Relax Shiatsu

relaxshiatsu @ 2007-08-12T13:14:00

2007-08-12T12:39:02Z

I figured out what the thing with the gym was. When the guy took the cards I knew something was wrong. I had the weirdest feeling I was going to get a call saying he'd sent someone up to me but I had to give them such-and-such a discount because they were a gym member. It's the kind of thing he'd do. It freaked me out for the rest of the evening, and I wished I'd never asked. I stopped myself from freaking out by deciding that if that happened I'd honour it for that person, for their first session, but that I'd tell the guy he had no right to do that and to either recommend people on my terms or throw the cards in the bin.

It preyed on my mind though. I realised there was something deeper going on. Asking somebody to display your cards is a reciprocal thing. It may well be free in monetary terms, but it's not free. Asking someone to pin a card in their shop is effectively asking them to recommend you — and that means returning the favour. You need to be able to recommend them, and I realised I can't recommend people go to my old gym. I don't respect the owner, and I don't respect how he conducts his business.

As it happens I was speaking to someone who goes there yesterday. He'd asked about the cards, and the guy had said “I'm not putting up cards. I'm not messing up my wall.” Which is the best outcome all round :) Thanks universe!

relaxshiatsu @ 2007-08-04T16:38:00

2007-08-04T16:43:27Z

I started putting cards around the place this week. My original plan was that the instant I'd qualified I'd go out on a mad mission and get them all over the place, but it didn't work like that. What actually happened was that my final exam drained the last of the adrenaline that'd propelled me through the previous couple of months and I crashed! Luckily I'm (mostly) past the stage of giving myself a hard time for not living up to my own crazy standards, and I let myself coast for a while (and had a shiatsu from The Man — shiatsu is great!) I hadn't planned on putting cards out yet, but last Sunday I was killing some time in Arcania and there were some cards in my bag so I thought “why not?” and it all started from there. I've not been pushing myself, but I'm keeping a box of cards in my bag so when I walk past somewhere it's not “I must put some cards in there when I do my carding mission” but “I'll just put some cards in there now.” Chipping away works well for me when I'm low on energy.

It's less places than I initially thought too. I'd planned on sticking them anywhere with a noticeboard or leaflet rack but it turns out there's a lot of places with such things and I've been quite picky. I guess plenty of practitioners feel otherwise, but I see shiatsu as a treat, a luxury, and my target market is people who appreciate the value of that kind of luxury, and when I ask myself if it helps to associate my business with some chip shop or tatty newsagent and quite frankly the answer is no.

I've never had to sell myself, not like this, and it's odd. Everywhere's different. Some places are like “sure, do what you like”, others are full of questions. Arcania have you pay £1 a month to their charity box, and the guy from Joost was talking about referral discounts. I must admit I didn't quite get it at the time — I'm still not firing on all cylinders — but in hindsight he was making a lot of sense. I just emailed him about it, but I guess the moral of this story is that you need your wits about you for this kind of thing!

I had one unsavoury encounter — my old gym — but I'm still absorbing that one.

relaxshiatsu @ 2007-07-29T20:36:00

2007-07-29T19:39:52Z

Bevan Loon asked me about my RSI the other day. I started to reply then and there but the answer got way too long, and besides it's kind of relevant here because it's (somewhat indirectly) why I got into shiatsu in the first place.

A brief rundown: I started getting pain from typing in 2001, and after a lot of procrastination and denial I ended up seeing some specialists. Their prognosis was that my nerves were too short; various actions associated with computer use were causing them to stretch and snag, and this had damaged my ulnar nerves where they pass under the elbow. It was recommended I have surgery to move the nerves to the tops of my elbows where they would be less prone to damage and be allowed time to heal.

I declined the operation. I couldn't say why — I don't fully know even now — but it just didn't feel right. Here's what I did instead, in no particular order:

Read up

This basically provided the context for everything else I did. There's all kinds of stuff on the net, but what did it for me was It's Not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Breaks

I use Workrave to enforce 30 second breaks every three minutes and five minute breaks every fifteen. You need to stop and move your arms to allow your muscles to untense. Locked muscles from periods of typing or mousing without otherwise moving inhibit the smooth movement of tendons and nerves.

Keyboard

I use a Kinesis Advantage keyboard. I tried a couple of other keyboards first, but a major part of my problem is that I flatten my hands as I type and the Kinesis makes this impossible.

