5

THE ENERGIZED BODY

Using Spontaneous Movement to Heal

The ancestral spirits speak in dream time:

Healer, you must first administer medicinal vibrations. Know that any other form of medicine is secondary. An attuned vibration must activate the body’s natural ability to absorb whatever else is given.

The same is true for dispensing prayer. To be blessed, the body must be vibrating to receive the sacred resonance of uttered holy sound.

This also holds for the biggest love. The heart must flutter in order to move the wings of ecstatic flight.

And so it is for everything from the handling of suffering to being blessed by grace. With vibration we are able to be more fully caught by all that life offers.

Healer, first tremble yourself. Then pass the vibration to others. This is how spiritual medicine is delivered.

Spontaneous movement is a natural part of maintaining life. It is one of the ways you automatically regulate your body functions. For instance, heartbeat, breathing, yawning, peristalsis of the digestive organs, and blinking of the eyelids are involuntary spontaneous movements that are always taking place in your body.

Healers from all over the world have known that, in addition to involuntary movements, it is possible to induce spontaneous movements—especially vibrations that activate the body’s natural abilities to heal. Some contemporary bodyworkers report new discoveries that spontaneous movements, including trembling and shaking, can help heal trauma, injury, and disease. In reality, this is actually one of the oldest teachings of cultural healing traditions throughout the world.

While vibration is associated with the healing response, what has often gone without recognition is the fact that the vibrations of a healer can help activate healing vibrations in the client. The body-worker, healer, or movement coach must be tuned to catch the rhythmic pulse that can help others have a vibration that gets natural healing in motion. When you see people teaching about life force energy and claiming to conduct energy healing, pay less attention to how they explain it. It doesn’t matter whether one talks about healing or energy in terms of quantum theory, spirituality, or vibrational medicine. What matters is whether you notice a vibration in the healer. Does that person move as if he or she is plugged into an unseen electrical source? Do they touch others with vibrating hands, or are their hands, voice, and body motions lifeless, lacking the vitality of the non-subtle life force? If people are passing out in the aisles and there is no visible vibration in the healer’s hands, body, and voice, then you are most likely witnessing group hypnosis and suggestive influence. This is equally true for both religious and New Age congregations. Be forewarned: there is an enormous amount of misinformation taking place in the name of the vital life force and healing.

Seiki is obvious. You see it, hear it, and feel it. As the old Bushman healers say, you can even smell and taste it. There is nothing phony or false about seiki and there is no need for quasi-scientific metaphors to convince you that it is real. With seiki, words are not primarily used to persuade. They are used to celebrate and give praise for the bliss and the immediacy that the non-subtle vital life force delivers. If someone is authentically trembling, shouting, and singing with joy, then he has seiki. Get as close to this seiki as you can. Everything inside of you is vibrating, including the billions of body cells that pulse in different frequencies. Healthy cells have a different frequency of vibration than unhealthy cells in diseased areas of the body. The key to activating spontaneous recovery is found in how you change vibrations; when these vibrations are changed, you create a favorable climate for healing. When a healer is vibrating with vitality and health, that frequency can be passed on to another person. No need to think of this as bodywork, physical medicine, or healing. It’s simply bringing someone inside a dance with seiki. If you are vibrating with the vital life force, then dance with someone. Hold their hands, lift their arms, and move them in all the spontaneous ways that seiki inspires.

Have you heard about the dance studio that teaches you how to dance with the vital life force? Inside we find a different kind of instructor, one who helps people be danced by seiki. The setting looks like a classic dance studio with a grand piano; someone is playing music as movement is performed. There is the instructor, lifting one arm and tilting her head as another dance begins. Now she’s dancing with someone who is sitting in a chair. Shaking and swaying like a tree in the wind, she helps you catch the rhythm that moves your life.

The earth vibrates at approximately 7.83 cycles per second. This is the measurement of the magnetic wave frequencies that pulse between the earth’s surface and the ionosphere, the part of the atmosphere that begins about twenty-five miles above the earth. Scientists refer to this rhythm as the Schumann resonance, and it has been proposed that it is the pulse or heartbeat of Earth itself.

Our bodies are able to move with this very same rhythm. Zen masters produce an alpha brain wave during meditation that pulses at 7.83 beats per second. The fluttering hands of ecstatic healers also move at this frequency. We can ask whether falling into the same beat as the universal life force enables a sympathetic flow of energy from the ocean of energy that surrounds us, enabling it to pour directly into the body. Move yourself into the 7.83 vibration, doing so with everything from body trembling to brain wave activity. When you fall into this rhythm, you create the conditions to be tuned and healed as energy naturally flows through you.

Do you remember what your high school or college science teacher taught about sympathetic resonance? If you place two tuned violins in two different corners of a room and only play one violin’s string, the other violin’s string will vibrate and make the same sound. If you and I are tuned instruments, then playing one of us transmits or sets up a sympathetic resonance with the other, so both of us are played. Seiki works with this principle. Hold on to a seiki master, and as seiki tunes him, you will be tuned. When seiki plays either of you, both of you are played.

