Tao Touch® Chi Nei TSANG
In September 2018, and through a personal introduction from Anat Baniel to Gilles’s work through the abdomen (Anat has known Gilles for over 20 years), Fiona began her Journey with TaoTouch® Chi Nei Tsang. Since then, TaoTouch has had a profound and complementary impact on her own personal healing Journey, as well as that of her child. She now has folded aspects of this work, which, in essence, is Taoist Abdominal Massage and its Taoist Chi Kung fundamentals into her practice. She continues to train in the work, where possible, and she has completed the Practitioner Fundamentals Certification and has completed coursework in all 3 Practitioner Training Levels. She finds that it deeply supports the integration of the Structural, Metabolic and Somato Emotional healing processes within each Being.
*The following information on this page has been taken directly from the website of the Chi Nei Tsang Institute, Gilles Marin’s School of TaoTouch®.
What Is the TaoTouch® Approach to Healing?
1) TaoTouch practices healing from a global approach, treating the whole person rather than specializing in only one aspect. TaoTouch brings back to life a disappearing holistic approach to health.
• With TaoTouch we don’t heal diseases, we heal people with diseases. TaoTouch revitalizes the person by supporting and enhancing the natural ability of the body to heal itself. When people heal, their diseases disappear no matter what these diseases are.
• Being truly holistic, TaoTouch does not fix or correct. TaoTouch works with the body, with the symptoms, with the patterns of tensions, including their emotional components- never against them. In the emotional language of healing, correcting means punishing. Even with the best intensions of helping from the practitioner, the attitudes of fixing, adjusting, correcting or fighting the disease would bring the healing practice in conflict with the person treated. No true healing can come out of such a divisive situation resulting in a gridlock.
• Originating in Master Mantak Chia’s traditional Thai medical massage, with Gilles Marin, Chi Nei Tang evolved into TaoTouch as a result of 30+ years of clinical practice, adapting and developing the Eastern aspects of CNT to our Western needs. The TaoTouch approach to Chi Nei Tsang makes it a truly holistic contemporary hands-on healing modality adapted to our Westerner needs and expectations.
• TaoTouch uses three simultaneous technical approaches to healing: hands-on metabolic, non-verbal emotional, and internal movement awareness-oriented structural, cornering subjects into not being able to escape healing. In such a manner, the person is not corrected or fixed but is put into a situation of learning, knowing better, and growing out of one’s habitual self that led to disease.
• Each of these approaches are performed a non-conventional way:
The approach is primarily hands-on- going directly to the organs to promote their optimal function.Once healing is manually established, then herbal, dietary, lifestyle changes, and even allopathic drugs and surgery will work successfully.
The approach is non-verbal.It is also done through touch by connecting the person treated within the depth of their subconscious mind while being put into dream state and even deep sleep.
The approach involves a completely new way at connecting metabolism, emotional profile and structural patterns of tension through breath with the diaphragm and through movement with the psoas muscles, the foremost core muscles responsible for everyone’s particular way to walk and breathe.
• The extraordinary efficiency of TaoTouch comes out of triggering the healing process by directly addressing the person's subconscious during the treatment, through visceral touch into dreamtime. There is nothing to understand, nothing to solve, nothing to fix. Once oriented toward the healing field, the body knows exactly what to do. The body naturally knows how to heal. It just needs to be guided and supported there. Healing can only come from within the physical intelligence of the person treated.
2) TaoTouch works at the cutting edge of modern biology, combining classical Chinese Taoist medical knowledge with our conventional understanding of anatomy and physiology. It also connects the mental, emotional, instinctual and spiritual aspects of the person treated, making it a true intercultural contemporary holistic modality.
A revolutionary viewpoint of treating the body- requiring a different conceptual framework, a different paradigm:
• TaoTouch acknowledges and uses the existence of a sophisticated corporal energy body that transcends the existence of the physical body and is at the origin of its shape, structure, metabolic and mental aspects. We don’t exist from building blocks from the inside out, we exist at the energy and informational levels first, then we express, materialize and eventually crystalize our existence into a physical form. This physical form comes from the energy field created by an environmental, emotional, mental, instinctual and spiritual profile that permeates individuals to the depth of their cellular level. This energy circulates through meridian systems in the fasciae and cellular levels.
• The navel, its roots and surrounding tissues in the abdomen reflect all external and internal tensions and misalignments in the body. Gentle manual work in the abdominal area unlocks internal patterns of tension through the train of fasciae and liberates energy trapped there as emotional cysts, giving the body its emotional physical and mental attitude. This is the base of all TaoTouch Chi Nei Tsang treatments.
• Our diaphragm, through the way we breathe, literally holds our psychological profile. Being the ultimate core muscle in our body, it shares this responsibility with the iliopsoas muscles, sharing the same attachments on the spine, and gives us our physical emotional attitude and ways to hold ourselves.
Connection between metabolism, structural alignment and emotional aspects of symptoms
A revolutionary way to understand breath:
• The way we breathe reflects perfectly the way we emotionally fell. Places in our bodies where the movement of breath is restricted are places that are holding and hiding painful emotional charges that we are trying to protect ourselves from feeling. TaoTouch, through a progressive and strictly holistic, client-oriented approach, brings awareness and processing of these charges, moving pain from the physical level to the emotional level where emotional negativity can be recognized, validated, digested, and eliminated.
• Our ability or inability to move freely, including articulation of movement and visceral mobility and motility, voluntary or autonomic, are physical extensions of our breath and reflections of our emotional makeup. Any accompanying chronic pain or chronic symptomatic conditions are reflections of our emotional makeup needing to change and evolve.
