Art of Jin Shin Jyutsu by Tom Wilson

We wanted to share our friend Tom Wilson’s wonderful article about Jin Shin Jyutsu with his permission. Hope you enjoy this as much as we did!

A friend who hears your song
When you have lost it
Sings it back to you
—Anonymous

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A Reflection on the Art of Jin Shin Jyutsu

by Tom Wilson, Ph.D.

Jin Shin Jyutsu is an ancient healing art that reaches back before the time of the Buddha. Passed down from generation to generation, this amazing healing modality had fallen into relative obscurity until rediscovered in the early 20th Century in Japan by Master Jiro Murai. It was brought to the United States in the 1950s by Mary Burmeister. As the Art evolved, Master Murai finally came to call it “The Art of the Creator Through the Person of Compassion.” Mary Burmeister saw it as more than a healing modality, referring to it as “The Art of Living.” Now taught and practiced throughout the world, Jin Shin Jyutsu’s ancient wisdom has been instrumental in healing countless humans and animals.

For me, the study of ancient and modern modalities of vibrational medicine is a journey to the heart of who we truly are as living beings, a journey of endless revelations about our place in the cosmos, our relationship to the natural world and all living creatures, and how we heal through the power of the life-force energy that animates everything in the universe.

Many of my professional colleagues and students in the Animal Acupressure Training Academy have found Jin Shin Jyutsu to be one of the energy-healing modalities that has opened for us a work that can be called “right livelihood,” or what Carlos Castaneda referred to as “A path with a heart.”

The Art of Jin Shin Jyutsu

As a young man Jiro Murai was diagnosed with an incurable disease. He asked to be taken to the family’s mountain cabin and left for seven days, at the end of which he said he would be cured or dead. During that time he fasted, prayed, and worked with hand mudras based on his discovery of Jin Shin Jyutsu in the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Things) in the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. At the end of the seven days, he was returned to health. Later, he would heal Mary Burmeister, who then brought Jin Shin Jyutsu to America. In studying Jin Shin Jyutsu, we have the profound wisdom of the 50 years that Master Jiro Murai worked in the streets of Japan researching and refining this ancient healing art, all the while collaborating with Mary Burmeister as practitioner and teacher in America.

I have witnessed the healing power of Jin Shin Jyutsu in my life, in the humans and animals I work with, and in the lives of my colleagues and friends who practice this gift of energy healing. I discovered Jin Shin Jyutsu when I was training to become a massage therapist at the Heartwood Institute. My massage instructor was a Jin Shin practitioner who showed us Jin Shin Jyutsu Self-Help, as well as Jin Shin techniques to incorporate into a massage for energy balancing. When I felt energy moving in another being, it was the end of my massage career. I had discovered life-force energy.

At the time, I was suffering from chronic fatigue brought on by years of traveling 45 weeks a year all over the world in my consulting practice. In three consecutive nights at the Heartwood Institute in my room, I did the Jin Shin Jyutsu Self Help we were taught in class. Each night was like a shamanic magical mystery tour of energetic experience. The first night I fell asleep doing the Self Help, a miracle of sorts since my years of constant traveling had rendered me too fatigued to sleep until an hour or two before sunrise. When I awoke on the third morning, the chronic fatigue was gone. I no longer had to lean on the massage table to stay upright.

What was the cause of this healing? My physical body was back in a state of vitality. To attribute that return to vitality to a purely physical cause would seem almost impossible to accomplish without a period of rest, nutrition, supplementation, and exercise—all of the standard elements in replenishing the biochemistry of the physical body. What I was most aware of that morning was a heightened sense of clarity and serenity. Something more than the physical had shifted. Or, said another way, some other force—perhaps an alchemical shift in consciousness—was instrumental in shifting the biochemical physical condition of my body.

I thought I would plunge headlong into Jin Shin Jyutsu training but the Heartwood Institute captivated me, especially the chance to study with Bruce Berger, the world’s leading Polarity teacher and owner of the Institute. Somehow Jin Shin Jyutsu got relegated to the back burner for a couple of years until I was about to leave for Ireland and Scotland on much needed seven week walkabout. The night before my flight, for some reason, I went to my laptop and typed in Jin Shin Jyutsu and discovered that there was a Jin Shin class taught by Philomena Dooley starting the day after my arrival in Dublin, Ireland. So I took my chances walking into class, got a big smile from Philomena, and a “Come right in, dear boy. You’re most welcome.”

Even after my Jin Shin experiential revelations and healing at Heartwood, I often wondered—edging toward doubt—how simply touching another being with your fingers and hands could facilitate healing. Was this energy stuff real? But the Doubting Thomas in me was about to get initiated very fast—in Philomena fashion. As she was welcoming me, she glanced over my shoulder at one of the students walking into class (we’ll call him Tony for confidentiality reasons). Philomena immediately instructed him to get on a massage table. By the look of him, Tony had abused his body very badly for decades with a lifestyle of cigarettes, alcohol, and way too much bad food. He looked like he might drop over any moment.

Philomena went right to work while calling out to her advanced students, “Jeanette, hold his 9s. Kathy, hold his 5s. Evelyn, hold…” The rest of us surround the table to watch. We all noticed that his swollen liver had protruded from under his ribs and was higher than the rib cage. We watched for half and hour as Philomena worked with her students and Tony’s liver slowly receded to its normal state. Later in the week during a class break, I happened to walk past Philomena and Tony and heard her say to him, “You know, Tony, that we’re throwing away of those ‘puffers’ [Asthma Inhalers] at the end of the week!” Tony and I were both back in the class the following summer in Dublin. He was a new man with vibrant color in his skin, radiance in this eyes, a new slimmed-down body, and an unquenchable love of Jin Shin Jyutsu. He had found Mary Burmeister’s Art of Living.

Safety Energy Locks never sounded very poetic to me in Jin Shin Jyutsu, though I understand the idea of the Locks as an analogy to a circuit breaker in an energy system. But it was when one of the Jin Shin master teachers, Matthias Roth, described the SELs as vibrational entities that the poetry came through for me. Matthias instructed us to sit quietly with our fingers on the SELs of another being and “listen to the songs of the masters.” Each SEL vibrates with a harmonic resonance that animates an aspect of our being that can attune us back to health.

This is the poetry and the heart and art of our work: “A friend who hears your song when you have lost it sings it back to you.” The vibrational frequencies of the 26 Jin Shin SEL energy centers are the songs of healing.

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