SHEN Therapy: Physio-Emotional Relief for Recovery and Re-Empowerment

Hands-On Help for Emotions, Stress, Pain and Trauma

Website of Ayleyaell Kinder, Certified SHEN Therapist

WHAT IS SHEN THERAPY?

SHEN Physio-Emotional Therapy is an effective and predictable therapy, solidly based in physics and physiology, and proven with more than 25 years of clinical research and professional application.

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

SHEN Therapy has been well tested in such clinical settings as the Chronic Pain Unit of St. Joseph's Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, 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 physical, mental or emotional functioning.

SHEN Therapy also promotes relaxation, reduces stress, relieves acute or chronic pain to varying, often significant degrees, enhances health & well-being, and is useful for personal growth and insight. SHEN helps you transform old physical and emotional wounds into experiential awareness, i.e., "personal empowerment."

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EMOTIONS, PAIN AND YOUR BODY

Research has shown us that our bodies react to emotional pain such as fear, grief, shaming, etc, the same way our bodies do to physical pain-- by contracting.

Pain, trauma or abuse, whether physical or emotional, triggers an automatic physical contraction called ACPR (Auto-Contractile Pain Response), also known as the "splinting reflex", an involuntary reaction that temporarily tightens or immobilizes an area in your body. This is your body's automatic way of minimizing tissue damage, such as from a broken bone's sharp ends.

However, when we experience a painful or shocking event that is intense, or if such an event happens repeatedly, this involuntary contractive response doesn't relax - and the tension from the experience remains frozen in our body. Subsequent similar experiences will result in increasing layers of tension held more and more deeply within our bodies. After a certain point, our minds may or may not consciously remember these incidents, but our bodies do. The effects of these contractions are tangible and are readily seen in the tension in our facial muscles which change our natural appearance, as imbalances which misshape our posture, and as decreasing flexibility which eventually hampers our mobility.

Often it is these internal contractions that are responsible for many conditions labeled neurotic or 'psychosomatic'-- conditions when medical examinations find "nothing physically wrong."

Research has shown that bodily held tension/contractions do adversely affect the muscles and nerves, and the deeper contractions affect organs, glands and tissues at the physical site where the emotional trauma was experienced and that emotional responses to physical sensations lead to the onset of physical disorders.

Until recently, how this happens was not clear. We now know that unreleased tension deeply contracts the body and will impede normal blood flow. Held too long and it interferes with normal metabolic processes such as cells receiving nutrients and fully releasing waste products, thus hampering cellular functioning and causing degenerative disease.

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

In fact, studies have shown that a high percentage of patients in cardiac units have suffered major grief six months to a year before having a heart attack.

The immune system is also affected by grief as contractions around the heart suppress the activity of the thymus gland, which activates the T-cells.

Internally held contractions trapped by ACPR and retained in our body affect not just our physical health and our appearance, but our emotional state: how we feel and react to present situations today.

Most of us are still carrying 'wounds' today from our earlier experiences. We have had physical trauma such as accidents, injuries, or surgery, had traumatic births and/or childhoods, lost loved ones, suffered shame, isolation and belittling or have had abusive relationships.

The feelings, thoughts and reactive patterns which are retained in our bodies from past experiences will dominate how we relate, how we feel, and how we live our lives today.

In other words, somatic (body) tensions hold the memories of past events, our beliefs and our reactions to those events. They can show us the decisions we made about ourselves and about life during those earlier experiences. They can be a key to discovering unconscious, habitual restrictive or destructive ways of being and reacting to life's events, and the decisions our younger selves originated which still affect us today.

Usually, we work very hard to find and to understand the past events that shape our current responses to life, only to discover that learning the origin of our feelings did not entirely free us, and we still find ourselves with old emotional reactions that keep surfacing in response to certain people or circumstances. We are all familiar with knowing others or finding ourselves "shrinking in fear", "our heart sinking", "in the grip of terror", "numbing out", saying yes when we want to say no, "exploding in a fit of rage", "overwhelmed by grief" or "reacting just like my parents did."

It is the buried, trapped emotions birthed in our past and held in our bodies which drive us to think or say or do things we wish we hadn't. Much of what appears to be dysfunctional behavior is actually our inner self exacerbating painful emotions in an attempt to throw off these intense internal contractions and heal.

SHEN Therapy offers an elegant solution to Fritz Perls' statement that emotions have a life cycle with a beginning and a natural ending which often is not completed and remains inside us until it is, affecting how we feel and everything we do.

The precise and powerful hands-on techniques of SHEN Therapy have been developed, refined and continually tested for over 25 years with clinical studies and in professional practice application.

CERTIFIED SHEN THERAPISTS are skilled at dissolving physio-emotional contractions that are retained in the body.

I do this in a respectful and non-invasive way by directing the naturally occurring biofield, or chi energy (pronounced "chee" and sometimes spelled ch'i or qi) from my hands in specific and proven techniques.

I offer SHEN Therapy both in private sessions by appointment or in a workshop environment. A short series of personalized SHEN Therapy sessions is very effective for most physical and emotional conditions and will forward and complement other therapies you may be involved in. I am available and happy to answer questions about combining SHEN Therapy with other therapeutic modalities.

SHEN WORKSHOPS: In a week long SHEN workshop, as in private SHEN sessions, you will receive hands-on help to dissolve chronic pain, low self-worth, fear, numbness, grief, anger, stress and unwanted reactive patterns.

