“A Speech by David Burmeister Given in Many Locations”  –  from The Main Central Jin Shin Jyutsu Newsletter, issue Number 79, Winter 2013:

Dear Friends,

It’s good to be here with all of you to share in this special occasion, 100 years since Jiro Murai’s first experience of Jin Shin Jyutsu in his family’s cabin located in the mountains of Western Japan. At the young age of 26, Jiro Murai was on the verge of dying from a disease that was described by his doctors as incurable. Not wishing to die in a hospital where he would be constantly examined and where his wish to be left alone would not be respected, or even at his home surrounded by family and friends hovering over him, Jiro asked to be taken to his family’s cabin where he could spend his few remaining days in solitude and tranquility. Since Jiro was not able to make this trip on his own, he asked friends to carry him up to the cabin and leave him there for 7 days, after which they could return to retrieve his body.

This decision, to be left alone during what everyone thought were the final days of his life, gave Jiro Murai the opportunity to practice sitting Zen, breathing, meditation and holding some of the many Mudras he had observed on the statues of the Buddhas found throughout the islands of Japan. During the first six days, Jiro experienced his body becoming colder and colder, and each day he wondered if this would be his last. Then on the seventh day, Jiro’s body became so hot, that he later described it feeling like steam was surging through his body. Eventually, he cooled back down, and to his amazement, knew that he was completely healed, as though he had never been sick at all. As you can imagine, his friends and family were equally surprised to see him walking down from the mountains on his own, looking strong, healthy and vital.

Not only did Jiro Murai’s decision to be left to die alone enable him to restore his health, it also gracefully led him to his life’s work. It was during this time that Jiro first experienced the keys to unlock the secrets that would allow him to understand and develop what would become the Art of Jin Shin Jyutsu. What began as Jiro’s final request became the beginning of a lifelong journey and the beginning of the Art of Jin Shin Jyutsu.

Of course Jiro Murai was as surprised as anyone that he was alive and well, but he felt certain that the reason he survived and thrived was because of the things he had practiced as he approached death. It had been many days and perhaps weeks since he had eaten and then retreated to the mountains. Jiro contemplated the great sages of the past. He remembered the Buddha and how he had fasted and meditated before he attained enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. He thought of how Jesus went into the desert for 40 days without food and returned in communion with the Creator. Jiro believed that the answers he was looking for, the reasons for his own healing, could be found by repeating the same process of fasting and meditating while practicing the Mudras.

During the next several years Jiro Murai conducted a number of 3-week fasts enabling him to purify and quiet his body so that he was able to experience the many energy pathways. Eventually he could illustrate these pathways in great detail. Jiro Murai repeated these 3-week fasts a total of 12 times during the course of his life until he was able to clearly identify the precise pathways of the Jin Shin Jyutsu flow patterns. Through his experience of extreme fasting and holding the Mudras in meditation, Jiro Murai theorized that other people in ancient times had also learned about the energy pathways using the same methods. He knew that similar illustrations dated back nearly 5,000 years, as found in the The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine and believed that this knowledge could have been gleaned from many cultures throughout the centuries.

To be continued…