3) A revolutionary non-verbal approach to emotional healing
• Our digestive system not only digests food but also digests emotions. Undigested emotional charges are the main causes of poor metabolism, cloudy thinking, mental unrest, and the main trigger for all chronic diseases.
• TaoTouch encourages and enhances the processing and digestion of emotions directly through our digestive process: We extract what we need for our emotional development and eliminate what is no longer relevant for our personal growth. Emotions are the food of our soul body.
• Our metabolism is naturally designed to process emotions, especially while sleeping during dreamtime. Dreamtime is the only time in our life when we are allowed to be 100% emotional without any danger to ourselves or to others, being safely paralyzed and anesthetized in bed while sleeping.
• What is needed to trigger the healing process is emotional permission. Permission to heal is granted when we can allow ourselves to feel and validate the internally trapped emotions we don’t accept to have.
• We are subconsciously very well trained to protect ourselves from emotional charges we are not able to face without being emotionally destroyed. In order to face these emotional charges, we have to have the energy, the support system, and the maturity to be able to outgrow these emotional issues without unnecessary suffering, so we can acquire emotional maturity and mental solidity.
• Stress is the result of internal conflicts within ourselves. Anything we do with pleasure and enthusiasm, no matter how much work and sacrifice it takes, will be fulfilling and enriching. Any behavior going against any of our mental appreciation, including spiritual, emotional and instinctual, no matter how small, will be stressful and detrimental to our health. Any attempt to persist in mental conflict through denial will get us exhausted, in a bad mood, and eventually sick as an attempt from our subconscious to make us stop.
• We heal through growing beyond our internal mental conflicts and through digesting our emotions. Healing means outgrowing our suffering self so we can free our spirit and enjoy life.
4) Based on Taoism, a solid perennial philosophy at the origin of Traditional/Classical Chinese Medicine
• TaoTouch is based on a philosophy that is highly spiritual but non-religious.
• Life comes from life.
• Life is transmitted and shared.
• We are born to enjoy life.
• Life enjoyment, like life itself, is also transmitted and shared.
• If we don’t enjoy life we send the inner message that we don’t deserve to live and we can’t share the enjoyment of life any longer. This calls us into falling into the field of pathology so we have an opportunity to change and heal from it.
• The universe is in full expansion and evolution, so is human consciousness.
• The law of change is the only unchanging truth in existence.
• If we cannot change and evolve, we die. And when we die, we change. Life goes on.
• Death is part of life. Death is not a pathology to avoid at any price. No death, no life, no life, no death.
• We can heal until the very moment of death.
5) A non-conventional training of the practitioners - TaoTouch is applied Chi-Kung
The TaoTouch teaching program is ambitious and the training quite rigorous. The principle is to develop the extraordinary skills to get the extraordinary results we want. This requires us to approach healing a completely unconventional way.
• The TaoTouch practice is primarily physical and requires training in internal Chi-Kung and functional meditations for the use of the extension of Chi within the person treated and the management of energetical by-products resulting from treatments.
• Practitioners are trained to practice on each other under supervision.
• They learn special forms of Chi-Kung and biodynamic Taoist meditations to enhance the quality of their personal bioenergy and to enter the field of healing.
• To be certified, practitioners in training don’t go through examination. Instead they have to work on and submit cases studies to demonstrate that they can develop a professional practice doing TaoTouch/Chi Nei Tsang on their own.
6) Extraordinary results
The outcomes of healing are often unpredictable since we don’t work on specific symptoms, and the emotional work is mostly non-verbal. So, unless we get feedback from our clients, as practitioners it is often nearly impossible to predict all the results of treatments. Besides, once someone is relieved of an ailment, all they feel is normal and they often forget about their past symptomatic conditions. We generally need to get beyond the 80% better mark before feeling the difference within a health condition. Clients have to be reminded how they felt before starting treatments. So, please, always ask for feedback.
Conclusion
TaoTouch is revolutionary because it requires a 360 degree turn around from our conventional medical, fragmented, and highly specialized way of thinking and functioning. Not just a 180 degree turn around, but rather a 360 degree spiral- a moving, progressive revolution resulting in a different view of life from the same angle, as a result from the change of the person.
Also, we are not waging a war against any disease or pathology. On the contrary, we are working for peace by supporting and validating the good reasons why someone gets sick: to allow learning, growing, adapting, and changing unhealthy patterns of habits, and outgrowing the emotional aspects that put the pathological factors in place. This requires functioning from a different paradigm, working for peace rather than fighting a war against.
From a more Eastern viewpoint, a human revolution is a term used in Buddhism to describe the transformation established by the work of meditation and other monastic disciplines, which follows the same evolutionary path of healing with the change in personality, behavior, and state of mind. We evolve from a warrior state to a monk state.
Complete healing comes with a full transformation of the person treated when they are coming to terms and outgrowing their most non-accepted emotional sides that needed to be put in denial because of lack of support, energy and maturity. This is a process of growth and integration, as opposed to the conventional medical process of alienation.
TaoTouch is a healing modality that requires a lot of learning but not so much from the conventional rational mental way of learning by repetition and remembering, but by an extensive day-by-day training based on integrating knowledge and developing skills to awaken and uncover our body’s deep-seated natural wisdom. The practice of TaoTouch brings to practitioners a change of their personal detrimental patterns of habits into positive self-improvements so they can guide their clients into very successful healing processes.
Stay In-Touch with yourself and the TaoTouch principles...
and be touched by pure grace!
Gilles Marin
Chi Nei Tsang Institute / TaoTouch