iPhone nourishment

In the news, Theory, Zen shiatsu (Masunaga)

The latest buzz over the new Apple iPhone is reported on the BBC site in terms of a Stuff lust. It asks what is it about new pieces of technology that drive people to queue for days, get into debt to own it, or simply visit stores to pay homage?

Shiatsu is a physical therapy that recognises that each of us are driven by psychological, emotional and spiritual needs. Masunaga’s theory of Zen Shiatsu would recognise this stuff lust in terms of needs and manifestations of fulfilling those needs.

The stomach and spleen meridians run down the front of the body and represent that forward motion that identifies what we want and how we are going to get it. The stomach in particular is about that impulse to reach out for our desires and it is the spleen that accepts what we consume and gives us that feeling of satisfaction.

So when the marketing expert is quoted as saying:

It’s all about the Scalextric set your mother didn’t buy you when you were a child. Now you can buy your own.

He is in fact talking about lack of satisfaction reaching back to childhood. Interestingly mothering and nurturing are also aspects of Stomach and Spleen so this marketing trick is playing with the basic foundations of our being.

The consumption of food analogy is taken further by this quote from a Doctor of addiction therapy:

You get people trying to take back things that they’ve just bought, because they didn’t really want what they’ve bought, they just wanted to shop, they wanted the process of buying

These products are being consumed but then rejected only to be consumed again. There is the idea of non-acceptance (spleen) but maybe also a lack of assimilation.

Assimilation is the process where we take something into the core of our being. Food has to be broken down into nutrients that can be absorbed into individual cells and ideas have to be broken down to be made part of our individual philosophies and life stories. So our possessions have to be accepted into our lives. This is the realm of the small intestine energy that links the physical realm to the emotional.

If a gadget cannot fill a need or be accepted into our lives then it has to be rejected and the hunt continued for something better. Shiatsu theory recognises that we cannot remain healthy if we continue to binge and take little nourishment. It does not matter if we are binging on food, ideologies, relationships or gadgets: Good health only comes from what accepting what we have consumed and using its goodness. The Doctor quoted above seems to agree with Masunaga:

Shopping addicts often also have eating disorders and in turn, these might be linked to depression. And the mood-altering kick of the purchase isn’t about making them happy, it’s just a fleeting sense of feeling different, he says. Moments later, with purchases they don’t need or want, they’ll feel even worse.

Tony Brown @ July 12, 2007