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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I especially like to be with people who straddle pain well – laugh and cry with the same breath, embrace what is meaningful with both arms holding tight to past times, fast friends and all that, even if it is only available in the reverie mind. That is where the good times live and live on…Recall the time when he did this or she said that and DID WE LAUGH! If we are careful we can select those times that nurture us, the occasions that give us fulfillment, and joy the way we used to select the apple or the peach from the tree – just right, just ripe. Savor we must the now unique and perfect treasure!

I visit people who are ill and often very ill. Sometimes the door is closed tight when I enter that sacred space. Or the curtain of separation is drawn or the eyes are shut. We all require some private time when we suffer or we are in pain. Sometimes we need someone to be with us, though, to listen and to breathe the same air and just care to get it right along with us. The old “share and share alike” that I was taught in elementary school…when I was hunkering down learning the elements…simple truths…the good and just and right stuff. How come then so many of us have neglected those truths, forgotten to focus on those little gems? Is an hour or two on Sunday or a Saturday morning enough to inoculate us for coping with another week of work and worldliness? Why aren’t those who claim authority – teachers, doctors, clerics more vulnerable themselves? Did they skip Sunday and elementary school? A few lines of Scripture perfunctorily poised – is that enough to get one through a crisis?

For a few perhaps; more often than not I would propose/suppose perhaps not. Can we be more gentle, more tolerant, understanding and willing just to be patient? Patience is in short supply when we run more often than walk until that day our tap runs almost empty and our whirling in the wind winds to a halt and drops us somewhere where we assumed we would never be. Then we might understand. And what we will comprehend is how hard it is for some of us to straddle the pain, whether the door is open OR closed. Darned hard.

When I was leaving her hospital room and it had been a hard day – no way around it – from behind the tears and the smiles she asked me to please leave the door open. She was ready for that now. I had understood all too well what she was – and was not – saying…all too well, because I GET IT. I think that I simply do, but…if I had never been so ill myself, would I? Perhaps, but in truth I shall never know.

Thank you, Georgianne.

Thank you, Mary.

Thank you, David.

Gassho, Namaste, Blessings