Seitai - learning from the body
Seitai is a body education that focuses on the body's capacity for self-regulation and encourages active involvement in the maintenance and care of health.
Learning from the body. An approach to Seitai
Seitai is a body education that focuses on the body's capacity for self-regulation and encourages active involvement in the maintenance and care of health. It was created in the 1940s by Haruchika Noguchi (Japan, 1911-1976), who, after twenty years as a therapist, reoriented his professional practice towards education.
This article is intended as an approach to the most relevant aspects of Seitai, which Shimananda has learned about through Mutsuko Nomura (1) and from his own experience in over thirty years of learning and dissemination.
Self-regulation of the body
The human organism, like any other living being, is always trying to find an internal balance that allows it to carry out its vital functions, maintaining and developing its own life.
Since we are subjected to many stimuli, be they internal or external, psychic or physical in nature, movement and change are constant in the organism. We yawn when we are tired or bored, we sigh after enduring a situation, if dust gets into our eyes we tear up, we sneeze if our nostrils become blocked, etc. These involuntary, simple, everyday acts are governed by a desire or need for inner balance.
Sometimes the intense expression of this desire manifests itself in different symptoms (fever, pain, cough, etc...) that we tend to see unifocally as something negative, without taking into account the role they play as a bodily readjustment.
The human body is self-regulating (2). It does so constantly, but the vigorous expression of this
capacity is only possible in a healthy body. A healthy body possesses inner elasticity, i.e. a wide power of contraction and distension.
Seitai practices
These practices are very easy to do, because it is not a matter of exercising something predetermined on the body, but of maintaining a dialogue with it. The starting point is always to follow that something pleasant or pleasurable that we feel when we move naturally and that develops in the practice itself.
Katsugen undo,
is an innovative gymnastics that follows the body's desire to move.
Just as after sitting for a long time we feel like stretching and shaking our legs, or after sleeping we wake up, this movement arises automatically as a response to an internal state that is seeking balance.
The movement is initiated by preparatory exercises.
The yuki,
consists of perceiving the body through the hands, paying attention to the communication and
reaction of the vital energy (ki). When we receive a blow or feel pain, it is natural to place our hands where it hurts. We also express affection or sympathy with our hands.
If we intentionally place our hands on the abdomen and let them become familiar with it, we will notice some changes, a pleasant feeling and a deepening of the breath. It is basically a matter of attending to what we perceive through the hands.
As we practice, the sensitivity of the hands, the intuition and the knowledge of "the structure of
the movement" that Seitai brings, are added, enriching the practice.
After the practices it is common to have an intimate feeling that something in us has been renewed: the breath deepens, the mind clears; a mood - a joy - arises that is the fruit of the bodily change.