Kizuna Bodywork Advanced Class 1: Full Description

upcoming dates: Sept. 18-21, 2010
duration: 4 days
location: Akigawa, Japan (near Tokyo)
teacher: Les May

Use the enrollment form to reserve your place in the class.

Brief Summary

In this class you'll learn beautiful patterns of strokes using the hands and arms to mimic the flowing movements of water. You'll also practice using your forearms and elbows to give a wide range of pressure from light to the beginnings of deep pressure. By learning to add variety to your massage and studying details of human anatomy you'll increase the effectiveness of your work. And through creative dance, observing nature, and partner yoga you'll awaken your natural ability to move gracefully and touch people with compassion.

Overview

In this class you will study high-level Kizuna Bodywork techniques and principles to broaden your range of skills, improve your effectiveness, and deepen your work in many ways. You will learn methods of helping clients achieve superior relief from tension and pain in the most common problem areas while protecting your own body from being overworked or injured. The focus will be on advanced techniques for giving a wide range of pressure from light to the beginnings of deep pressure. You'll learn to generate pressure using your body weight instead of your strength so even if you're relatively small and lack physical power you can do effective massage without hurting or tiring yourself.

In addition to using your hands for lighter work, you'll learn Kizuna Bodywork's unique techniques for using the forearms and elbows to do work that is as effective and pleasurable as massage with the hands. This will greatly reduce demands on your hands, wrists, fingers, and thumbs so you can avoid the pain and injury most massage therapists suffer from. If you are already an experienced therapist in another style of massage, these Kizuna Bodywork techniques can transform the way you do massage. And if you're one of the majority of massage therapists who has suffered pain and injury from doing conventional techniques, this Kizuna Bodywork class can give you tools with which to get started doing the work you love again while allowing your body to rest and heal.

Other advanced topics in Kizuna Bodywork that you will explore in this class include performing complex flowing strokes, reducing repetitiveness and adding variety to your work, massaging under the client's body, learning details of human anatomy to increase the effectiveness of your techniques, developing greater sensitivity of touch, improving your posture to avoid injury as you give massage, and giving a unique massage to each client which meets their individual needs.

But Kizuna Bodywork is much more than these innovative massage techniques and methods. It is also a process of awakening your natural capacity to feel more deeply and express yourself, to touch others with compassion, to connect with nature and notice what it has to teach you about movement and energy, to be more aware of your own body and able to move more freely, and to allow your creativity to flow. In this class you will explore this process of inner awakening through free-form dance, observing nature, and partner yoga, in addition to massage practice. The deepening of connection with yourself and others that you cultivate through these diverse activities will bring depth to your massage, give your techniques the effortless beauty of a dance, and give you the power to promote healing and change not only in the physical body but also in the lives of the people you touch as well as your own.

This class is one part of a three-class series. It fulfills part of the requirements to achieve Advanced Certification as a Professional Practitioner of Kizuna Bodywork. It is an ideal continuing education class for experienced students and professionals who wish to enhance their massage and explore new techniques and approaches to bodywork. Practitioners of oil massage styles other than Kizuna Bodywork are also welcome to enroll. Experience studying or professionally practicing massage is recommended before enrolling in this class.

Details of Concepts and Curricula

Each part in the series of three Advanced Classes immerses you in the study of high-level technical massage skills and methods while deepening your understanding and application of the key themes of Kizuna Bodywork.

As in every Kizuna Bodywork class, love will be a foundation of your work. You will practice inner listening in order to connect with your own heart, focus your intentions on being compassionate, and let these intentions express through the gentleness and beauty of your touch. The distinctive advanced techniques of Kizuna Bodywork will blossom from this connection with your own heart as well as from your connection with nature. Like the intricate, beautiful, powerful movements of wind and water, your hands and arms will circle, spiral, and flow around the receiver's body, supporting and embracing them in a stream of nurturing, graceful motion, inviting release of tension and pain, and promoting profound healing.

You will study advanced techniques in which you perform a different complex stroke with each hand in synchrony. The complexity of these flowing movements and the pleasurable sensations they engender help the receiver's mind surrender its analytical activity to a deepening of relaxation. They also guide the client's body to unwind, tap into its own healing power, and become more receptive to the beneficial effects of your massage. These complex flowing techniques will make your massage feel like an exquisite work of loving, healing art to the receiver, and you in turn will feel you are like a painter brushing beautiful swirls of color and compassion into the people you touch.

