How do you support shiatsu?
There is an excellent piece called 10 Things you can do to strengthen Chinese medicine as a profession over at Deepest Health that I would recommend any student or practitioner of shiatsu to read. A good web presence is mentioned but I want to pick up Eric’s point on developing leadership skills:
I find that many Chinese medicine students and professionals shy away from leadership roles. Unfortunately, this either allows power to be concentrated in the hands of the few who are willing to take on those roles or simply leaves the profession with very few leaders at all. We need strong leaders to advance this medicine.
Although my post Who will promote shiatsu? was about practising what we preach in developing our own on-line presence it was in one sense a call to stand up and be counted. It is easy to criticise the Shiatsu Society for its poor administration but if we do not their method there might be an opportunity to be exploited.
I have in the past year volunteered to help with the Shiatsu Society Newsletter student’s page. This came to a disappointing close, in part because of my own lack of inspiration. What I take from this experience and Eric’s post is that putting myself forward at some point to work with the Society would not only be a positive step to improve the governance of shiatsu but would also be a beneficial area of personal development.
Tony Brown @ August 20, 2007
Thanks for the kind comments. It’s funny because I just got off the phone with a friend who was being very critical about the US professional CM organization I talk about in my post… and we came to the same conclusion as you did above… In a way, we shouldn’t really complain about the bad service we are receiving — we should step in and make good things happen.
Anyway, thanks for your post.
Eric