BEING-NESS, By Alex Hawthorne, Jin Shin Jyutsu student and practitioner, Margaret River, Western Australia, as published in The Main Central Jin Shin Jyutsu Newsletter, issue Number 57, Summer 2007:

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During the Christmas break I was reading Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” and was taken aback by the similarity of some of this material to Mary Burmeister’s teachings of Jin Shin Jyutsu.

In chapter 7, Tolle describes how meditation can take you into that state of being-ness and stillness from which true joy emanates. I often have trouble describing how a Jin Shin Jyutsu session feels, but Tolle’s description of meditation seems to put it into words perfectly: “become aware of the entire inner energy field of the body. Don’t think about it…feel it. When you can feel the inner body clearly as a single field of energy, let go, if possible, of any visual image and focus on the feeling. If you can, also drop any mental image you may still have of the physical body. All that is left then is an all-encompassing sense of presence or ‘being-ness’, and the inner body is felt to be without boundary. Then take your energy even more deeply into that feeling. become one with it. Merge with the energy field so that there is no longer a perceived duality of the observer and the observed, of you and your body. The distinction between inner and outer also dissolves now, so there is no inner body anymore. By going deeply into the body you have transcended the body.”

It is enriching for both arts when one overlaps with another and there is common middle ground. The commonality expands both approaches and each lends more depth than either would have independently.

Mary gives great credence to Being-ness in her teachings. In her Self-Help Book I, she reminds us that we are human beings…not human tryings or doings or strivings. We are just simply human beings. “There is only the present state of Be-ing which already is our ‘past’ and the foundation of our ‘future’.” These words are inverted commas for a very good reason…because they are fictional. Mary expressed in 1985 what Eckhart Tolle is telling us in 2006; there is only NOW.

The dovetailing of these concepts brought home a couple of realizations, neither of which are new, but both true nevertheless. The first is how far ahead of her time Mary was. It takes a very brave and progressive woman to teach this revelatory material, on her own, in Middle America, in the 1950s. And the second is the gratitude I feel for Mary and all the subsequent Jin Shin Jyutsu teachers to have shared such a simple and empowering gift.

At a party recently when discussing what we enjoyed most in our lives someone asked me, “How would you feel if you didn’t know about Jin Shin Jyutsu?” I replied that “I had no idea…I couldn’t imagine how I would feel, look or even think without it.” That pain across my shoulders, in my upper arm, no strength in my right thumb…the doctors would think me mad! However, now I know how to approach these ‘projects’…by being in the body and listening to it, to the ebbs and flows, the stresses and strains of everyday living.

As Mary put it: “The art of Jin Shin Jyutsu is simple. We complicate it with our efforts to try to live, or is it to exist? Jin Shin Jyutsu is beautifully simplifying the complexities of existing into an Art of LIVING.”

Thank you, Alex.

Thank you, Margaret.

Thank you, Mary.

Thank you, David.

Gassho, Namaste, Blessings

All issues of the Main Central Jin Shin Jyutsu Newsletter are available at http://www.jsjinc.net.