There is nothing to teach about how to use seiki for healing other than reminding you to go to school with seiki. Osumi Sensei learned at the seiki stool and so can you. Whether it is transmitting seiki, helping make someone soft enough for reception, or administering it in a therapeutic way to facilitate healing (what Osumi Sensei called seikiryouhou), there is no routine, model, or protocol that can be followed. You simply have to get enough seiki in you and allow it to lead you to spontaneously perform. The latter point cannot be stressed enough: it is not technique that makes a healer, but the degree to which that person is herself plugged in to the vital life force when interacting with another.

When you are filled with seiki, you are automatically led to the “treatment points,” as Osumi Sensei called them. These are the areas on the body that are ready to receive seiki. Their locations vary according to the present condition of the client’s body, the geographical location and weather, and how many seiki treatments have already been received, among other factors. Treatment points do not occupy fixed positions within a rigidly defined system. Instead, they are constantly changing in relation to the particular needs of each unique individual.

If you are a bodyworker, you may have learned specific procedures for working with clients. All this may have been useful in the beginning of your training to help alleviate your anxiety about what to do with a client, but later this gets in the way and becomes too restrictive. Having worked with master healers and bodyworkers all over the world, we have found that they all share one thing in common—they are master improvisors. Though their explanations may vary, when it comes down to working with a client they do not follow any specific healing protocol or model. Instead, they work as the client’s body calls them to perform. This is the sign of an authentic, well-developed healer.

We have given seiki to many bodyworkers and have helped free them from any and all practice models that restrict their improvisational presence with a client. In addition to awakening the healing gifts of a bodyworker, seiki jutsu brings forth healing skills for all practitioners. As you work with seiki in your daily performance exercise, you will find that a time will come when a natural healing response spontaneously comes forth. Your hands will start treating yourself as they touch, rub, poke, pat, tap, and vibrate various parts of your body. You will find the desire to touch those close to you, especially your family members. We encourage this exploration of seiki touch with a loved one.

One of the strongest contexts for holding the life force and administering it to others is found among the Kalahari Bushmen, who conduct most of their healing in community dances. Here, no touching interaction is framed as “bodywork.” It is instead regarded as a part of the healing dance. Imagine dance halls with live bands where people not only dance for fun or courtship, but for healing as well. That’s what you find in the Kalahari—outdoor sandlot dance grounds where people dance with seiki. Here healing, inspiration, and guidance spontaneously appear without having to be named as anything other than the arrival and movement of seiki.

In religious ceremonies of laying on of hands, the hands do not have to be still, nor does the person receiving the touch. If you are actually feeling the holy spirit, your hands definitely will be trembling. What gets passed from one person to another is a vibration, and this is the carrier wave of seiki. When the vibration is transferred, new frequencies are activated within the recipient, opening all kinds of experiential possibilities. Though healers have many different metaphors and understandings of what is taking place—depending upon the cultural tradition in which they were brought up—they share a recognition that spiritual presence is marked by spontaneous body movements.

Masters of the non-subtle life force don’t distinguish between moments when they are healing someone, preparing another for receiving the life force, or giving it. Instead, they are often moved by something sacred and holy that leads to a spontaneous handling and sharing of the vital life force. They are instruments available for a higher power to act through them. Though it may be tempting to ignore healers’ spiritual beliefs and reduce their work to a core practice or technique, a healer’s relationship to spirituality may be what is most responsible for attracting and amplifying the life force. It is next to impossible to reach the highest frequencies and most transformative vibrations without a profound love of holiness and respect for that which is its source.

They may call you a healer, but all you feel is gratitude for the joy that is circulating inside of you. Others may call it the life force, but you know it’s the holiness of life, a gift from God. When it circulates inside, all things are possible, though always outside your will. You are only an instrument for expressing creation’s never-ending movement. Jump into the heart of God’s love. It is guaranteed to move you. When someone comes asking for help, just say, “All aboard! This ship is bound for glory.” That’s what you are—a ship on holy water. Hold that person’s hand and he will be touched by what touches you. Never mind what it is or how to talk about it, let alone explain it—just feel it move you. The only words worth saying are “thank you.”

Those who love God—who feel a big love for divinity—will likely have more seiki than those who believe that quantum theory or core techniques are all the metaphors needed to deliver its efficacy. We are not inviting a head trip about belief, whether it professes religious wisdom, spiritual principles, or New Age platitudes. We are referring to an experienced relationship with holiness, whose intimate contact makes you tremble and voice a sound of praise. This, more than anything, marks a master of the vital life force.

If you feel no need or desire to be a professional bodyworker, but feel called to work with seiki movements, then consider becoming a coach of spontaneous, seiki-filled body jazz. Make certain that you differentiate yourself from ecstatic dancing, which sometimes loses an awareness of seiki and gets caught in presumed assumptions about dance. Ecstatic, improvisational dance or “shaking” gatherings may or may not have any relationship to seiki. It is seiki, not just the wild movement of the body, that carries us into ecstatic experience.

