Shenyo was founded by Pat Leeson, an experienced and professionally qualified Shiatsu Practitioner, Qi Gong and Yoga Teacher. Pat's mission is to share the benefits these wonderful health-supporting therapies to those in need. Pat lives and works in Woking, but provides home visits around Surrey and parts of southwest London.
The three practises that Shenyo offers are all based in ancient eastern systems of healthcare where health was always understood as a delicate balance of mind, body and spirit in relation to our environment and life experiences. Shiatsu, Yoga and Qi Gong compliment each other perfectly and can be life changing when practised alongside a healthy diet and lifestyle.
Pat discovered Shiatsu at the age of 30 due to raised stress levels and ongoing back issues as a result of being a secondary school teacher. Having retrained as a Shiatsu Practitioner, Qi Gong was part of the training in developing an awareness of Qi and maintaining your own health as a Shiatsu Practitioner. She realised that as a body worker you need to really take care of all aspects of your own health and she turned to Yoga as well as Qi Gong. These practises were life changing for her and she deepened her practise of both Qi Gong and Yoga and trained to be a teacher in both arts. The training and study of all of these practises is a life path for Pat as they are arts that require skill, experience and dedicated practise. Pat is a Shiatsu Practitioner Fellow member of the Shiatsu Society, a teacher with the British Wheel of Yoga and a teacher of Qi Gong with the Lotus Nei Gong School of Daoist arts headed by Damo Mitchell.
In the daoist system of healing in ancient China of the different ways to heal the body and the mind, the most beneficial and long lasting way to health was to heal yourself from the inside. Heal the mind, balance the emotions and everything else would follow. Thus meditation was considered the most effective method. However meditiation is very hard to achieve, demands a lot of time and practise and is not a practical way of healing for most people. In addition,, in order to be able to achieve the state of meditation one had to have a good level of mental and physical well-being to begin. So systems were developed whereby those farthest from absolute health might have more support and intervention to assist them. The first of these was body work or touch based therapies like Shiatsu and the Chinese Tui Na, then came needles and herbs which could affect the system more deeply and finally surgery.
For the average person a combination of diet, exercise, herbs and massage was ideal. Acupuncture was used if things needed an extra kick and surgery and poisons were considered the most extreme level. (Poisons are how ancient Chinese medicine might have described most western medicines as they harm one aspect of the body in order to change or manage a disease or illness.)
In the Eastern system we are all sick, all out of balance - otherwise we wouldn't get ill or have problems with our muscles and bones. Thus we all need to look to exercise, diet, herbs to support our body to work better without harming it. In addition we all need a little extra input - touch therapy like Shiatsu in order to get our systems moving and working better.