Alexis Brink - Healing at your Fingertips: Quick Fixes from the Art of Jin Shin

PRAISE FOR

ALEXIS BRINK

Having watched Alexis interact with clients from a diversity of backgrounds over the three decades we have known each other, I have always been impressed by her gentle confidence and natural inquisitiveness. A true healer who knows and implements both the science and art of medicine, she has always impressed me by her desire to break new boundaries and think beyond ordinary paradigms.

Deepak Chopra, MD

For years, Jin Shin self-help has been my saving grace, pulling me and even my bandmates through a range of crises, from food poisoning on a twelve-hour flight to South America to a flu passing through our band bus. Once one becomes empowered by Jin Shin self-help, life starts afresh!

Maria Schneider, Grammy Award winner and leader of Maria Schneider Orchestra

The Art of Jin Shin is an energetic healing modality that is a powerful complementary practice to Western medicine.

Maurice Preter, MD, integrative neuropsychiatrist

The Art of Jin Shin is a powerful self-help tool that can be extremely helpful for dancers, as the unblocking and release of energy can aid in injury prevention and more rapid healing of injuries.

Nikki Feirt Atkins, founder and producing artistic director, American Dance Machine for the Twenty-First Century

I have been seeing Alexis Brink for over fifteen years, and whenever Im in New York City I make sure to get a treatment. I always leave a session more energized, yet calmer, and am better able to go about my day in a peaceful, joyful state. Alexis is a first-rate healer/practitioner and I highly recommend her to anyone suffering with a particular health issue or anxiety issue, or those who simply want to be at their optimal level of being!

Debbie Gibson, singer, recording artist

I knew nothing of the Art of Jin Shin before I met Alexis Brinkshe has made a believer out of me. My stressed-out body found calm and my exhaustion gave way to energy. This ancient practice should be a prescription for all women who do too much.

Deborah Roberts, journalist and mother

To my children, Mara and Tyler, with unconditional love

WITH THE MODERN world perpetually running at a breakneck pace, there has never been a better time to spread the word of simple self-healing. Technology has become an inescapable part of our daily lives, and many of us find ourselves seeking a more integrated relationship between our body, mind, and spirit.

This book provides a basic introduction to some of the foundational principles of a simple and effective form of energy medicine called the Art of Jin Shin.

If youve read The Art of Jin Shin, you already know something about the simple and effective form of energy medicine called Jin Shin. If youve picked up this book without any prior knowledge of the subject, you will find everything you need to get started with this energy healing modality well be exploring. The practice has many thousands of adherents all around the world, from my New York Citybased clients, to the inmates at a jail in the Indian province of Gujarat, to several hospital programs in the United States, and to the many men, women, and children who have been helped by Jin Shin Jyutsu in Japan, its birthplace.

You will find everything you need to get started within the pages that follow. And since this simple energy work involves no tools other than your own two hands, you will always be ready to relieve your aches and pains or set yourself up for a great day.

THOUGH THE ART of Jin Shin bears some similarities to acupuncture, the practice achieves its transformative results without needles, using only a gentle toucha methodology that translates very nicely to self-care. All you need to get started are your hands and a little bit of time and patience.

The holds in this book will grow more effective as you become a more adept reader of your bodys signals. However and whenever you start, to some degree you will succeed in moving stagnant energy and restoring harmony right from the get-go, and thats part of the beauty of the Art of Jin Shin.

Each of us is endowed with the ability to balance and heal our physical, mental, and spiritual selves. Jin Shin allows us to tap into the bodys innate wisdom, lifting us out of the jagged rhythms of modern life and returning our bodies to the rhythm of the universal clock. We always have the necessary tools to practiceour breath and handsand theres no way to harm ourselves using the holds and quick fixes.

Im happy to be able to share some of the magical quick fixes in Healing at Your Fingertips. The holds presented here have been literal lifesavers countless timessometimes for a stranger on a street corner or a straphanger on a subway car, and more than once, for myself.

Many years ago I was walking down the street with my aunt Mimi, an old-school Dutch traditionalist with little interest in alternative healing practices. She was overcome with a sudden need to void her bowels, but there were no bathrooms in sight. I dug into her left lower back and the outer side of the back of her right knee, and the sense of urgency instantly vanished.

Likewise, I have had so many opportunities to use Jin Shin with strangers that I sometimes feel the universe is pushing them into my path. Maybe the same will happen to you.

I hope you enjoy the benefits of a medicine cabinet fully stocked with natures own prescription medicine. Your friends and family are likely to love your newly acquired Jin Shin skills, too.

THE TWENTY-SIX SAFETY Energy Locations (SELs) are vital to our practice. Located on the right and left sides of the body (with twenty-six per side) and dispersed along the front and back sides, these three-inch areas, used along with the fingers and vertebrae on the spine and main center line of the body, are the primary sites for a Jin Shin treatment plan.

For a Jin Shin practitioner, the SELs are used in specific combinations to allow energy to move in the body. We use our hands to apply treatment to the SELs and other vital points in the body, gathering feedback as we work. Listening to the energy spiraling to the core of the body and back at relevant SELs, we leave our hands in place until we feel the energy harmonize. The pulses will slow, quicken, and/or steady as the clients energy comes into alignment, and other energetic cues such as excessive heat, cold, swelling and congestion, or discoloring may dissipate. Distinct from the arterial pulses, which measure the flow of blood to and from the heart, Jin Shins energetic pulses are the result of the primal energy spiraling to the bone or the core of the body and back in response to the practitioners touch. The need to feel a pulse quickening or slowing as the treatment takes hold is one of several reasons Jin Shin practitioners use their hands instead of needles (as in acupuncture) or other implements. The pulses give us information about which areas of the body need to be harmonized.