Let’s put on some George Gershwin, Cole Porter, or whatever music stirs your feelings. Imagine dressing up your fingers in miniature formal dance wear. Put some tiny dancing shoes on the tips of each finger. Draw them if you like. Now ask your significant other to lie down so her back becomes your dance floor. Then say to your partner, “Let’s dance.” Let those fingers dance, glide, and jump across your tactile floor.

We ask our clients to sit on a Japanese seiki stool in front of us. We may hold one or both of their hands as we make contact with seiki. Usually our eyes are closed as our voice changes, now empowered with the non-subtle life force. As we move, our clients move with us. Or Hillary may talk or sing as Brad stands to administer a spirited vibration to a client’s neck or head. In seiki body therapeutics, spontaneous movements come forth when the client’s body calls out for transformative vibrations. They unconsciously ask for a dance with seiki.

Some of our students and clients are dancers. Whether they know it or not, all dancers are hunting for seiki. As an accomplished dancer herself, Hillary has found that seiki is the key to inspiring any form of dance, from free-form improvisation to more constrained forms such as tango, salsa, flamenco, or swing. All dancers seek those rare moments when movement becomes effortless and it feels as if the dance is dancing the dancer. The latter, what flamenco dancers call “duende,” is made more possible when seiki is present,

We once had a session with a teacher of ecstatic dance from Santiago, Chile. Although her dance was improvisational, she complained that her movements had begun to feel habituated and contrived. As she described it, with tears in her eyes, “Although I move freely and have had moments of ecstasy, I have never truly fallen into the seiki stream. I long to be danced by seiki.” Hillary asked if she ever tried dancing tango. Sometimes, when improvisation becomes too purposeful, the constraints of form and partner paradoxically bring us more deeply into relationship to spontaneous movement. The woman responded, “I have tried it, but I do not like to dance with a partner because then I do not feel free.” Without a word, Hillary got up and put on some slow tango music, then took the woman’s hand and led her to the center of the room. As the audience watched, Hillary took the woman in her arms in a tango-like embrace and began to dance her with seiki. At first the woman’s body was stiff, but soon she relaxed and allowed her body to be moved. Seiki proceeded to dance both dancers and the atmosphere of the room became charged with electrical-like energy. The experience was so strong that the woman and members of the audience began to weep. Together they fell into a seiki dance, when two bodies become one, danced by something greater than any sum.

We are feeling something now. We are feeling it this very moment, as seiki pulses and marks its own time and way with us. We are happy that seiki is here, moving us. This is a time when transformations can happen, so let’s open our hearts and let the movements have their say—wherever they take us is where we’ ll go, making ourselves available for holiness to bless any mess, and happy to know that it is time to go deeper into what really matters.

Brad was once asked by a board member of Dr. John Upledger’s institute in Palm Beach, Florida, to show up for a surprise visit with Dr. Upledger, a founder of cranial-sacral therapy. Brad’s visit was Dr. Upledger’s birthday present, given by some of those who were close to him. Brad and John had met before and discovered that they each were passionate fans of the jazz pianist Erroll Garner. Both men played jazz piano and spent the evening performing for each other. Brad then gave a demonstration of seiki to Dr. Upledger. He was so excited about its direct and non-subtle quality that he formally endorsed seiki jutsu as “going straight to the core of healing . . . an energy practice anyone can learn and benefit from.” Brad hung out with Dr. Upledger for a week; they visited patients all day and took turns giving each other treatments. They discussed the need for a “people’s movement” that would be like the barefoot doctors of China, enabling the healing practices of practical energy work like seiki jutsu to be in the hands of all people, not just professionals. Brad told Dr. Upledger how this had happened in Japan during the early twentieth century, when a popular health movement spread through the country, teaching seiki jutsu to everyone.

We have now trained medical doctors, surgeons, dermatologists, pediatricians, internists, radiologists, osteopaths, chiropractors, Alexander practitioners, Rolfers, reiki practitioners, nurses, and many other “people-helpers” how to use seiki in their professional practice. One of our clients is a renowned spinal surgeon in Brazil. He never operates until he has first filled himself with seiki. Though he wouldn’t tell his medical board this, he reported to us that that his hands automatically perform their job with precision and speed once he is filled with seiki. “Seiki,” he says, “is now performing the surgery.” Of course, we are not saying that anyone can unconsciously do surgery or practice medicine without an education. We’re illustrating how a medical education becomes supercharged and empowered with a new vitality whenever seiki is present.

We have had several spinal surgeons come to us for private healing sessions because their own spinal injuries could not be healed by medical science and previous operations. We placed them inside the currents of seiki so they could be moved by its healing vibrations. To their surprise they recovered and found relief from pain that had burdened them for years. We had nothing to do with it, other than allowing seiki to dance all of us together.