In order to better understand these techniques and infuse your work with the intelligence and beauty of nature from which they originate, in this class you will spend time outdoors observing the elements, earth, sky, plants, and animals, learning from their forms and movements, and experiencing yourself as a manifestation of this same intelligence and beauty. In particular you will study water and its teachings about how to move in flowing, complex, and powerful ways with the help of gravity. You will use the qualities, movements, and shapes you observe in nature as guides to help you learn to move beautifully and gracefully as you do massage. And you will lay a foundation of creativity for your work by learning to feed your imagination with the inspiration nature offers, using it to continually develop your own unique ways of doing massage. If as an experienced therapist you sometimes feel your massage has become formulaic or boring, this connection with nature will bring an infinite supply of fresh ideas and energy to your work. The time you spend observing nature will also help you enter a state of relaxed awareness in which your body and your intuition can flow more freely. This too has the potential not only to enhance your massage work but to bring richness to all spheres of your life.

On the technical side, during this class you will practice a wide variety of techniques to help bring your clients relief in the most common areas of tension and pain. These will include using the forearm and elbow to give a wide range of pressure from light to the beginnings of deep pressure. You will become comfortable using these more durable alternative tools when clients want more pressure so you can avoid injuring your hands, wrists, and thumbs as most therapists do. This will also prepare you for the next level of study in Kizuna Bodywork, the deep tissue training which does not rely on the hands. To further increase your technical versatility you will practice massaging under the client's body both when they are prone and supine and in such a way that you protect your body from strain.

One of the themes we will explore which complements these advanced techniques is customizing your massage work to meet the specific needs of each individual client. Most massage therapists follow a formula they learned in class and give nearly the same massage to each person. They thus become bored with the repetitiveness of their own work, and their clients experience their massage as uninspired. A key to getting better results for your clients and achieving a high level of customer satisfaction is to instead offer them a highly personalized massage in which you spend a substantial amount of time focusing on treating the problems or parts of their bodies that are most in need of help. In this class you will practice focusing on the client's areas of greatest need, allowing an intelligent, intuitive, and creative exploration of the body to take the place of set procedures. You will practice trying various techniques, noticing what works best for each client's unique body and condition, and refining your techniques to get better results. Replacing your formula with this exploratory process will not only make it possible for you to help people more but will also keep your massage work continually fresh, different, interesting, and fulfilling to you and your clients. Furthermore it will set you on the path of becoming your own teacher, of continuously evolving your techniques and understandings while you work, and ultimately of creating your own original techniques and massage style.

At an advanced level of study, detailed knowledge of human anatomy becomes essential to increasing the quality of your massage work. The body is extremely complex, and in many cases the structures beneath the skin are not what you would imagine without having studied them. You will therefore be guided in this class in learning to precisely locate specific parts of muscles, bones, and other body parts that are most relevant to treating common sources of pain and tension. This will immediately make it possible for you to offer your clients more effective massage. And in case you choose to enroll in Kizuna Bodywork Deep Tissue Classes in the future, this exploration of anatomy will prepare you for the more advanced level of study in those classes in which it is even more crucial to know the details of anatomy for your client's safety as well as your own.

Among the other advanced methods you will study in depth is to "look with your hands and not your eyes." You will practice seeing into the receiver's body with your hands and arms, feeling its condition and its responses rather than focusing on its surface with your eyes. By shifting from your sense of vision to your sense of touch as the primary focus of your awareness you will gain the ability to receive far more information about the depth of touch and range of motion that is appropriate for each part of the receiver's body so you can work within their limits. This shift will greatly enhance your ability to work sensitively, will promote feelings of safety and deeper relaxation in your clients, and will improve the therapeutic results you help them achieve. As you practice allowing your head to be in a normal upright position rather than constantly looking down at your technique and the small part of the client's body you are touching, you will also allow yourself to take in a broader field of view, notice and connect with the client's entire body as well as the environment around you, and use your vision in a much fuller way. This method is very likely to improve your posture and reduce stress on your neck and back as you give massage. And while even many advanced practitioners of other massage styles are relatively unpracticed with their forearms and elbows and feel uncomfortable using them for sensitive work, in this class you will cultivate the ability to see into the body with your forearms and elbows too so you are more technically versatile and are well-prepared for the next phase of study, Kizuna Bodywork deep tissue massage, which relies on the sensitivity of these sturdier tools.

In addition you will learn how to perform your techniques in complex non-linear sequences in this class. As opposed to a predictable sequence in which you perform one or two techniques on one side of the body and then perform the same techniques on the other side, you will learn to blend several techniques together to form diverse patterns of continuous flowing movements. Practicing this method will prevent your work from feeling like a series of repetitive techniques to you and your clients. It will greatly enhance the quality of your massage by replacing predictability with variety and creating another avenue for the expression of your creativity and originality.

