"Disability does not mean inability. It simply means adaptability."
SHEN YOGA
Yoga adapted for disabilities
"Don't mind me. I come from another planet. I still see horizons where you draw boundaries."
Frida Kahlo
In the photo Luana Sechi, Rett syndrome
Yoga beyond barriers
SHEN YOGA
I began my relationship with mental disability about twenty years ago. It was through Judo that I came into contact with a world I knew only very superficially. I have been practicing Kundalini Yoga for more than thirty years and Tai Chi Chuan for more than twenty. The in-depth study and practice of these two disciplines was the cultural background I had to relate to this new experience of mental and physical DISABILITY, in addition to Judo of course, which represented the first contact and which I still practice, teach, and care for today.
However, the approach with some forms of disability did not allow me to fully use the very valid and countless possibilities that the aforementioned disciplines offered me. So I began to try to understand the most obvious difficulties that people had as a result of their disability. I adapted and modified the techniques learned in traditional disciplines, to be able to perform them with fair success on people with mental disabilities. The combination of active techniques (performed in almost complete autonomy) and passive ones, carried out by the operator, the use of correct breathing, relaxation, etc., constitute Shen Yoga.
The human body is crossed by energy channels, as Tai Chi Chuan and Yoga teach, so by acting on points of our body, with pressure, movements, repeated and targeted, in the case of our disabled people, repeated many times, we try to rebalance an energy level that allows the operator to come into contact with the person, and the contact to be established with people with mental disabilities by those who "work" with them is fundamental.
Through Shen Yoga, I am able to establish this contact much more deeply by using my body which comes into contact with theirs. Of course, obtaining a response to a gesture or a breath takes time but, when the person has understood (cum-prendere, to take with oneself) they hardly forget and, indeed, the gesture, the breathing, etc. become of ever higher quality.
I have had the "fortune" to be able to work with many disabled people and, apart from everything I have been able to receive in return from them and their relatives and friends, I have come to know pathologies such as Down syndrome (the best known), the multiple varieties of mental retardation (from birth, due to difficult births, as a consequence of medications taken, etc.), autism, Rett syndrome which seems to affect only girls, and not boys, around two and a half years of age, with very serious consequences.
Through movements, very simple for us, but of enormous difficulty for them, Shen Yoga offers a valid contribution and support to medical therapies, which Shen Yoga does not replace. I reiterate that it does not replace them, because Shen Yoga seeks to activate the internal energy that each of us possesses, regardless of pathology, to make it flow correctly and naturally, seeking the energetic rebalancing of our body through external stimuli that can be the manipulations of the operator or the movements that the person themselves imitates and performs alone.
Sergio Olivieri, founder of the Shen Yoga method
SHEN in traditional Chinese medicine
indicates the energy of the HEART
SHEN YOGA
Dojo NARABI*Via Leonardo Da Vinci 1 Rignano Flaminio 00060 RM *338 254 5097
"Disability does not mean inability.
It simply means adaptability."