Inside the seiki whirl things are moved in new directions: loosening, finding release, building new forms, transforming as seiki moves them to do so. Do nothing; get out of the way in order to get in the Way. Habits fall away easily when this energetic wind blows across your face. Exhausted thoughts dissipate, and worn out suffering and pain wash away as seiki’s weather brings a fresh rain to cleanse a torn heart. Seiki is blowin’ in the wind, asking you to become the change that can change what needs to be changed.

One of the first times Brad made a professional presentation of seiki to a group of doctors and other people-helpers, it resulted in quite a surprise. Not sure whether the audience members would be soft enough to experience seiki, he went all out in amplifying its presence. As he puts it, “I doubled the intensity of seiki that morning.” To everyone’s surprise, the first two rows of participants in the seminar all experienced what felt to them like spontaneous orgasms. One of the other presenters at the event was Dr. Ernest Rossi, the well-known psychotherapist and hypnotist who edited Milton H. Erickson’s collected work. He observed the event and interviewed some of the people, trying to figure out what had happened. The energy in the room was so strong that even a handshake or a light touch on the back resulted in an orgasmic energetic rush for both men and women. That was the last time Brad purposefully tried to amplify seiki. From that moment on, we have allowed seiki to make up its own mind as to how strong it needs to be.

We have mentored many people all over the world in seiki jutsu. One of our seiki mentorship groups had a remarkable experience in using seiki to heal. One of the class members had a friend who had been in a coma for a year with no sign of recovering. The week we were there, the doctors at the hospital told the family to get ready for his death because he had no longer than a week to live. Our student asked one of the doctors if she and her friends could come and give their friend some prayers and healing touch. The hospital doctor said it didn’t matter what they did at this point because he was beyond treatment. Several members of the class went and placed their hands on the man. They sang and shook, passing on a vibration that was inspired by caring love. To everyone’s surprise, the man woke up and spoke to them. He fully recovered and went home. The doctors are still baffled over what occurred.

What happened to him is what takes place every week in the Kalahari. He received a healing vibration. The healer didn’t heal. Instead, seiki moved someone who, in turn, touched someone else so it could be shared and passed along. Healers are “vibration catchers.” They catch a vibration that enables them to be tuned and then pass it on to others. We like to say that seiki work is a kind of spiritual tag. Someone catches a spiritual vibration and touches another, and that person touches someone else, continuing until everyone is touched by the spirited presence of seiki. In the game of tag you say, “You’re it!” whenever you touch someone. The same is true for seiki. When it touches you, “You are it!” You become tuned and ready to share seiki.

On a flight to South Africa Brad sat (serendipitously) next to the medical doctor who worked on the film The Gods Must Be Crazy, a comedy about the Bushmen. After finding out that Brad was on his way to visit the Kalahari Bushmen and that he had spent time in the village of the movie’s main Bushman actor, the doctor told a story. It turns out that N!xau, the Bushman who played the lead role in the film, got very ill during the filming and was taken to a doctor for treatment. The doctor advised the film crew to drive N!xau to a hospital that was hundreds of miles away. The next thing that happened was that N!xau started trembling and shaking. The doctor thought his condition was getting worse so they ordered a plane to get him to an emergency room. When N!xau arrived at the hospital, he stopped trembling; he had spontaneously recovered. The doctor said that he still has no idea what happened to that Bushman film star. He could not see that N!xau had administered himself the world’s oldest medicine—a healing vibration.

Over the years, many healers from all over the world have called on us to help them with a symptom, problem, or difficulty in their lives. Once a medicine woman from Canada came because she had hives and sore legs that her doctor was not able to cure. Brad held her hand and filled himself with seiki. As they sat there trembling, she started telling him about a dream she recently had about a man who had died a couple of years previously. Brad quickly interrupted her and asked whether that man made jewelry. Brad reported that he was imagining a silver necklace with a particular black stone; sure enough, there was such a necklace, and it was made by the man she had dreamed. He was a jewelry maker, and he made that necklace for his wife. However, the woman who came to see us had secretly always wanted that necklace. With seiki giving us the assurance to say what we felt, we recommended that she ask the widow for the jewelry.

She later reported that when she felt the shaking vibrations, it overwhelmed her when it started. “You can feel it right away. It touches you deeply.” She also later reported that “after he doctored me, my sore legs and hives cleared up . . . I felt refreshed and healthy, mentally as well as physically. I haven’t forgotten it. In fact I think about it a lot. . . . There is a powerful thing happening with this medicine. I’ve been around a lot of healers and medicine people. I have never seen anything like it before.” And she did receive the silver necklace with the black stone. It was given to her as a gift from the wife of the man she had dreamed about.

In this case, seiki brought a vision that gave instruction for what to do. This happened often with Osumi Sensei, as it does with other ecstatic healers who have a strong relationship with seiki. The woman’s husband was so taken by what had happened that he also asked for a session. He was a traditional medicine man who had helped establish addiction treatment centers across Canada. He was loved by others for his kindness, generosity, and nonjudgmental character. He taught traditional spiritual wisdom to young and old alike and served as cultural director at one of the treatment centers. He liked to say that “mankind is my business.” When this man came to Brad he confessed, “Though I am in the medicine way, I have a problem I have never shared with anyone. I can’t even share it with you. I just want the spirits to help me with it.”

