WHAT IS HIBIKI MEDIA

Many years ago, I had the good fortune as a young man to train with some very special teachers - The first, from Japan, had a formal school of Traditional Japanese Medicine - my formal training there (and my typical practice throughout most of my career) consisted of acupuncture, moxibustion, manual therapy, Japanese nutritional understandings, and doing a lot of client education.

My second teacher was an Appalachian man practicing his Native American folk medicine, specializing in herbs and bodywork - he also always started by working in the abdomen.

When I was first practicing, there was very little in the way of acupuncture legislation or regulation in the US. This was during the early to late-1980s, and I was very fortunate to have access to these older teachers who were passing on their lifelong cultural knowledge to me.

About 10 years later, I also graduated from a Chinese medicine school, and became a licensed acupuncturist.

I spent many years practicing in various different regions around the U.S. I worked in Colorado and North Carolina and the Pacific Northwest, and various different places while traveling. Later, I spent a number of years in Mexico.

Over the years, I've had many, many people ask me if I would be able to teach them what I knew and what I was practicing, what I learned from my teachers.

During a lot of that time, I wasn't really prepared to do that - I didn’t have any sort of organized program.

And so a number of years ago, I started trying to figure out how to do that.

I generally spent a lot of time with each client, so I would talk to them while I was working on them and have conversations to develop diagnostic information, medical history, and trying to understand why they had the conditions that they had - what happened to this person that resulted in my noticing what I was feeling while touching them?

That became a big part of my practice - getting a deep understanding of their

history as a person, including medical history and history of any sorts of injuries or stories of traumatic events that happened in their life, surgeries, medications, all that kind of thing.

So I decided, when I started focusing on Hibikimedia, to start with one part of my practice that is central to what I actually do, and very uncommon.

That is the abdominal manual therapy part of what I do.

For one thing, that was such an important part of my practice and the benefit that my clients got from our treatments, and it was a skill that I developed a particular expertise in.

A lot of the places that I worked were places with transient populations, like tourist areas in Aspen and in Mexico, or places that I would periodically pass through in my travels.

I would often hear from my clients, “When I go home, or in the meantime, before I get to see you again, where can I find somebody who does this kind of practice?”

The only other kinds of practitioners that I know of are people who practice Ampuku (Japanese), Chi Nei Tsang (a Thai-chinese style of abdominal work), Mayan Abdominal massage, or Upledger-style abdominal visceral work.

Those are the only other schools of abdominal manual therapy that I have heard of - but all of those practices are also very rare in most places.

So I decided that I would come up with a program to teach abdominal manual therapy - a course that would be self contained as a unit (actually 3 levels), and people could learn that part of the practice and then incorporate it into whatever else they did.

Whether you are a massage therapist, an acupuncturist, a midwife, a nurse or a home care provider, I could start to share some basic knowledge and tools to help you learn to do a lot of things that your clients really need.

The abdomen is so central to our health in all kinds of ways.

Not just digestion, but the nervous system and the reproductive systems and

the liver - and all these different processes that are happening in the abdomen. The best way that I know of to access them, figure out what's happening with them, and treat them is through touch.

It is a rare practice, and a very valuable one.

I'm feeling a responsibility to my teachers to pass on what they taught to me and what I spent so much time developing.

So I decided to start Hibiki Media as a way to start being able to pass on some of this old knowledge.

I am excited to share this work, and I'd love to help guide you through the journey of learning about it.