Do-In

Last Thursday, I went to a Do-In (Traditional Chinese Medicine) workshop at Yoga & Cultura in Ipanema to learn how to align my chakras by accessing them through different pressure points through out my body--a self massage. The instructor was a skinny man in his early fifties that had discovered Do-In in New York while living and working there. According to him, he was very unwell and had gone to the doctor to see what was alling him. The doctors could find nothing wrong with him, and told him they would have to wait for something to manifest itself before they could treat him. He thought this was a ridiculous idea, as his health was still in a moment where he could prevent a serious illness, so he decided to take an alternative approach looking into different types of holistic medicines and practices, where he came across Do-In. He said that the master took one look at him and exclaimed "You are a very sick man!" which ellated him, as no one before could tell him that anything was wrong. From that moment on, he has been practicing Do-In and feeling wonderful, in a nutshell.

He continued flailing his arms about demonstrating the movements like a an interpretive modern dance and talking about Do-In's benefits for an hour and the crowd started stirring a little. At one point, I thought that he might take flight over all of us by the velocity of his arm movements. He might have lived in NYC, but he was definitely a Brazilian at heart. His speech was slightly redundant and we wanted to try this miracle self massage.

Finally, after almost and hour and a half of hearing about Do-In we got to experiment with it ourselves. It was incredible as he talked for an hour about the benefits, one would think he would spend time on the technique, but he flew through most of the practice leaving me still clueless about the principle message that starts at your shoulder, runs down to your fingertips, back up to your shoulder, around your head, down your lateral torso, down the leg, up the leg on the inside, and back up over the head, to repeat the sequence on the other side. He did it like lighting, so I'm not sure if that is even the sequence. One very important pressure point I do remember, however, is almost in the middle of your palm--it is supposed to augment sex drive. Hum...interesting.

The other pressure point I paid particular interest to was for putting yourself to sleep. He said that most sleeping problems are the result of an anxious stomach, so one should calm the stomach to sleep. The pressure point in question is on the first toe next to your big toe, on the bottom outside corner of the toenail, where you are supposed to press with the tip of your nail and hold it securely until you dose off to sleep. I tried this,  legs up in air, pressing and pressing, trying to have the patience for this to take effect, but needless to say, I just turned over and drifted of to sleep about 30 mins later as normal. I won't discount it quite yet, but it didn't work after 10 mins of pressure.  

All in all, it was fun to learn about something new. I am continuing to massage and hit the toxins out of my body daily since. I will end as the instructor ended, "Don't forget to touch yourself daily." There is nothing else I can add to that.