It’s easy to blindly follow the rules set by others, to follow gurus. Where I live, in terms of my health, if I live conventionally, I am somewhat obliged to follow a set route. Drugs or die, operations or nothing, except perhaps some physical therapy, you get the picture. It may seem a bit stark, but there is some truth there.
But what if this is a wider pattern - for most of us?
The fork must sit on the left.
The napkin must sit on the plate.
The waiter must serve … was it left or right?
Why?
I guess there’s safety and helpfulness in repeatable or expected structures. If we are setting for knife and fork users, most people I have observed start with a fork in the left hand and a knife on the right. So a kind and thoughtful place setting puts them there ready for you.
That’s all well and good, but what if that doesn’t work for me - will I be looked down on if I switch hands, or don’t set it right when I lay the table? I have come across this often!
To my energy practice: while I love to receive a good shiatsu treatment (indeed it was vital to my recovery and I received it weekly over a long recovery from illness) my focus is on self help. We can do it ourselves. This I learned from Donna Eden (the founder of Eden Energy Medicine), who focuses on self help, within a structure, in her many books.
It’s a moot point whether or not it’s best to teach with full information (the THEORY) or without. Research shows, for example, that not only the placebo effect, but also the impact of credentialled drugs is enhanced when:
i) the patient believes the drug/placebo will work
ii) the doctor also has a strong belief in that
See this nice cartoon from Sprout (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uFmGqB1VAo&t=2s), or if you want to dive deeper there are studies out there on the internet (such as this one on pubmed https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6176716/ ).
I guess the same could be said for energy work. If I teach you the Triple Warmer Smoothie, but don’t tell you about it’s connection to the meridian of the same name (in traditional Chinese medicine, a meridian is an energy pathway in the body) or what that does - is this enough?
More background: for some reason … I have been prone to gurus. I love (or did!) a good guru. Which is odd, because growing up I have always liked to understand by doing it myself, from the ground up, then decide whether or not to layer additional knowledge onto that. I don’t like to take someone’s word for it! But (coming back to the guru) that has not often prevented me from leaning into the idea that somebody or something may have a locktight solution to whatever it is I am seeking.
And ... when I haven't found the solution I was seeking, or achieved what I thought I'd been promised, there’s been a mite of disenchantment, yes, even blame. I didn't want to take responsibility for my actions or my experience.
There are many parts to play and the guru has been a good one over many centuries, if not millennia, but ... at the expense of our self-responsibility and empowerment.
What if now we could focus on ourselves as the genius? Each one of us with our own kernel of truth within us to be explored.
With this in mind, in our online courses, I usually leave my demos somewhat open-ended. There’s no (or not a lot) of theory. The idea is that this leaves space for each individual to make their own discoveries, to experience what this particular method unlocks - if anything at all - for them. To discard or choose, as they see fit, and to have an even deeper experience because any discoveries belong to them, and not something they simply read or heard.
Do not hand the keys over to me. I am not the guru - YOU are.
â¤ď¸ Catriona
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Catriona Murray is an intuitive life and wellbeing practitioner who incorporates Shiatsu and Eden Energy Medicine as part of her practice. She is co-founder of Pilgrimages of the Heart.
Photo by Antoine Dautry on Unsplash
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