, purified energy.

  • When the life energy moves through us without obstruction, we are in perfect harmony. Obstructions—which lead to physical, mental, and emotional disharmony—are created by attitudes. There are five basic attitudes: worry, fear, anger, sadness, and pretense (cover-up). All attitudes arise from FEAR, or what Mary refers to as False Evidence Appearing Real.

  • Life energy moves through the body in distinct pathways, known as flows. These flows unify and integrate the body.

  • Energy moves down the front of the body and up the back, in a continuous oval. This movement creates a complementary relationship between the upper and lower body as well as the front and the back. Therefore, if the symptom of disharmony appears above the waist, the cause is found below the waist. A similar relationship exists between the back and front of the body.

  • There are twenty-six distinct sites, called safety energy locks, on each side of the body. These safety energy locks act as circuit-breakers to protect the body when the flow of life energy is blocked. Once a safety energy lock shuts down, it manifests a symptom in the corresponding part of the body. This serves as an alarm that also indicates the source of the imbalance.

  • Finally, within each of us an underlying harmony is always present, even when we suffer from some prevailing disharmony or illness. Even though such disharmonies seem to take many different forms, they all arise from the same root cause—blockage of life energy. For this reason, the resultant disharmonies are called labels. Big scary labels, such as cancer or heart disease, indicate a lot of blocked or stuck energy. Less fearsome labels, such as simple indigestion or a common cold, arise out of smaller blockages. Any label, regardless of its size, can be helped by freeing up the stagnant energy.

  Essential to all of the preceding concepts is the idea of a universal life energy. Jin Shin Jyutsu teaches us that this energy is something more than an abstract, inaccessible force. Moreover, one of the primary ways to facilitate the flow of
this energy is actually much more accessible than people think—it is implicit in our every breath.

  the first gateway to harmony

  We come into the world with an exhalation, to clear and empty us, so that we can receive. We never “take” a breath. We “receive” a breath.

  The first tool for relaxing the body and removing blockages in the life energy is the breath. All we need at any moment is to exhale deeply and allow the new breath to enter our being naturally. With every exhalation, we release piled-up stresses, physical tension, and FEAR. Deep exhalation empties us, so that we can receive more fully the next inhalation and its life-giving energy. Now the life energy can move more fluidly through our system. We can be refreshed and enlivened by the breath—“the purified essence of life.”

  If you exhale now, you can feel the tension drain from your shoulders, torso, and pelvis—all the way down to your toes. With each breath, you become more relaxed, returning deeper into the harmony, as the tension releases from your body. Receive each breath with awareness and gratitude.

  Breath is the basis for energy. The life energy that surrounds us and permeates the universe is always available to us in the form of breath. There is no scarcity of the life energy—it is the most available of all natural resources. So we always have available the power to transform our lives and our world. The key to that transformation is simply to exhale and allow the life energy to fully infuse our being. As Mary says, “In the breath that I am, I am always new.”