The SHEN workshop powerfully facilitates rapid and noticeable "real" change during those 7 days, while compassionately promoting your self awareness and empowerment.

(Please scroll down for further information about SHEN Workshops which offer CEUs for Acupuncturists, Massage Therapists, and Nurses)

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WHAT HAPPENS DURING 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." I place my hands on or near your clothed body in gentle, precise placements as indicated by your specific needs. You may feel tingles, warmth, or other sensations. You might shake, twitch or vibrate as you relax, release tension, and you may enter a state similar to meditation. Your stomach or intestines may gurgle as chi flows through them. All of the above are naturally occurring therapeutic responses. Frequently, metaphoric images or forgotten memories of pivotal events from earlier in your life surface briefly.

As the gentle, pressureless chi of SHEN therapy relaxes you, your surface tension calms, and as the session continues, the deeply buried internal contractions either simply melt and quietly dissipate, OR are lifted into your awareness where options present themselves. A SHEN session most often is done in meditative quiet, but can have interactive therapeutic dialogue depending on your needs. A great amount of talking is not usually necessary during a SHEN session.

While great benefit can occur in a single session, usually a series of sessions, highly personalized, are needed for an individual to release the deeper trapped emotional layers. In acute conditions, scheduling several sessions close together over 2 or 3 days will have the fastest therapeutic results. You may choose to visit San Diego for a 3 day weekend to have a private SHEN "intensive".

You can expect to feel many emotions during your SHEN sessions--some of which may not be pleasant. However, a strong chi field from an experienced, calm and compassionate SHEN therapist will be relaxing the tension and drawing the emotion, not just up, but out, helping it dissipate and enabling your physical body and your psyche to release, finally, the effects of your history. And if an uncomfortable memory or emotion such as fear or grief or feeling inadequate arises, it peaks and leaves, and something else will come: astonishing vitality and insights, well being, a deep inner peace, a sense of inner connectedness "at one-ness" or an experience that has been described as "good as the best meditation I've ever had." You will find yourself once again able to reach long forgotten levels of relaxation, calmness, joy, love, confidence and happiness.

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The proof of SHEN's effectiveness happens after the table, in the wide world. One notices that former feelings and patterns of behaviors are different. 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, replaced with new options. 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, bottomless grief, panic attacks, migraines, blocked sexual feelings, depression, spiritual emergence, kundalini crisis, eating disorder, irritable bowel syndrome, menstrual or premenstrual distress, and nightmares.

Others report greatly accelerated recovery from injuries or surgery and from sexual, physical or emotional abuse.

Almost all who have received SHEN reported that their lives and relationships noticeably improved, often in surprising ways.

"It felt wonderful... as if I had rediscovered an essential part of my being."
-- J. A, writer.

"My body and emotions were in constant pain the last 2 years from injuries in a car accident. Life was getting harder and harder. I feel it's been a miracle. I feel like me again."
--L.H., Reiki Master

"I walked around my whole life being vigilant, fearing someone would hurt me...I don't have that knot in my stomach any more."
--J.A.., social worker

"...my serious trauma case is very well documented with thorough regular medical monitoring...Yesterday a new set of films was taken showing the tibia to be completely healed and remodeled. I don't know who was more surprised, the surgeon or myself...Subsequent to receiving SHEN my condition has improved dramatically, objectively, and has surpassed all medical expectations and constitutes a well documented and remarkable REVERSAL of a thorough and expert prognosis by an orthopedic surgeon who by all accounts is in the top 1% in the nation...I attribute this renewal and the resulting physical healing to SHEN. "
--R.D., doctor (OMD) and martial artist

"I lived with fear my whole life. I didn't think I was ever going to get out of where I was. It's a miracle. Fear doesn't have a hold on me any more. After 56 years, I am finally out of the bunker."
--E.S., war survivor

"I haven't had a good night's sleep since I was seven....Last night I slept 7 hours. I'm so thrilled! I have a sense of well-being now. I don't dread going to bed anymore."
--J.E., incest survivor

"I became interested in SHEN after a city bus t-boned my car, smashing in the whole passenger side. My SHEN practitioner came and picked me up from the wreck and brought me straight back to her office for a treatment. During the session I felt all of the trauma from the accident leaving my body and left feeling great with no future repercussions or pain... in my personal experience, I have found SHEN to be a powerful tool in alleviating emotional and physical trauma."
--Genevieve, yoga instructor

"To sum it up, I am different! I feel more confident, whole....I came here [to a week long SHEN Workshop] with a little heart, the size of a robin's heart, constricted by the scars of my childhood. I leave here with a heart big and strong, the size of an elephant's heart, beating boldly, and filling me with gratitude..."
--K.B., psychologist

"SHEN has reached to my very core in releasing many old emotions... I feel freer on every level." --D.A., writer

"I am more centered, balanced, and creative! My neck and back are much freer, dramatically so, my scoliosis has improved, and my students are commenting that there is something different about my presence. Ayleyaell got my juices flowing."
--R.S., 90 years young woman Chi Gung teacher

" The pain in my shoulder is gone, without any manipulation or effort I could see. In all my years, I've never said to anyone what I am going to say to you. You are a miracle worker. ."
--Dr. Bob Osborn, D.C. (graduate 1949 Palmer Chiropractic)

SHEN Therapy: Physio-Emotional Relief for Recovery and Re-Empowerment

Hands-On Help for Emotions, Stress, Pain and Trauma

SHEN Personal Experiential Workshops

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