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Align your innate healing potential
Reduce stress, release tension, and connect with your well-being. Book today!
About Shiatsu
Integrative Approach
Zen Body and Breath combines wellness practices with bodywork and massage to synergise your personal healing journey. Relaxation, Intuitive touch, myofascial release, body awareness practices, and daily routine all help regulate the biodynamic cycles to promote internal healing and alignment with your purpose. Join your practitioner in meditation as you work together to harmonize the dissonance in your biofield.
Compassionate Touch
The client-practitioner relationship is foundational to the healing process. The practitioner uses their trained senses of perception to listen to the client's body and find the appropriate quality of touch to bring about healthy change. The compassion, intuition, and sensitivity of the practitioner help the client relax and amplify their healthy resonance.
Embodied Somatic Intention Setting
The central focus of treatment is the anti-pathogenic goal. Pain, discomfort, limited range of motion, and stress are common reasons people seek out body work; but when we focus on pain, the pain is amplified. What is on the other side of this distress? What is that good feeling that you crave and deserve? What would you like to cultivate in your life? By focusing on the sensations that address our needs, we can amplify our innate healing ability to achieve our goals of our treatment.
Offerings
Shiatsu:
Shiatsu is very relaxing and helps the receiver align with their innate healing potential. From muscular and tendon pain, restricted movement, and tension from stress, to issues sleeping, digestive discomfort, and anxiety from trauma, Shiatsu can help the receiver heal from a variety of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual issues. Based in Chinese medicine and informed by Western anatomy, physiology, and psychology, Shiatsu works to improve the communication pathways within the body by releasing tension and harmonizing with healthy function.
Shiatsu originated in Japan and is practiced clothed on the floor. A mat and bolsters ensure the receiver's comfort. The primary technique focuses on providing relaxed pressure to the receiver's body from the giver's hands. Other techniques include joint mobilization, assisted stretching, deep breathing, and abdominal massage
Advanced Clinical Shiatsu for chronic conditions:
When trauma is stored in the body it can cause many serious health issues: autoimmune conditions, chronic pain, and cancer. Shiatsu can help the receiver process trauma with simple visualization and gentle touch techniques. The receiver will no longer have strong emotional reactions to the event and their body will finally be able to relax and heal itself.
Craniosacral Therapy
With origins in osteopathic medicine since the 1930's, craniosacral therapy is a non-invasive touch therapy suitable for all conditions. The receiver is clothed and lying down on a table, although any position that is most comfortable is suitable. The practitioner uses their intuition to place their hands gently on the body of the receiver. gentle touch of the hands helps the receiver to relax and the tissues unwind themselves, no outside intervention needed. This therapy is very effective for the face and jaw, including other sensitive locations that are difficult to manipulate, as well as trauma stored in the body.
Oil Massage, Gua Sha, and cupping:
The goal of oil massage is to improve circulation of blood and body fluids by use of gliding strokes (similar to Swedish massage) and other techniques utilizing tools. The massage starts out with an emphasis on myofascial release with direct contact of dry skin. After oil is applied, Gua Sha and cupping are used to help release stagnation in the body, giving the body a chance to drain any accumulated toxins in the tissues. Gua Sha uses a tool which glides along the skin, combing through the facial network. Cupping uses silicone suction cups to create space between the layers of tissues, allowing access to fresh blood. Both techniques can leave temporary marks, a sign that stagnant blood is being drawn up from the tissues and cleared out through the lymphatic system just beneath the skin.
Note:
Facia is a net that encapsules every organ, tissue, fiber, and cell in the body. The network of facia can become bound to itself, restricting motion, circulation, and communication throughout the body. Applying pressure to facia helps it to soften so that it can rearrange itself in a more organized state.
Oil massage is performed best when the receiver removes clothing, allowing access to the skin. Precautions will be taken to preserve the respect and dignity of the receiver through appropriate draping, or coving areas of the body that are currently not receiving work with a sheet.