Honoring his request, they went to a dark room, just as is done in a traditional ceremony of his culture. There seiki entered as Brad sang a song. The man later described his experience in an audio recording:

I had an amazing experience. I saw little lights flying around all over the place. I’ve seen them before in sweat lodges. I could hear Brad talking in some other language . . . I felt a tiny lightning bolt go into my head. Brad is uncanny in the way he is in tune with the spirits. Before seeing Brad, I had never had a vision. Although hard to believe for a medicine man, this was the truth and a fact of my life that I deeply wanted to change. In the ceremony Brad instructed me to place twelve twigs under my bed in the shape of a clock, to be located directly underneath my chest. The twigs were to be gathered from the woods where I live, each one collected from a different geographical direction, from north to south, east and west, and coordinates in between. Brad sent strong vibrations into me through sound and then said to me, “The spirits want to get in touch with you. You shouldn’t be trying to contact them so much.”

I had been doing this, but I had never told anyone this. It was too embarrassing to be in the medicine way and to admit that I had never had a vision. This is what I could not bring myself to tell Brad, but he knew. I followed his instruction and I have been visioning almost every night and remembering most of it. At first I was freaked out. I thought I was flying over my house. It actually scared me a bit. Since then, I’ve had phenomenal and fantastic visions. I have been given clear visions of my life as a child. I can now remember everything about my life, as I have flown over it through time. I have seen all of it, including the pain. My life has become amazing, for now I am a visionary dreamer. It’s been that way since that ceremony.

We received a call from a woman who was a medical researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. She said her daughter needed help and she didn’t know where else to go. Her daughter was a competitive college gymnast who had undergone knee surgery several years before. Although the best doctors at the Mayo Clinic had worked with her, they were startled to find that after she recovered from surgery she was unable to perform a forward somersault.

She was sent to various departments throughout the clinic, from surgery to physical rehabilitation to psychiatry. No matter what they tried, nothing worked. For several years, she found herself unable to move every time she attempted a forward somersault. The Mayo Clinic gave up and suggested that perhaps she should try some alternative approach. The girl’s parents went on a search to find an alternative treatment for their daughter and were given the name of the Milton Erickson Foundation in Phoenix, Arizona, a world-renowned center for hypnosis and innovative work in psychotherapy. After the director of the foundation listened to their story, he recommended that they have a meeting with us.

When the young gymnast, now a college student in Wisconsin, came to our house, we told her about seiki. We directed seiki toward her knee and suggested that she start moving her body in a way that would attract seiki to flow through her whole being. After one week, she returned and said she felt a tingling in her knee throughout the week, and that to her great surprise, and her coach’s surprise, she had spontaneously done a double somersault during a practice session. One week of seiki was able to bring what years of medical treatment were unable to accomplish.

As we continued teaching her more about dancing with seiki, we had a session where she spontaneously visualized a special box her grandmother had once given her. Since we were full of seiki, we trusted what came up in our intuition and advised that she should be on the lookout for a dream in which she might encounter this box. The very next night she dreamed of the box and heard a voice tell her to open it. She did, and found that it held a tiny snake, all coiled up. This didn’t frighten her, but it made her curious. We told her that cultures throughout the world depict the snake as a symbol of the vital life force.

We asked her to keep track of her dreams for the following week and to choose one word for each dream that would best represent the meaning it had. For the dream she just had, she chose the word snake. When she returned to the next session, she was delighted to report that she had experienced three powerful dreams.

The first dream involved a frightening criminal entering her house. In the dream, she hid in the closet and covered herself with a pile of clothes. When the intruder opened the closet door and lifted off the clothes, he looked at her and said, “There is no one here.” He then left, and she was not harmed in any way. The word for that dream was fear, and we discussed how the last several years of her life had been filled with the fear that she would never be able to perform a gymnastic routine again. For three years she had sought help in numerous forms, but she had not competed in a single competition. In this dream, however, she faced fear, and it did not come in.

The second night she dreamed of being near the edge of a canyon. There she turned into a cloud and was able to fly over the canyon, and over a forest that was right next to it. Her word for that dream was cloud, and it captured her feeling of being weightless and able to fly without effort.

In the third dream she had that week, she saw herself in a gymnastic competition performing her routine with absolute perfection. She chose the words desired reality to capture the essence of that dream and noted that she experienced complete ecstasy in the dream.

At our request, our client then took the words she had chosen for her dreams and constructed a sentence with them that would capture what she had learned from seiki. The sentence she came up with was this: “When you see the coiled snake, know that some will see fear, while you will see the secret to life, the seiki that turns you into a weightless cloud and effortlessly moves you to your desired reality.” She decided to focus on this sentence whenever she was about to perform her gymnastic routine. The next evening she performed for the first time in three years. She placed in two of her events and led her team to first place.