Mouse

There's a variety of options if holding the mouse hurts your hand — different sized mice, trackballs, etc — but this wasn't a problem for me. What does me in is reaching for the thing: it trashes my rhomboids. The Kinesis helps here — there's no numeric keypad between my hand and the mouse — and I make heavy use of keyboard shortcuts. I try and remember to type these with two hands so I'm not stretching unnaturally.

Desk

It's standard advice that you should adjust your chair so that your forearms and thighs are horizontal. The problem here is that you probably only have chair height to play with and you cannot set two things with one adjustment — one of them is going to be wrong. I have an adjustable desk. You set the chair to get your legs right, then you set the desk to get your arms right. This would not be such an issue if desks were roughly the right height to start with, but most desks are too high for most people. I'm 5'10" and the top of my desk is 26" from the floor. My old desk was nearer 30".

Physiotherapy

It was my physiotherapist who first figured out that the pain was snagging nerves. She did some stretches and trigger-point stuff to release locked muscles along the path of the ulnar nerve, and showed me some I could do myself. I supplemented these with some nerve glides from the book I mentioned earlier. We also figured out that cold made it worse and heat made it better, so I started having a bath after work each day to loosen everything out. Sometimes if I get sore hands I run them under the hot tap for a minute or two.

Posture

The physio and baths provided some relief but they weren't addressing the underlying problems. My nerves may well be shorter than average, but this wasn't helped by my posture. When you sit upright your nerves have a nice straight path through your shoulders and your muscles don't need to work much to keep you upright. Slouching means the nerves have to kink a little and so cover a longer distance, and the tensed muscles supporting you are take up more space and are less pliable than relaxed muscle; they fill the spaces your nerves should be able to move freely through. The physiotherapist gave me a load of exercises to improve my core stability — when you've slouched forever the muscles you sit up straight with need a kick-start. The book recommended some shoulder strengthening exercises which I also did.

Sleep

This is an odd one, but it's hard to sit up straight when you're tired. I try to make sure I get good quality sleep because everything hurts a lot more when I don't.

Yoga

Back then I thought that yoga was all about stretches and posture, and since my treatment was all about stretches and posture it seemed natural to me to try some. And it did help these areas some, but the major benefits were not what I was expecting. Firstly, it made me aware of what was going on in my body. Part of the reason my RSI got so bad was that I spent so much time in my head that I only paid attention to my body when it started going seriously wrong. And secondly, most importantly, it started the long, slow process of calming me down and chilling me out.

Alexander technique

Yoga is only incidentally about tension and posture; in Alexander that's all there is. I was recommended a teacher who'd got into Alexander because of RSI and spent an obscene amount of money learning how to sit down and stand up and pick things up off a table. It was totally worth it.

Shiatsu

Yoga was for me a huge step change in relaxation and posture and body awareness. Alexander was a change of a similar order of magnitude, and starting to learn shiatsu was another order of magnitude again. Obviously I'm not finished with this one yet!

Let go

The yoga and Alexander and shiatsu started me learning just how much of RSI is from the mind. Not in the mind, but from it. It's Not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome actually covers this in great detail, but for some reason it passed me by until years later. A major cause of RSI is mental attitude.

It's about letting go of perfection, about letting go of getting things done right now. Sometimes when I'm working I'll not be happy with something. It's not 100% right, so I'll fiddle and fiddle and fiddle for hours on end. Then I'll decide that the original way was better and I'll revert all my changes. Then I'll think of another way to do it and start fiddling all over again. A big part of letting myself recover is recognising when I'm in this state and being able to walk away.

Ok, I think that's it!

relaxshiatsu @ 2007-07-24T23:25:00

2007-07-25T08:57:47Z

It occurred to me the other day that I get hung up on “healing”. I didn't start learning shiatsu to heal. It's wasn't my intention to go into practice to heal either, but somewhere along the line that got subverted. Lately I've been reading around a lot, in preparation for going into business. I've been checking out other practitioners' sites, and reading blogs and articles and whatever, and somehow healing sneaked into my brain.

I'm probably in a minority here, but the whole concept of alternative medicine bothers me greatly. I don't really believe that point work or whatever can cure disease. My take on it all is that a) I believe that stress is a major factor in illness, b) I believe that reducing stress may help many conditions, and c) I believe that shiatsu may help reduce stress. There's maybe a little more than that, but that's the bit I can put into words and — crucially — that's the bit I'm confident in enough to sell.

