About Shen Therapy
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What is Shen Therapy?

Shen is an effective and predictable therapy, solidly based in physics and physiology, and proven with nearly 25 years of clinical research and professional application.

Shen Therapy uses naturally occurring Chi (Qi) from a practitioner's hands to relax and release physical and emotional pain held in the body.

Shen Therapy has been well tested in such clinical settings as the chronic pain unit of St. Josephs Hospital in Fort Worth, Dallas Memorial Hospital, the Medical College of Wisconsin Mental Health Hospital in Milwaukee, and the Shanghai College of Traditional Medicine in China.

Shen is best known for superb results with any condition where retained, traumatic experiences have impacted either psychological or physical functioning.

Shen Therapy also promotes relaxation, relieves acute or chronic pain to varying, often significant degrees, enhances health and well-being, and is useful for personal growth, insight, and transforming old physical and emotional wounds into experiential awareness (empowerment).

Emotions, pain and your body

Research has shown us that the body reacts to emotional pain such as fear, grief, shaming, etc, the same way it does to physical pain - by contracting. Pain and abuse, whether physical or emotional, triggers an automatic physical contraction called the 'splinting reflex', which is an involuntary reaction that temporarily tightens or immobilizes an area in your body and is your body's way of minimizing tissue damage from a broken bones sharp ends. However, if an experience is severe, or goes on for a long time, it becomes held and then layered in a physio-emotional contraction within your body. Over time, our minds may or may not consciously remember painful incidents, but our bodies do.

These internally trapped, involuntary contractions affect not only our physical health, but how we feel and react to present situations, and are often responsible for many conditions labelled psychosomatic. The contractions hold the memories of past events as well as the conclusions and decisions we made about ourselves and life during those experiences.

Most of us carry wounds today from earlier experiences. Many of us have had physical trauma such as accidents, injuries, or surgery, suffered from traumatic births or childhoods, lost loved ones or had abusive relationships.

Many of us have worked very hard to understand the past events that shape our current responses to life, only to find that learning the origin of our feelings does not always free us, and we still have to deal with old emotional reactions that keep tripping us up. We are all familiar with finding ourselves or others in the grip of fear, numbing out, exploding in rage, overwhelmed by grief or reacting just like my parents did.

Until and unless they are released, those conclusions, born in the past and retained in our bodies, function as the dominating factor in how we relate, how we feel, and how we live our lives today. It is these buried, trapped emotions, birthed in our past and held in our bodies, which drive us to think or say or feel or do things we wish we hadn't. Much of what appears to be dysfunctional behaviour is our inner self exacerbating painful emotions in intense attempts to throw off these internal contractions and heal. We know too, that the deep, stored contractions affect the muscles, organs, nerves, glands and tissues at the specific sites where the trauma occurred and that these contractions often leads to the onset of functional physical disorders.

For example, feelings of shame and low self-worth have been frequently found to be a fundamental component in prostrate, feminine and menstrual difficulties as well as sexual dysfunction. Long term fear or anger has been linked to stomach and digestive problems as well as insomnia and eating disorders. Retained grief is known to constrict the area around the chest and is often a significant factor in many respiratory conditions, heart problems, and some chronic headaches/migraines (when constriction at the vagus nerve interferes with blood return from the head).

In fact, studies have shown that a high percentage of patients in cardiac units suffered major grief six months to a year before having a heart attack. The immune system is also affected by grief - contractions around the heart can suppress the activity of the thymus gland, which activates the T-cells.

Until recently, how this happens was not clear, but we now know that unreleased contractions in the body will impede normal blood flow, thus interfering with normal metabolic functioning such as cells receiving nutrients and releasing waste products.
Shen Therapy offers an elegant solution to Fritz Perls' theory that emotions have a life with a beginning and a natural ending and, when not completed, remains inside us affecting everything we do.

Certified Shen Practitioners are skilled at dissolving these physio-emotional contractions held in the body at sites of old or recent trauma. They do this by directing the biofield, or 'chi (qi) energy', between their hands, lifting the emotion to the surface where it is safely cast off. SHEN Practitioners use non-invasive, precise and powerful hands-on techniques developed, tested and refined over years of clinical research and professional practice.

You can experience Shen in a private appointment with a certified Shen practitioner or a supervised Shen Intern or in a workshop environment.

What happens in a Shen session?

Shen Therapy sessions are non-judgemental, non-invasive, safe and empowering. During a Shen session, you recline fully dressed, on a comfortably padded Shen cradle or table. Your Shen practitioner gently places his or her hands on or near your clothed body in precise placements. You may feel tingles, warmth, or other sensations as you relax, fall asleep or enter a state similar to meditation. Frequently, metaphoric images or forgotten memories of pivotal events from earlier in your life surface and are experienced.

While great benefit can occur in a single session, usually a series of sessions, highly individualised, is needed for a client to release the deeper trapped emotional layers.

You can expect to feel many emotions related to earlier memories in your Shen sessions - some of them not pleasant. However, if a painful emotion such as fear or grief or feeling inadequate arises, it peaks and leaves, and something else will come: astonishing insights and vitality, a deep inner peace, a sense of inner connectedness, at one-ness or an experience that has been described as as good as the best meditation I've ever had and you will find yourself once again able to reach long forgotten levels of joy, love, confidence, well-being and happiness.

The proof of Shen's effectiveness happens after the table, in the wide world. One notices that behaviours and feelings just change. Pain that was a constant background may just vanish. Situations and people that used to hook you - don't. Old ways of reacting are gone. One's life just changes.

People who have received Shen Therapy report that Shen either ended or helped greatly with their chronic pain, anxiety, repressed grief, panic attacks, migraines, blocked sexual feelings, depression, spiritual emergence or kundalini crisis, eating disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, menstrual and premenstrual distress, and nightmares.

Others report greatly accelerated recovery from injuries or surgeries and from sexual, physical and other abuse. Almost all who have received Shen Therapy reported that their lives and relationships noticeably improved, often in surprising ways.

Finding a Practitioner/Centre

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About Shen Therapy» This page has been viewed 2522 times