Kizuna Bodywork Advanced Class is an opportunity for you to study self-care in greater depth too as you will practice self-massage and stretching techniques that help you treat your own areas of tension and avoid injury. You will also learn about self-care in terms of setting professional boundaries with clients and handling situations where clients have inappropriate expectations around sexuality and nudity.

Another key theme in Kizuna Bodywork is discovery of the teachers which are already within you and all around you. Through exercises designed to help you hear the messages your own body, intellect, and feelings are always sending you, you will develop your intuition, your natural ability to know what path is right for you and how you can help others. Every class day will include Kizuna Movement in which you will practice feeling and moving freely, dancing without choreography, developing a deeper connection with your own body, and allowing your true self to emerge from behind your social mask. In the accepting, compassionate community we will create together, this practice of freedom and creative self-expression in movement will gradually help you become more comfortable moving in your own unique ways in the presence of others. As self-awareness and self-acceptance blossom you will become more connected with your own inner source of creativity and intelligence. This will in turn foster your capacity for self-expression and innovation as a bodyworker and prepare you for more advanced training in which the ability to work creatively and adapt to new situations becomes more important. The deepening connection with yourself and your natural abilities which you cultivate in this class will not only enrich your massage work but also enhance the quality of your whole life.

Part of this course is set aside for students to request instruction about any specific problems or situations they have encountered while doing massage work whether these are technical, professional, or personal issues.

Kizuna Bodywork Advanced Class is thus an opportunity to practice both caring for others and fostering your own health and development on many levels of your being. It is designed to be an effective alternative massage education experience as well as a joyful, heartwarming time of connecting deeply with yourself, with the beauty of our world, and with other people.

Format

In each class the teacher will demonstrate and explain several techniques and concepts in detail. Students will then practice with a partner, sometimes following along while observing the teacher give the demonstration again and other times practicing on their own while receiving one-on-one instruction from the teacher. Classes will also include outdoor walks in nature and movement exercises like partner yoga and free-form dance which help students learn about the themes, body postures, and movements of Kizuna Bodywork. The teacher mostly speaks English, so lessons will be presented in Japanese by a skilled interpreter.

Who This Class Is For

Kizuna Bodywork Advanced Class 1 is appropriate for experienced students and professional practitioners, including:

  • Kizuna Bodywork therapists who have completed the Basic Certification Program and want to gain advanced skills and credentials
  • massage practitioners who already studied a different massage style and who want to explore new techniques and concepts in bodywork
  • injured massage practitioners who want to learn alternative techniques with which they can do effective and beautiful massage while allowing their injuries to heal
  • experienced non-professionals who want to learn massage to share with family and friends for personal enjoyment and who do not need a professional certificate
  • massage practitioners who already took this class and want to review, improve their technique with the help of expert teachers, enjoy the rich experience of Kizuna Bodywork Class again, and connect with their peers in the community of bodyworkers

Students who are not residents of Japan who can understand either the Japanese or English languages are also welcome to enroll.

Teacher

Kizuna Bodywork Advanced Class 1 will be led by Les May. Les is the founder of Kizuna Bodywork. He teaches massage in Japan and in the San Francisco Bay Area. Les has worked at Esalen Institute since 2001 and has taught movement classes and baby massage classes there. He is also a member of the Esalen Massage Crew and the editor and producer of the Deep Bodywork DVD series.

Location and Accommodations

Kizuna Bodywork Advanced Class 1 will be held near Tokyo in the small town of Akigawa in a quiet, beautiful setting where there are mountains, forests, rivers, and natural hot springs. This setting is similar to the environment in America where Kizuna Bodywork was developed. All classes will be held at Sankei, a spacious and attractive educational center with both modern and traditional features. Lodging and meals for students will also be provided there. When you enroll you will have the opportunity to request vegan meals (free of animal-sourced ingredients) or standard meals. Sleeping rooms will be shared with other students, and men and women will be in separate rooms. During free time we will have the opportunity to enjoy nature in Akigawa and relax together at nearby hot springs.

Dates

  • Advanced Class 1: September 18-21, 2010
  • Advanced Classes 2 and 3: 2011 (details to be announced)

Note: Baby Massage Class will be held Sept. 22 and Deep Tissue Class 1 will be held Sept. 23-26, just after Advanced Class 1. If you attend at least two of these three classes you receive a discount on your tuition.

Schedule

There will be a total of 25 hours of class over four days plus free time for practice, rest, going to hot springs, and other activities outside class.