It's odd, because on a personal level Chinese medicine makes a lot of sense. I see myself cycling around the elements, in the way I feel, the clothes I wear, and the foods I eat. I can feel meridians, mostly, some better than others, and the same goes for points. I've had amazing experiences with both shiatsu and acupuncture. But I haven't made the transition from my inner feelings about Chinese medicine to the kind of outer belief that would seem to be required as a theraputic practitioner.

This is the root of the issues I have with my website. It doesn't flow, it doesn't put across the message I wanted to put across, and the reason for all this is that while one part of me remained focused on my core message of relaxation another part of me got influenced by everyone else and started trying to get healing in there. It got all schizophrenic.

When I get a minute I'm going to kick the ass of all the stuff I wrote about “pain and disease”, but right now I'm going to have a beer and watch Fight Club.

relaxshiatsu @ 2007-07-21T23:05:00

2007-07-21T22:54:04Z

My insurance documents arrived on Thursday so now I have everything I need to practice shiatsu professionally — except the energy to do it! These past couple of months have really drained me; work has been particularly intense, and stacking shiatsu and decorating on top has taken its toll. I could push myself to get out there and get my business cards in shops and cafes but realistically there's no way the universe will send me clients as depleted as I am so I plan on hanging back for a week or two, just coasting and taking it easy until the time is right. I booked myself in for a shiatsu from the man on Wednesday and I can't wait!

Ok, a caveat. I said I had everything I needed, but one of the things I have is not right. The website. I had been really pleased with it, but some comments from a friend coupled with an article I read made me realise I've fallen into a bit of a trap with it, a trap that lots of complimentary therapists fall into. I think I know how to fix it, but it needs my brain a bit sharper than it is at present. That's another reason for not distributing business cards yet: that strategy relies on the website backing the cards up.

Luckily I'm not relying on this to (for instance) pay my mortgage! I have to keep reminding myself that the main purpose of this venture is to get a flow of treatments for my second and third years — and the second year doesn't even start until October so there is no pressure to have clients right now. I have to keep telling myself this (ie here) in order to not go bezerk!

relaxshiatsu @ 2007-07-16T19:53:00

2007-07-16T19:09:37Z

Been a busy couple of weeks. I did a ton of work making my website look lovely, and my final exam was Friday so I have my certificate now. I designed the business cards I'm going to use as adverts and got some made, and they arrived today so the only thing standing between me and professional practice is waiting for my insurance documents. It's really daunting having got to this stage: this is where the planning stops and the action starts. This is where I find out if I've been talking shit this past couple of months.

relaxshiatsu @ 2007-07-01T22:09:00

2007-07-01T21:27:47Z

Work and decorating have pushed shiatsu onto a back burner lately, but I've been making up for it. I was away on business in a rather boring town last week so I took the opportunity to finish my anatomy coursework in the evenings. My futon arrives Tuesday, and I have my 28th and 29th practices booked in for Tuesday and Thursday. After those I'll get the teacher booked in for his shiatsu (which will double as my 30th and final practice) and hopefully I'll have my certificate not long after — which will enable me to buy insurance. I've also finished the first set of FAQs for the website — though I'm too tired to upload them! I need to fiddle with the templater and tweak a filename before I do. It'll not be the prettiest site in the world — the content needs styling — but I need the basic FAQs there for when I start sticking business card adverts around the place. Of course, I haven't designed the business cards yet but as I'm neither qualified nor insured yet it's not a limiting factor. I can't decide whether to put my landline or my mobile or both on them. So many decisions! But it's all go...

relaxshiatsu @ 2007-06-09T17:35:00

2007-06-09T18:03:29Z

It's amazing how insecure I can get if I go to Harvest or wherever and start looking at shiatsu practitioners' leaflets. They all have their strings of letters after their names and their blurbs about how they've done their three years of practitioner training and their lists of medical conditions they can treat, and I think, “damn, I can't say that, how can I compete?” It's times like this I need to keep my marketing strategy in mind, because when I stop and think I'm prepared to bet that leaflets in Harvest are a pretty ineffective way of getting customers.

