Elaine Liechti has been a Shiatsu practitioner and teacher since 1983, and has been teaching in Scotland since 1986. Don’t be fooled by her small stature and soft hands, because her whole career is a testament to her character as a Scottish woman and one-time Aikido practitioner. A student of Pauline Sasaki, she is one of the first generation of Shiatsu practitioners in the United Kingdom. Above all, she is the author of several books on Shiatsu which have been translated into many languages. Discover this lady of Glasgow and of Shiatsu, who has made her mark on Shiatsu across the Channel.
Emilie: Hi, Elaine. Could you introduce yourself in a few words, please?
Elaine: My name is Elaine Liechti, and I’m a Shiatsu practitioner and teacher. I began learning Shiatsu in 1980, and I’m still learning – it is a lifelong process. I teach Shiatsu here in Glasgow, in Scotland, and we created a Shiatsu School here in 1986.
Elaine, how did you discover Shiatsu?
I discovered Shiatsu when I was training to be a journalist in London. I had an experience where somebody tried to attack me at night, so I looked into self-defense classes and chose to study Aikido. One night during the Aikido class I got knocked out and Sensei brought me round by using Kidney 1 point. When I asked, “what is this?”, he said, “Shiatsu”. And he told me I could find out more at the East West Centre. Later that year, I was going through a bit of a health crisis with really severe migraine and digestive upset. I happened to pass a health food shop where there was a poster which read “Do you feel tight or loose?” That resonated with me because a lot of the time I was very uptight with stiff shoulders and neck, and bad headaches, and then sometimes I felt very loose with no energy and had to rest for days. The poster was for a series of lectures about macrobiotics, including diet, balanced lifestyle and some East Asian theory. The tutor suggested that I should try Shiatsu for my headaches, and on asking where I could learn this, the reply was “oh, the East West Centre”. So, thinking “I have heard this before”. I went and signed up for a weekend introduction to Shiatsu. This was with a man called Jon Sandifer[i] who unfortunately is no longer with us. It was a very practical weekend with no theory or explanations, just using Ki and hara, which was familiar to me because of Aikido. It felt fantastic, like “I can DO this!”. Very different to writing and journalism. And since I was at a crisis or crossroads I felt “this is what I want to do with my life”. It was an amazing strong pull.
I then signed up to do Levels 1 & 2 at the Michio Kushi Institute, at the East West Centre, since that was the only place I could find that taught Shiatsu. We did other subjects too, Oriental Diagnosis, Macrobiotic cooking, “Order of the Universe” which is the Macrobiotic philosophy of Ki, East Asian medicine and Shiatsu. My first Shiatsu teachers there were Mike Burns, Jon Sandifer and Neil Gulliver.
After that, when the Shiatsu Society started, there were other teachers who visited the UK, like Nishio Kishi, Shizuko Yamamoto (my husband and I cut short our honeymoon to go on her weekend course), and Wataru Ohashi. And, of course, Pauline Sasaki. We will talk about her later. I always wanted to experience as many different styles of Shiatsu as possible. I think that makes you a more rounded practitioner.
How was the recognition of Shiatsu when you started to learn it?
At that time, as far as I could see, very few people knew about Shiatsu. It seemed very new, or, not new, but it was very strange. My family thought this was something odd; they were very conventional. Although other Complementary therapies like Homeopathy, Acupuncture and herbalism were known about, Shiatsu seemed completely unheard of. Around this time in 1981, the Shiatsu Society was created, to link up different people who were doing Shiatsu (it wasn’t only the East West Centre) and spread information about it. I was asked by Jon Sandifer, one of the Society’s founders, if I would be interested in dealing with the administration, and that was the start of my long journey with the Shiatsu Society. I was the Secretary for 10 years, then took a break while I was involved in other activities, like setting up the Equine Shiatsu Association and helping to run the Rudolf Steiner School in Glasgow. I have been on the Education Committee for about 30 years, and more recently I was on the Board of Directors for 6 years. In that time the Society has gone from being a networking ‘club’ to a professional association which promotes the therapy, maintains standards of practice and education and, over the years, has done lots of other things like research, running congresses, public exhibitions and so on.
Thank you for that. And how do you feel nowadays?
Nowadays, Shiatsu is much more recognized, although not as much as other therapies. That is something we are all working on. Here in Glasgow, because of the community projects that have been done by our students and graduates, Shiatsu is actually known about. For example, after COVID, when we were all just recovering from that, the Shiatsu School went into a medical General Practice to give Shiatsu to the professionals; the doctors, the nurses, the receptionists, and so on, to help with stress relief, because they were all so stretched due to the pandemic. They were pleased to have this because they had heard about Shiatsu and stress relief. And I know there are projects in England where colleagues are working to support people with cancer. They’re not treating them for cancer, because we’re not allowed to do that, but supporting them in their wellbeing – it’s a holistic approach. And there are a couple of National Health Service hospitals which are actually looking to create projects where they will have Shiatsu for the patients.