One of the leading philosophers of bodywork, Don Hanlon Johnson, underscores how the invention of different body therapies arises from the originator’s own spontaneous movements, which too easily become rigidified when they become formalized and taught to others in a fixed manner. The most promising future for body therapy will be in the direction of returning us to an experience of basic, natural movements that take place effortlessly and spontaneously.

One of the early pioneers of using spontaneous body movement as a therapeutic practice was Dr. David Akstein, a psychiatrist from Rio de Janeiro. He studied how some of the ecstatic spiritual traditions of Brazil, especially umanda and candomblé, used spontaneous movement to induce an altered experience, what he called a “kinetic trance.” He decided to experiment with this form of naturally induced hypnosis. He first taught some dancers with the national ballet company, Ballet Nacional do Brasil, how to move spontaneously, assuming it might help their performance. He avoided all spiritual beliefs and superstitions and only focused on helping them enter into the automatic motions. To his surprise, they not only felt invigorated and lifted in their performance, they also reported spontaneous healings. One woman who had been diagnosed with depression was suddenly symptom free; others reported a wide range of improvements, both physical and mental. This led him to introduce a new kind of movement therapy called Terpsichoretrance therapy, named after Terpsichore, the Greek goddess of dance and music. Terpsichoretrance therapy simply means “dancing trance therapy.” It draws upon Dr. Akstein’s background as a neuropsychiatrist and scholar of trance. Milton Erickson called Dr. Akstein one of the major figures in the history of hypnosis. Whereas Charcot, Mesmer, and others had created direct hypnosis (encouraging the subject to enter directly into a trance), and Erickson had developed indirect hypnotic suggestion, Dr. Akstein had recognized “kinetic hypnosis,” trance induced by spontaneous movement.

Working with groups of psychiatric patients, Akstein played ritualistic music he had recorded and invited everyone to move spontaneously, dancing in a freely spirited fashion. He found that this kind of ecstatic dancing was a nonverbal group therapy that led to all kinds of improvements in the lives of his patients. Although the therapy is not suitable for people with epilepsy, serious cardiovascular problems, certain motion disorders, and women in the first trimester of pregnancy, it was successfully used as a therapeutic approach for people suffering from a wide range of problems, including most of the so-called psychoneurotic neuroses. The therapy also proved highly successful as a tool for personal growth and development.

In an effort to explain the therapeutic benefits of this highly aroused movement therapy, Akstein and Portal proposed that ecstatic movement helps bring forth an emotional release. As quoted in Doug Morgan’s T.T.T.: An Introduction to Trance Dancing, “We have seen the sub-cortical areas are released from inhibition, in particular the limbic system, seat of the emotions. The emotional liberation is maintained by the very stimulating music, facilitating releases, and at the same time preventing them from being totally chaotic forms of expression, by the rhythms, which provides a certain framework.”¹

Observable emotional release is often one aspect of the healing response. What is likely happening at a more systemic level is the realignment, recalibration, or tuning of the individual’s neurobehavioral organization. The balance, stability, or homeostasis of the whole brain and whole body may be articulated using many different metaphors and theories. However it is specified, spontaneous movement serves to reset the organization of our whole being. This resetting or tuning applies to all possible levels of biological processes, from neurobiology to behavior and social patterns of interaction.

Brad first met Dr. David Akstein in May 1997 at the Evolution of Hypnosis Conference in Brazil. Each of them had been invited to give a keynote address. After Brad presented his work, Dr. Akstein took the stage and publicly announced that Brad was his “spiritual son.” They went off to talk, and Dr. Akstein told Brad his life story—how thrilling it was to learn from indigenous practices that utilized movement and how challenging it had been to be ostracized by his own profession. He had to leave Rio and move to France, where he continued his professional career in the land where hypnosis first prospered.

Seiki jutsu goes past being attached to either the metaphors of dance or trance but sees both as possible inside a performance of spontaneous movement. Seiki doesn’t care whether you enter trance or dance, but if it happens spontaneously, then it is what it is. Seiki jutsu emphasizes the freedom to be moved by seiki, in whatever form or absence of form naturally takes place.

Spontaneous healing can even take place in dream. After working with seiki in a weeklong intensive, Brad strained his back when he moved his keyboard and sound equipment following the event. That evening, filled with seiki, he had an unusual lucid dream. He thought he was awake and was getting out of bed. In his dream he believed he was putting on his clothes, and as he sat on the edge of the bed to put on his shoes, he was shocked to see a scorpion inside one of his shoes. He had a pronounced startle response and jerked back. At that moment, in the instant motion, he spontaneously gave his spine an adjustment. He woke up and found his back pain gone.

Years later when Brad’s knee gave him some trouble, he went into seiki and asked what he should do about it. He heard an inner voice tell him to include more calamari in his diet. The knee pain disappeared. Seiki is the doctor, the voice, and the movement needed to guide us into realignment, tuning, and healing.