Movement integration:
Various exercises can be recommended for stretching and strengthening tissues. The postures recommended emphasize: development of body awareness through alignment and utilization of tensegrity; as well as meditative focus through relaxed breathing and holding for extended time. The result is integration through coordinated effort of muscular chains that minimize effort of maintaining posture.
More advanced and dynamic exercises can be offered as well, to develop balance, coordination, and power through movement.
Zen Yoga: embodied breath and the heart of Hatha Yoga
Deepen your practice by mastering the basics of Breath and Bandhas - the internal alignment that focuses on control over the pelvic floor, abdominal wall, diaphragm, and throat. Breath practices help keep the mind calm under stressful situations. Learn the power of chanting OM and experience the power of vibrational healing as you delve deep into your internal landscape. Develop psychic sensitivity with standing meditation–a practice which develops awareness of not only the internal landscape of muscles, bones, and organs, but also develops psychic awareness of the electromagnetic field (our energetic egg) that surrounds the corporal body.
Lifestyle integration: Routines to regulate the natural biodynamic rhythmic cycles
To continue the therapeutic effects of bodywork after the session has concluded, the therapist will talk with the receiver about various practices the client can do on their own time. These lifestyle changes focus on development of routine to help regulate the natural rhythms of the body as prescribed through Chinese medical philosophy. The practices should enhance your sense of wellbeing and will be personalized over time after multiple bodywork sessions.
Life coaching collaboration:
Have guidance achieving your goals with the help of one of our Life Coaching partners. Our coordinated effort will help us deliver more effective therapies.
Amenities:
Private bathroom and shower - body wash and fresh towels provided
Filtered drinking water
Homemade massage oil - a blend of oils to moisturize, reduce irritation, and promote healing of the skin
Buckwheat bolsters - to support the body, enhance comfort, and promote alignment
Aromatherapy
Nature sounds - ocean waves to promote relaxed breathing and manage excessive thinking
Temperature regulation - Abundant radiant heat in the winter, Air conditioning in the summer, fans for circulation, and HEPA air filter and window access for fresh air.
Sacred space - intentional and dedicated room for healing and relaxation
Sound therapy (upon request) - bells and bowls
Kyle McQuaid: Practitioner profile
Born and raised in the SW suburbs of Chicago, Kyle was a very curious child and had a talent for abstract thinking. He pursued education in many branches of science and mathematics as a way of searching for answers to shape the understanding of reality and purpose. Ultimately unfulfilled with employment prospects focused on expanding capital or academic careers fighting over publication references, Kyle turned his attention inwards to the parts that were neglected since childhood. While working as a private tutor for high school and college students in physics, mathematics, and chemistry, Kyle was able to pursue alternative education in Yoga which would feed the soul. During his five year stay in Seattle, Kyle pursued spiritual enrichment and exploration of the body through dance, martial arts, and qigong. Out in the PNW Kyle met the Radical Faeries, who would transform and shape Kyle’s life unlike any other group.
After moving back to Chicago in 2020, Kyle returned to school to pursue studies of alternative healing modalities, with an emphasis in Shiatsu. Because of his experience with meditation, empathy, compassion, body awareness, body-weight sharing, and an independent bodywork practice; Kyle’s education accelerated the development of intuitive touch. The paradigm of Chinese Medicine expanded his consciousness and kept him coming back for more. He completed advanced coursework with the school and continues to enroll in classes to further cultivate personal wellness to share with clients.
Education
Brookbush Institute
Movement specialist (in progress)
Zen Shiatsu
715-h Shiatsu Massage Therapy Diploma Program, 2023
AOBTA certified practitioner of Shiatsu, 2023
Licenced Massage Therapist in Illinois, 2024
Advanced Clinical Shiatsu Practice Program, 2023
Zen Shiatsu Mastery training with Grandmother Winter Jade Forest, 2024
Blue Lotus Thai Healing Studies
200-h Thai Bodywork program, 2021
Tejas Yoga
250-h Yoga teacher training, 2015
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Bachelors of Science in Physics and Chemistry, 2012