An amazing, miraculous thing happened to me lately. I was cured of my backache. And I didn’t use medicine or acupuncture or massage or anything of the sort.
Let’s rewind for a moment to Sunday, May 1. That day, I was leaving an award ceremony in Wanaque, NJ, when I suddenly started experiencing pain in the upper left side of my back. It was weird that it came suddenly because I didn’t lift anything heavy that day. The backache was pretty unbearable; I had to stop myself from sneezing because I’d really feel it in my back.
But ever since I lifted that dinosaur of a computer monitor of mine in January 2010, I’ve been having back issues. Since then, I couldn’t lift heavy items for fear of cramping up my back. I also had to stop giving my young daughter piggyback rides for this reason.
Well, on May 2, I went to the Ringwood Public Library for a lecture on a Japanese non-contact healing technique called seimei. Not only was there no medicine involved, but there was no touching either, unlike acupuncture and massages. Two women from the Seimei Foundation, a non-profit organization headquartered in Hawthorne, NJ, spoke about the benefits of seimei and how it had impacted their lives.
Meaning “vital life force,” seimei was founded by Toshihisa Hiraki of Japan. Seimei has 150 practicioners in the United States and 25,000 practitioners in Japan.
To start off the free seimei demonstration, Meg, the lady who performed the demonstration, told me to turn my head multiple times, stretch out my shoulders and back, and to touch my toes. This how to look for any painful areas in the body, she said. Well, I had forgotten about my back pain until I did these exercises. I informed Meg of my problem area. She had me sit down in a chair and sat down next to me, facing me while I looked straight ahead at the front of the room. She outstretched her arms around me as though she was to hug me, but she didn’t. Instead, she lowered her arms around me until the arms reached the problem area. She then clenched her hands into fists, which seemed as though by doing this she was extracting the pain from my body.
A few minutes later, she asked me how I felt percentage-wise. I twisted in my seat to stretch out my back, and told her I felt 50 percent better. Meg said that the seimei technique should relieve 80 percent of the pain. She tried again, with her arms outstretched and fists clenched for about another minute. Again, I twisted in my seat, and discovered the back pain was completely gone. We gave each other a high five.
Throughout the seimei lecture, I kept twisting in my chair to really see if the pain was gone. I wasn’t obvious about the twisting though; I didn’t want it to appear that I had a twitch of some sort. The pain was gone. The proof is in the pudding: seimei is no joke.
And because my back pain is alleviated, I’m not afraid of sneezing without experiencing sharp pain.
For more information about seimei, the website is seimeifoundation.org.