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What it feels like to have Amatsu

words by Sadie Macleod

I feel drunk. I feel like I have been given a new body – one that my brain hasn’t quite caught up with yet. A lighter body, my head feels as though it is floating on my neck and shoulders. This is no bad thing as when I walked into Lorna, the Amatsu specialist’s, treatment room, I had a painful shoulder and I was told I had one shoulder higher than the other and one leg longer.

I had come to Lorna to find out more about Amatsu, an increasingly popular treatment that treats a variety of bodily ailments but the most frequent being joint, back and neck problems. Amatsu is an ancient Japanese therapy that uses soft tissue pressure and mobilisation techniques to help re-align your body so that it can work to the best of its ability.  It is also a fantastic way of revealing where the real problem lies: “people often think they’re coming to see me for one reason but actually the root of the problem is elsewhere – Amatsu tells me where that may be” Lorna tells me.

After an initial discussion about problems I have been experiencing Lorna then asks me to walk up and down a short corridor and do a variety of arm movements. After assessing my mobility I am asked to lie on the bed for a short session muscle testing, which is similar to kinesiology. This is a very gentle way of finding out where the weak spots lie by applying a small amount of pressure to certain areas of the body and seeing how they fare when tested, the process of which communicates to Lorna where the source of my soreness is coming from. And it appears my pelvis is lopsided and my neck is not working as it should, not to mention there are a host of digestive problems that I had been experiencing which could be connected to my muscular pain too.

As the kinesiology throws up an array of misalignments Lorna then spends a short while working out what the main priority is to treat. She settles on my neck and gets to work on very gently re-aligning my spine in my neck. It doesn’t feel quite as nice as a massage, but it is not painful at all. She then applies some pressure to areas in my neck and lets the muscle relax and work itself out around it. This feels particularly strange, as if my muscle is uncoiling.

Once finished she asks me to get up slowly and drink some water. I am then told to do a bit of a walk again up and down the corridor. Lorna warns me that it is completely normal to feel a little tipsy at this point, as if I have just downed a glass of wine. She’s right. I don’t feel myself. But I do feel much better.

Why Amatsu?

Amatsu is great for anyone suffering from a muscular or skeletal pain. Lots of Lorna’s clients have had accidents, and many of them have had a problem that they have ignored for years but have finally decided to do something about. But not to be discounted is that Amatsu is also very healing in other ways to. Lorna spoke of people who’s digestion dramatically improved, headaches disappeared and skin issues cleared up. This is because, as we Westerners often forget, our body is a whole and works as a whole with everything interconnecting and effecting something else. The route of the cause is not often where you think it is.

Where?

Lorna’s clinic is in East Dulwhich.

How much?

£55 per session. Most clients need 1 session a week for three weeks to begin with. But it is different in each case. Email [email protected] or tweet Lorna at @lornaclansey www.lornaclansey.com

Lorna Clansey

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