A holistic approach to healing

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.

Have you noticed an increase in people seeking out your healing treatment?

There’s been a huge interest, simply because the way we live our lives is not in tune with nature. What we eat is different to what our ancestors ate thousands of years ago; our sleep patterns are interrupted by technology; and we are experiencing a great sense of disconnection – despite living in this huge community, we don’t feel connected.

Western medicine is amazing – if you have an accident, you don’t need acupuncture you need a surgeon; but when it comes to more chronic conditions where we can see there is a connection between the mental and physical, that’s where ancient methods and more holistic approaches from India or China have become popular. These methods address the whole person: their analogy is that in the West we approach a person like a machine – if a part is broken you replace it. Westerm treatment is considered to bevery mechanical – it’s seen as a technical issue. Chinese medicine sees us as an ecosystem; we are a garden and the doctor is the gardener who wants to understand the whole picture and the connection between what’s happening in different parts of the ecosystem.

Do you have any guidance for how we can each try to find balance and grow through any changes we’re seeking to make this year?

Acknowledge the part of you that has made good decisions so far and brought you to where you are today. We tend to blame ourselves and only focus on the bad; but if we start to acknowledge that there is something in us that does make good decisions for our health and our enjoyment of life, then we can start from a place of joy and positivity rather than negativity. Ask questions of yourself with gentleness and openness – consider why you are doing things or seeking to make change.

To learn more and book a session with Slavomir click here