Yumeiho – beyond the hands there is the soul

The therapeutic practice often brings you face to face with people – colleagues at the beginner level, course participant or, why not, patients – who, amazed by that simplicity close to the unspeakable, by that ease with which you practice what you have learned, ask you how they can get to do, with their own hands, what you do with your own.

Besides the occasion of a didactic moment – which, undeniably, has its importance for all beginners – the question gives me the opportunity of a moment of rest in which the truth about achieving excellence in the Yumeiho practice bursts with the force of a reality contested by some, embraced by others: beyond the hands there is the soul. This is the “puppeteer” who endows the hands with the ability to give to the patient, in their body-mind-spirit unity, the state of balance, the state of health. A state we can suspect of being (at most close to) the original integrality.

No Yumeiho therapist can be like any other! It is a symptom of the “dictatorship” of unrepeatability. This is the truth beginners must appropriate from the first place. You can better your trainer, your master, not by trying to become like them, not by attempting to copy their “style”, movements, tactics in a behavioristic way (like a monkey playing a clogged flute, lacking familiarity with silence), but by striving to become, more and more, yourself.

The “algorithmic” part of Yumeiho, which consists of theory and application, is just that: a well-learned, well-implemented, repeated, practiced formula. It is the didactic segment all conscious professional trainers of good-faith must ensure to their students. But this is an exercise which, in extremis, a refined robot could execute with no problem. And the Yumeiho instructors do not train qualified robots; on the contrary, first and foremost, they reveal vocations which radiate with humanity, warmth, empathy, compassion. Which, briefly put, radiate with soul, like a word, like a never identically point pressed and then released.

The work of a Yumeiho therapist is largely like the work of a painter: of course we all can learn artistic theory with no problem, and of course we can practice. But the greatest masterpieces are not produced by imitating. A replica of Mona Lisa is, however faultless, nothing but that: a sad duplicate. And great masterpieces are, in the event of an assumed end reconditioned as an eternal return of the present (until it is turned into the absence of time), nothing but an hypostasis of the Source, in which each individual is a cherished child remembering the icon of perfection and exasperatedly constant spontaneity id the Creator.

If, in truth, the comparison with the field of art is somewhat extreme – at least in the eyes of patients and doctors for whom healing is the victory of cold science on disease – the exaggeration has a relevant function. It shows skill and mastery are obtained not driven by the will to gain appreciation (no worries, that will come, but it’s better if we wanted it in moderation, with detachment), but from the desire to express an extremely personal factor: just as the artist is “activated” by inspiration, the Yumeiho therapist is moved by empathy, that controversial naturalness which we can call “the immutability of the sake of people”.

Yet, in order for the expression to be efficient, work, perseverance, practice and exercise are vital. These offer that horizon in which vocation grows healthily and in which, in time, experience is built, becoming, as an “ardent, heraclitic fatality”, an act of human-heartedness, an act of the soul. It is the soil in which the seed of the soul germinates the touch, the firmness, the softness, the tenderness, the humbleness and the precision which describe the choreography of the hands achieving the maturity of mastery. It is also the soil which foretells the calligraphy of solace through the hands which designate the choice of the helping soul.

Involvement is, thus, required. Definitive involvement in each and every case and in constantly cultivating the practice. The Romanian language has a very fortunate expression for rendering this principle of involvement, of dedication, which exquisitely highlights what I want to say: “a pune suflet” (to put heart and soul). In other words, before placing/putting their hands to work, the authentic Yumeiho therapist puts heart and soul.

We are both enriched by those moments in which we crossed paths with Yumeiho as therapy, as attitude, as feeling, as choice, as action, as hope, as teaching, as the act of being for our own kind. What we wrote does not stand out as a certitude, belief or as a “dialectic stubbornness” meant to validate a new therapeutic paradigm. It is, in this final moment of putting down some words, probably complicated, bur certainly dripping with the implication of those who have cooperated in view of expressing them, the ascertainment of an irrefutable fact: something born in the soul of a Japanese awakens and moves the same something in the Romanian soul.