Georgianne Ginder offers an article in The Main Central Jin Shin Jyutsu Newsletter issue from Summer 2005, Number 49 about her experience using Jin Shin Jyutsu with cancer/hospice patients. This, and all issues of The Main Central, are available at http://www.jsjinc.net.

The author of this article is a Jin Shin Jyutsu student/practitioner and certified Health and Wellness Counselor who works with people at the Medical College of Virginia (VCU) in Richmond. She works with hospice, bone marrow and cancer patients, etc. Her husband, Gordon D. Ginder, M.D., is the Director of the Massey Cancer Center. Georgianne had given this patient several Jin Shin Jyutsu sessions prior to this visit. These sessions were very helpful to this woman. She had just received bad news that her transplant hadn’t worked. The sessions had “opened the door”, so to speak.

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What should we expect from ourselves and from others when we are so ill, so spent, so vulnerable? In a society that preaches empowerment, the art of wheeling and dealing and fast-forward forging, what happens when the inevitable occurs? We slow down to a crawl – or even slower that that – a drip from the tap that seems as if it is running almost dry.

I have been there on several occasions…so tired, sick and so spent that I can scarcely pick my head up from a pillow. Yes, I am told that this is the time to meditate and live in the spiritual dimension which has indeed become the only one available to me as my body and mind are so weak that thoughts hurt my thinking, and my hair (thin as it is) could send dagger surges to my mid brain. That’s awful. Those who tell us how to deal, more often than not, have not been so challenged perhaps, so compromised, they do not get it. To be sensitive and sick and weary and worn and heap lonely on top is rough – homebound and hospital tough.

Tomorrow will be better; it just has to be. But what if it isn’t and the weariness and pain prevail – pesky, ponderous, perilous persistence? What then? What distraction is enough; what meaning can move me from this trench? And why somehow do we feel guilty if we complain or cry? Why is that? It makes someone else uncomfortable? The society is not geared for this slower pace. travel to the farm towns – what is left of them – and see. Dying-out villages – even the Amish can’t keep up with this slowdown, I am hearing. Horses will be replaced by horse power any day now. State Fairs are not faring well as we hurry on. And hurry we do – until the time we cannot. Just cannot.

To be continued…