Day 1 of class:

  • 9:45am: students taking the train arrive at Musashi-Itsukaichi station
  • 10am: ride bus together from Musashi-Itsukaichi station to Sankei
  • 10:30am - 12:45pm: introduction and class
  • 1 - 2:30pm: lunch and free time
  • 2:30 - 6pm: class
  • 6:15 - 7:30pm: dinner
  • evening: free time

Days 2, and 3 of class:

  • 8 - 9:30am: breakfast and free time
  • 9:30am - 12:45pm: class
  • 1 - 2:30pm: lunch and free time
  • 2:30 - 6pm: class
  • 6:15 - 7:30pm: dinner
  • evening: free time

Day 4 of class:

  • 8 - 9:30am: breakfast and free time
  • 9:30am - 12:45pm: class
  • 1 - 2pm: lunch and free time
  • 2 - 4:30pm: class and conclusion
  • 5pm: departing students ride bus together to Musashi-Itsukaichi station

Day 4 for students who are also enrolled in the next day's baby massage class only:

  • 5 - 6:15pm: free time
  • 6:15 - 7:30pm: dinner
  • evening: free time

Prices

The base price of the class is 129,000 yen, lodging and all meals included (3 nights, 4 days). Of this price, 100,000 yen is the tuition and 29,000 yen is the lodging and meals fee.

All class materials fees are included in the tuition. Tuition does not cover transportation and admission to a hot spring, so please be prepared to pay the small fees for this optional activity if you wish to participate.

Discounts

If you enroll in both Advanced Class 1 and Deep Tissue Class 1 and pay tuition for both classes before the start date of the first class, you receive a discount of 20,000 yen off the total tuition for 2 classes. You also receive a 5,000 yen discount off tuition for Baby Massage Class if you attend it in addition to either Advanced Class 1 or Deep Tissue Class 1 or both.

You can substantially reduce your class fees by enrolling early, enrolling in multiple classes, and referring friends who also enroll. For details please review the discounts we offer.

How to Enroll and Pay for Classes

There are three steps to class enrollment and payment:

  • As early as possible please use our website enrollment form to send us your name and other information and indicate which class(es) you will attend. Although you can still enroll later, please enroll by July 12 if possible so we can confirm our reservation for the approximate number of guest rooms we expect to need.
  • As early as possible please pay a deposit equal to the total lodging and meals fees for all your classes (29,000 yen per 4-day class and 8500 yen per 1-day class) to confirm your enrollment.
  • Please pay the tuition for each class (minus any discounts you can use) in person on the first day of class.

It is also acceptable for you to send the deposit and tuition as one payment rather than first paying a deposit and later paying the tuition.

Multiple Class Enrollment

If you enroll in more than one class, once you have paid your deposit for all your classes, please pay your tuition (minus any discounts you can use) for the first class by 30 days before its start date. You then have two options for paying the tuition of your other classes:

  • You may pay the tuition for all your classes before the start date of the first class. In this case you would receive the discount we offer for enrolling in multiple classes.
  • You may wait after the start date of the first class and pay the tuition for your other classes by 30 days before their individual start dates. In this case you would not receive the discount we offer for enrolling in multiple classes.

Late Enrollment

If you wish to enroll less than 30 days before the start date of a class you may contact us any time to see if there are still places available and make special arrangements to enroll and pay your fees.

How to Send Payment

If paying in Japanese yen please pay your deposits through our partner web shop, Mother's Free Spirit, and then pay your tuition in person on the first day of class.

If paying by check or money order in US dollars, please send funds to Kizuna Bodywork founder Les May at the following destination:

Kizuna Bodywork
c/o Les May
PO Box 181
Big Sur, CA 93920
USA

Contact Us for Help

If you have any problems with the enrollment process or any questions about the amount due, how to calculate your discounts, or how to send payment, please contact us.

Enrollment Cancellations

If you notify us you wish to cancel your enrollment 30 days prior to the day the class begins or earlier, any deposit or fees paid will be refunded, less a 10000 yen cancellation fee. If you cancel later than 30 days prior to the day the class begins, your deposit and fees will not be refunded.

Advanced Certification Program

This class is part of the Kizuna Bodywork Advanced Certification Program, a course of study designed to provide professional massage practitioners with expert-level Kizuna Bodywork skills. When you enroll in this class you have the option to simultaneously enroll in Advanced Classes 1, 2, and 3 to receive a substantial discount on your tuition.

FAQ

Q: What should I bring to class?
A: Please bring a set of massage linens including a sheet and a towel. Also please bring shoes suitable for casual walking outdoors and comfortable, loose clothes appropriate for massage and movement activities including partner yoga and dancing. These should be clothes you don't mind getting oily since it can be hard to clean oil stains out of some clothes.

Q: When will you hold the other classes that fulfill the Advanced Certification Program requirements?
A: We will hold more of these classes in 2011. Please use the form at the top right of this page to join our mailing list so we can contact you when we determine the dates of our future classes.

Please also see the main Kizuna Bodywork FAQ. If you have any other questions please contact us.