It's a question of who you're reaching out to. There are two types of people: those who know what shiatsu is and those that don't, and for the former I'm thinking that nobody thinks, “oh, I want some shiatsu, best pop down to Harvest and get a leaflet.” They're much more likely to search the web for “shiatsu bath” or whatever and hit on the prettiest website. My theory is that having a nice leaflet won't get this group of people, but having a nice website that ranks highly in search engines will, which is why the first half of my marketing strategy is “have a nice website that ranks highly in search engines.”

And for the people who don't know what shiatsu is? If I watch myself as I look at these big leaflet racks I find that my eye slides right over anything I've not heard of. I read the words — “bioenergetics, rolfing, kinesiology, feldenkrais” — but by the time they get to my brain they've been translated into “whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever”. The leaflets that catch my eye — the leaflets I stop and look at — are the leaflets advertising something I've heard of. People who don't know what shiatsu is are going to lose the shiatsu leaflets in a sea of whatevers.

I don't plan on making leaflets. I plan on making business cards. You can put business cards in a lot more places than you can put leaflets, shop windows for example, and they're going to be bright green and have the word “relax” splashed across them in huge writing. The fact that I am a shiatsu practitioner will be almost incidental to the fact that I will help you relax, because regardless of whether people have heard of shiatsu they damn well know what relaxation is — and they'll probably think they can do with some. Finally, I plan to put them in my local shops. While I'll probably put them in Harvest too it seems a bit daft to pitch myself in with all the other shiatsu practitioners when I can stick some up in shops and on noticeboards around Combe Down where all the middle class people with plenty of spare cash live and no other practitioners advertise. That's the second half of my marketing strategy: “pin eye-catching business cards where people with spare cash will see them and not be confused by other practitioners' marketing.”

The best thing is that I only want two people a week, which hopefully I can manage even if I have got this all wrong :)

relaxshiatsu @ 2007-05-16T21:59:00

2007-05-16T21:34:12Z

Until now all my case studies have been either friends or friends of friends, but tonight was my first time treating a stranger. It wasn't completely cold — I'd met her, once — but until she arrived I knew nothing about her save her name and some contact details. I took the opportunity to practice being professional. There's quite a lot to it, even before they turn up, and I'm a scatterbrain so I made a checklist:

Clean up, including
- Hoover and dust, obviously
- Tidy the bathroom and make sure there's a nice towel in it
- Make sure the porch isn't full of mud
- Make sure the drive isn't full of beer cans and broken glass
Burn some nice incense
Make sure the place is warm
Lay the duvets out (futon when I have one)
Do the washing up
Get changed including clean socks!
Unlock the door (it just seems friendlier)
Turn off the phones (all three!)

relaxshiatsu @ 2007-05-14T18:05:00

2007-05-14T17:26:40Z

When I started training last year I never thought I'd go into professional practice. I figured I'd need to be doing something like fifteen treatments a week to cover my mortgage and bills with enough left over for a reasonable standard of living, and three treatments a day would be a heavy workload even if I could attract that volume of clients. I was simply studying it for my own enjoyment.

But a couple of weeks ago I was thinking how much I was enjoying giving treatments and how much I'd miss them when the course ended and I had no more reason to do them. And I was like “dur, I could do them for cash!” And as the days progressed a couple more things started slotting into place. Like, I've been struggling to find people to practice on for my case studies, and had been considering advertising. And treating strangers is a totally different proposition to treating friends and friends-of-friends. You have to be ultra-professional. I thought, “if I'm going to be doing all these professional things like advertising and keeping my house way cleaner than I ever would then I ought to be doing professional things like charging.” Not in two years time, but now. One or two treatments a week is a nice, easy level — I'm doing that already — and because I could do that without affecting my day job there would be no pressure. If I had a week or so with no clients then it wouldn't matter, because I wouldn't be doing it to eat, I'd be doing it to fill my life with treats like art and motorbikes and beautiful shoes. I could relax about it.

And that's The Plan™ I was talking about yesterday.

relaxshiatsu @ 2007-05-13T08:48:00

2007-05-13T07:55:31Z

Hmmm, where to start? Well, right now I'm almost at the end of my first year of shiatsu training and getting myself set up to start practicing and for some reason I felt compelled to write about it. Usually I tend to quash such spurious impulses — I often get compelled to write about things — but this time it aligns quite nicely with the Amazing Business Plan That Inspired Me To Start Practicing Shiatsu In The First Place™. So I'm allowing myself this luxury. But more about that later — I have a day of learning shiatsu to take care of first!