"Disabilita' non significa inabilita'. Significa semplicemente adattabilità ''
SHEN YOGA
Yoga adapted for disables
" Do not pay attention to me. I come from another planet. I still perceive orizons where you define borders."
Frida Kahlo
Pic of Luana Sechi, sindrome di Rett
Yoga beyond barriers
SHEN YOGA
I began my relationship with mental disability about twenty years ago. It was through Judo that I came into contact with a world I knew very superficially.
I have been practicing Kundalini Yoga for more than thirty years and Tai Chi Chuan for more than twenty. The study and in-depth practice of these two disciplines was the cultural baggage I had to relate to this new experience of mental and physical DISABILITY, in addition to Judo which clearly represented the first contact and which I still practice and teach today.
However, the approach with some forms of disability did not allow me to fully use the very valid and innumerable possibilities that the aforementioned disciplines offered me. So I started trying to understand the most obvious difficulties that people had as a result of their disability. I have adapted and modified the techniques learned in traditional disciplines, to be able to perform them with moderate success on mentally disabled people. The set of active techniques (performed in almost complete autonomy) and passive, carried out by the operator, use of correct breathing, relaxation, etc. , constitute Shen Yoga.
The human body is crossed by energy channels, as Tai Chi Chuan and Yoga teach, therefore by acting on points of our body, with pressures, movements, repeated and targeted, in the case of our disabled people, repeated many times, we try to rebalance at the energetic level that allows the operator to come into contact with the person, and the contact to be established with people with mental disabilities by those who "work" with them is fundamental.
Through Shen Yoga, I am able to establish this contact much deeper by using my body that comes into contact with theirs. Of course, obtaining the response to a gesture or breathing takes time but, when the person has understood (cum-take, take with him) he hardly forgets and, indeed, the gesture, breathing etc. always become of a superior quality. I have been "lucky" to be able to work with many disabled people and, apart from everything I have been able to receive in return from them and their relatives and friends, I have known pathologies such as Down syndrome ( the most known), the multiple differences in mental retardations (from birth, due to difficult births, due to consequences of medicines taken, etc.), autism, Rett syndrome which seems to only affect girls, and not boys, around the age of two and a half years of age, with very serious consequences.
Through movements that are very simple for us and enormously difficult for them, Shen Yoga offers a valid contribution and support to medical therapies, which Shen Yoga does not replace. I repeat that it does not replace, because Shen Yoga seeks to activate the internal energy that each of us possesses, pathology aside, to make it flow correctly and naturally. It seeks the energetic rebalancing of our body through external stimuli which can be manipulations of the operator or the movements that the same person imitates and performs alone.
Sergio Olivieri, Founder of the ShenYoga Method
SHEN in the traditional Cinese Medicine
designate the energy of the Heart
SHEN YOGA
Centro Discipline Orientali KIMOCHI * Via Piacciano 54 Fiano Romano 00065 RM * 338 254 5097
Dojo NARABI*Via Leonardo Da Vinci 1 Rignano Flaminio 00060 RM *338 254 5097
"Disability does not mean incapacity. It means adaptability"