A holistic approach to healing
Slavomir Latko follows an ancient Daoist philosophy that emphasises living in harmony with nature and offers a holistic approach to healing cultivating not only physical, but also mental and spiritual well-being.
Slavomir offers a unique blend of ancient healing methods, all based within Traditional Chinese Medicine principles, including acupressure, full body massage and sound therapy, which allows the Qi, our universal life force, to flow unobstructed, detoxifying the vital organs and rejuvenating us at the cellular level.
How did you first discover Traditional Chinese Medicine?
I grew up in Poland but spent most of my childhood in hospitals as I was quite sick. One of my first teachers as a teenager was working in a local hospital doing lots of treatments with sound and assisting people in huge pain in the final stage of their sickness. What I witnessed was magical. I saw her working with depression, prolonged physical pain, chronic issues and within 7–8 minutes of playing sound the pain would be gone. There is a wide spectrum in sound – it can assist physical recovery but also help harmonise our emotions. Like music it can help us relax, but it also has this more spiritual subtle dimension. In the West, sound therapy is more studied these days from a physical perspective – what happens to the blood, for example, after 20 minutes of sound.
Later I began to study tai chi and then explore other forms of Chinese medicine myself, including sound and qigong. I was curious about different forms of healing – Indian and other methods.
What can people expect from one of your classes or workshops?
Classes and group sessions involve gongs. We will do a lot of qigong, which is Chinese yoga, so lots of stretching to lengthen and open up the body and loosen the joints. Then as the mind gets more rooted in the physical body, we refine that process and go on to certain types of meditation. And we finish with sound. Sound is nourishing; it allows us to start to tap into the subtler dimensions within each person – the emotions and the mind.
In individual sessions, I work on allowing the ‘qi’– the energy –to flow. There are ways of tonifying and topping up energy but if there are leakages foundations are not there – like bad eating habits, overworking, dehydration, not sleeping, it is very difficult. These need to be addressed first, then we can design a treatment plan that will build on that, so we look at lifestyle changes first.