Dr. Andrew Weil once wrote that “if medicine is to come back in alignment with the great healing traditions and satisfy the needs and desires of those who are sick, it must recover the truths that Bob Fulford expresses.”² Brad was a friend of Dr. Fulford. They discussed how the vital life force was the main truth of his practice and of the practice of all great healers throughout the world. Dr. Fulford wanted to see medicine follow the trail of healing vibrations. When Brad showed him seiki jutsu, he was thrilled to exclaim that seiki, the vital life force, rather than synthetic or natural drugs, holds the most promising future of medicine. He said that seiki jutsu “marks the beginning of an awakening of the universal life force that is accessible to everyone . . . It is time for each of us to be acquainted with this energizing force and bring it into our daily life.”

Brad also showed Dr. Fulford a particular hands-on way of giving a special vibration. It involves the left hand being placed just above the person’s heart while the right hand is on the back shoulder behind the heart. Vibrations are then allowed to pulse in a spontaneous way and automatically start when performed by a master of seiki jutsu. The vibrations in the left and right hands are usually different, often poly-rhythmic and syncopated. They are usually gentle but pronounced and awaken a high frequency. If you are soft and prepared, the vibrations will typically spread throughout your body, and the effects are immediate and often dramatic.

After that demonstration, Dr. Fulford concluded that it was the key to healing that he had spent his whole career trying to find. In a letter, he wrote, “I have found your technique of starting first [with] working the left shoulder and heart area to be very effective in treating. It seems to unlock the rest of the problems.” He said further that this way of transmitting a vibration was the highest form of healing he had ever experienced. It brought forth the highest frequencies of spiritual vibration that spread through the lower, embedded frequencies associated with mental and physical phenomena. In the last years of his life, Dr. Fulford treated everyone with this method.

Stephen and Robin Larsen, autobiographers of Joseph Campbell, once hosted a healing service conducted by Brad at their retreat center near Woodstock, New York. A terminally ill man was carried in on a stretcher. He was in his final days of life, and he wanted to experience joy one more time before he passed away. He was unable to lift a finger and was as white as a ghost. It appeared that he might die at any moment. With a group of friends and community around him, seiki was awakened so that the room became highly charged. When Brad doctored him with infusions of seiki, he experienced a tremendous shift in his energy. He raised himself up and started singing songs from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, in which he had played the role of Jesus earlier in his life. He found his voice filled with a vitality he hadn’t experienced in a long time. He shouted with joy, claiming to never have felt so alive as this. He even proclaimed, “I want to make love with a Japanese woman!” No one knew exactly why he said that, but it was celebrated, for he was feeling alive, and the same seiki circulating in him was felt by everyone. He lived a couple of months longer and then left this world, happy and content.

Brad’s father once was struck by a debilitating disease that no doctor could diagnose. Brad filled himself with seiki, performed its tuning movements, and fell into a dream that night. He saw himself placing his hands over his father’s neck and feeling a pain that needed liberation. After Brad woke up, he made arrangements to travel to his father’s town and held a ceremony for him. His grandmother first prayed and sang a hymn, and then Brad placed his hands on his father’s neck, feeling a great heat enter it. His dad could feel it as well and announced that he was better. Brad took his father to a leading neurologist; after more diagnostic scans were examined, the doctor recognized what was going on and said that it was a miracle that Brad’s father was still alive. A growth was starting to sever his spinal cord. They performed surgery that week, and his father lived another 20 years.

We saw a man in Puebla, Mexico, who volunteered for us to work with him in front of a group of professional practitioners. He started by saying that he had over one hundred symptoms. He even had a list of all the symptoms that doctors and therapists had diagnosed, ranging from growths in his mouth to a plentitude of behavioral and emotional issues. Hillary reached for his hand and took him into the seiki current. As we were all moving together, she asked who else in the family had carried all this suffering before him. To everyone’s surprise, his late aunt had had the same condition, and that woman’s aunt (one of her mother’s sisters) had had it before her, and he believed the condition extended at least one more generation farther back in his lineage. His family was very worried about him. We asked him if he could say one thing to his family, what it would be. He replied, “I want them to know that I am all right. Whereas my aunts felt hopeless about their condition, I do not let sickness bring my spirit down.” He was more concerned about those people around him who worried too much about his health. He prayed that they would not suffer due to his problems.

Seiki then filled our voices, and we began to chant and sing that he was like a saint, more worried about others than he was himself. As we were all moving in a circular motion, without thinking Hillary said, “For the rest of your life, you are never to call these symptoms or problems. They are to be called your aunts. You have become part of a lineage that carries a burden, but you do so in a way that is different from the others. You have allowed your burden to make your heart bigger, carrying hope and concern for others. This, in some unexplainable way, will help free your aunts, wherever they are in the heavens. You, who carry all the aunts, must tell them they are free and that this no longer has to be carried by others in a way that is sad and hopeless. Things have now changed. You have resolved what has long been unresolved.”

