The New Shiatsu Method: Helping the Body to Heal Itself Paperback - 2004

RYOKYU ENDO has developed Tao Shiatsu over the past twenty years while training in the Pure Land School of Buddhism. His ongoing contribution to shiatsu therapy is the reestablishment of the original manual form of Oriental medicine, which demonstrates the deeply effective quality of shiatsu as a medical therapy. He brings to the practice of shiatsu the influences of meditative insight and discipline, and the intuitive understanding of his talents as a musician and composer. He has released five albums, known collectively as Tao Music. Born in Tokyo in 1956, he lived for three years in New York City from the age of ten. After graduating from the Japan Shiatsu School in 1978, he studied Zen Shiatsu with its founder Master Shizuto Masunaga, while continuing studies in psychotherapy. In 1984 he began treating patients at the Fukujuso Psychiatric Hospital in Okinawa, while teaching shiatsu to doctors trained in Western medicine. In 1991 he received a black belt in the martial art of Aikido, and was ordained as a Pure Land Buddhist priest after completing his formal studies (begun sixteen years earlier). Tao Shiatsu: Life Medicine for the 21st Century was published in 1995 and is now available in seven languages. He lives in Kyoto and teaches at the Tao Shiatsu centers there and in Tokyo. He travels extensively, giving workshops and seminars throughout the world. MICHAEL CHRISTINI was born in 1967 in New Zealand. In 1990 he first visited Japan and was introduced to shiatsu while living in Kyoto. In 1995, he and his partner Stephanie Courtenay returned to Kyoto to study with Master Ryokyu Endo and Mayu Endo at the Tao Shiatsu school. In 1999 they established the Tao Shiatsu Oceania clinic and school in Auckland. A Tao Shiatsu practitioner program was also set up in Melbourne, Australia, in 2001. Christini has assisted his teacher at workshops and conferences in Europe, Thailand, and Oceania. TZVIKA CALISAR was born in 1962 in Israel. In 1985 he went to Japan and started shiatsu studies at the Namikoshi School in Tokyo while attending lessons at the Iokai Center-the Zen Shiatsu school founded by Master Masunaga. After attending a series of classes that Master Ryokyu Endo was giving in Tokyo, he was invited to come to Kyoto to study Tao Shiatsu. For two and a half years he studied with Master Ryokyu Endo and Mayu Endo. In 1990 he returned to Israel and established the Tao Shiatsu Center in Tel Aviv, teaching Tao Shiatsu and giving treatment both there and in Europe. In 2001 he moved back to Japan, where he is currently teaching and giving treatment at the Tokyo Tao Shiatsu center. He continues to teach in Israel, Europe, and recently North America.