The man began to weep and disclosed that he felt close to his aunts and always imagined that they were around him. “Yes, of course they are,” we responded in song. Now he was very full of seiki and vibrating as we all held hands inside its movements. “I feel something moving in me,” he said. “I no longer feel confused about my sickness. I have come to free my aunts and my family, free them from unnecessary concern and hopelessness.”

“This is wonderful,” we added. “Why don’t you start celebrating your aunts now that you no longer will speak of symptoms!”

“Yes, that feels right. I can feel them rejoicing with me!”

Hillary continued, “Today is their second birthday. Each aunt, there must be at least one hundred of them over all the years, is being reborn today. Remember this date. Celebrate their birthday on this date every year.”

“I will and I will sing for them tonight,” he said, as he began to hum a folk song.

“Be an example to others who come to you with their pain. Tell them not to call them problems, symptoms, or disease. Tell them about the aunts. They may also need to know about the uncles, parents, grandparents, siblings, and all the relatives and friends that they carry within them. Free them so they, too, can celebrate and sing.”

The whole audience was weeping by this time, and someone started singing with a deeply heartfelt tone. Others joined in. Soon the whole audience had transformed itself into a seiki community that celebrated newfound life. After the session, everyone in the group went home with a new holiday added to their schedule. In November, we celebrate Aunt’s Day, the time when suffering becomes alchemically transformed into relational gold, freeing us to sing even when we feel pain and suffering.

With seiki you are moved to move with people, asking them to dance with seiki. Here there is no bodywork, medicine, or healing. There is only movement. Everything can change—including you and the name of whatever you think is organizing your life. Symptoms can become aunts and dying can deliver the truest living. There is no need to fix anything. Instead, move and change with it. The problem with problems and the suffering in suffering is that we relate to it in one way: seek out and destroy! Seiki comes to remind you that you have an infinitude of possibilities when it comes to relating to whatever experiences come your way.

Viktor Frankl found this out while imprisoned in Auschwitz. There he discovered that meaning can be constructed in all circumstances and situations, even the most oppressive and horrific.

Like Mother Teresa, utilize whatever is given to you, transforming it into a gift that can contribute to your creating a meaningful life.

Once Brad was interrupted at a weekend intensive by a woman who shouted out from the audience, “I have cancer and need to have a session with you now.” When she came on stage, Brad was already full of seiki, remembering that he had dreamt the night before that he would see this woman and ask her this question, “Have you recently moved your furniture?” When he asked her this, she said she had just rearranged her house because her father had passed away and she had obtained some of the family furniture and heirlooms. Brad went on to ask, as he rocked back and forth in his chair, “If you had to place your cancer somewhere in the house, where would it be located?” She mentioned a particular spot in the basement. He asked her to imagine what it would look like sitting there and asked whether it would be covered up. She replied that she imagined it wrapped in old newspaper.

Brad then inquired whether it was wrapped in the classified ads, for, after all, he said with a smile, “this is ‘classified information.’” As the movements raised the intensity of his voice, Brad became inspired to ask her to make a big change in her relationship with cancer. He asked her to consider placing an ad in the newspaper offering her cancer for sale. The woman felt a surge of seiki shoot through her and began rocking gently. Now they were both inside the enhanced life force currents, dancing with it together.

She shared how she had dreamed of a friend she hadn’t seen for many years. In the dream, her friend gave her a Bento box. Brad teased her, saying, “That’s because you are out to lunch.” They then discussed seiki jutsu and the Japanese healer from Japan, Osumi Sensei. As seiki grew in the session, it inspired considering more ways of how she could move things around in her house and creatively relate to her cancer. She was then directed to begin moving herself in the seiki way, doing it at home regularly, so things could be freer to move and change.

After the session, without telling anyone, the woman actually did place an ad in the Toronto newspaper, advertising her cancer and offering it for sale. To her surprise her condition improved, and her doctor told her she would live a long life. Even more unexpected was the report that she had gone to her basement and found an ugly abstract painting wrapped in newspapers, sitting in the same spot where she had indicated that her cancer was metaphorically located. She also met the woman she had seen in her dream, whom she hadn’t seen since they were adolescents. Out of the blue, her old friend called and invited her to lunch. The friend asked if she had seen or heard about the newspaper ad others were talking about—someone had placed an ad trying to sell her cancer. The news coming back to her about the action she had secretly taken in advertising her cancer for sale sent another lightning bolt of energy through her. She made a pledge to live for all the surprises and gifts that life could bring, and to keep moving with all of it.

The therapeutics of seiki spontaneous movement is that it helps free you to relate to everything, including your pain and illness, with movement. In movement are found the seeds of change, the roots of alchemy, and the original source of whole healing. Come to seiki with no expectation other than changing anything and everything, doing so because seiki asks you to dance with whatever is moving in front of your very eyes. Grab hold of seiki’s hands, whoever is embodying it, and take a step or two as part of life’s unpredictable choreography. Do it to feel totally alive.