Can you tell me how many practitioners are registered in Scotland?
Elaine: In Scotland, now, on the Shiatsu Society’s map, it says 55. In the whole of the UK, we’ve got about 430 practitioners.
Are they all practicing “Zen” Shiatsu only?
No, there are different styles and approaches. Within Shiatsu training, we try to encourage people to look at different styles and in fact that is written in to the Shiatsu Society’s Core Curriculum. So, for example, in the Glasgow School first year, we teach just very simple, classical Shiatsu as it were, just hands-on pressure with Yin Yang and the Five Elements as the theory base. But because one of my main influences was Pauline Sasaki, I’m coming from a Zen Shiatsu point of view, so I guess we’re starting to use that technique from quite early on, but we don’t say to the students “we’re teaching you Zen Shiatsu”. And we don’t go into any of Masunaga’s theory until the second year; that’s when we start to teach the meridian extensions. Now, in the school in Aberdeen, they have a similar kind of very neutral first year. And then they join second and third years together and either do a year of TCM next or a year of Zen Shiatsu, depending upon the cycle. In England there are other Schools which teach Zen and TCM, Movement Shiatsu, Five Element Shiatsu, Shiatsu-Shintai. So, there are different styles, but a lot of people do practice Zen Shiatsu because of the influence of Pauline Sasaki who trained a lot of us senior teachers. There are not so many Namikoshi style practitioners that I know of. I don’t know anybody in Scotland, but there are some in London. And a longer time ago, there was a very influential teacher called Sonia Moriceau[i], who was in Wales or the Welsh English border. She trained with Ohashi, so, she was coming from that Ohashi point of view, but then, because she was very interested in meditation and self-reflective work, she developed her style into what she called Healing Shiatsu. Each School tends to have a slightly different “house style” but we are all teaching Shiatsu. We feel it’s important to make connections between different styles of Shiatsu, so that people know them. And then we don’t have this rather linear thinking that you sometimes get from East Asian martial arts where, if you haven’t done it this way, then you’ve got to start training right from the bottom again. Certainly, in our School we accept people from other approaches. It’s just like, if you’ve already done some Shiatsu training, then you can come and join our second year and you can learn how we do Shiatsu. And then you can share the knowledge that you have from your specialty.
Tell me more about Pauline Sasaki, please?
Okay, we first brought her over from the US in 1984. At the time, the UK Shiatsu Society had been going for a little while in London and we were trying to bring people together. We thought that arranging a course with a very experienced teacher would help with this. One of my first teachers, Harriet Devlin (who, by the way was the main person in getting the Shiatsu Society started) said, “well, we could ask Ohashi, but he’s quite expensive. So why don’t I ask Pauline Sasaki because she taught me when I was in Ohashi’s school in New York”. Harriet invited Pauline to come over and we organized her to do a five-day workshop. It was just mind-blowing, because Pauline had assisted Ohashi in translating the book that we know as “Zen Shiatsu”[ii]. Pauline was an American-Japanese, and she did not read Japanese kanji, but Ohashi did, so Ohashi told her what the words were and then she kind of rendered it into English. Pauline had also studied with Shizuto Masunaga and had been the one who demonstrated for him when he gave workshops in New York, so she had a lot of understanding of his way of working. In the “Zen Shiatsu” book, it says things like “use the Kyo-jitsu method to feel the Hara” but it wasn’t clear from the text what that was. When Pauline came, she showed us what it meant, and she explained it and it was such a revelation. Then after that five-day course, she came back the next year for another five-day course and so on. In those days there was no internet, there was no email and so if I wanted to ask her a question, it was too expensive to telephone to America, I had to write her a letter on this wonderful blue thin airmail paper and then wait for a reply coming back.
For me her teaching was so clear, it was so full of heart and it really opened up my eyes to a lot of different ways of working which were not just “pom-pom-pom” with the pressure. It was more the practical application of kyo-jitsu, and the wider meaning of the meridians. Then later feeling different vibrational levels: is this a physical thing, is it emotional and so on ? All of this is now common in Shiatsu training, but at that time no-one else was teaching this, at least, not in the UK that I could see. For me she was a complete inspiration, and I studied with her as much as I could, around family and other commitments. The last seminar I did with her was in 2003 when she had developed Quantum Shiatsu, but before she went off body again into “Lightbody Shiatsu”. I sometimes use the Quantum techniques, but more generally I use the original Zen Shiatsu techniques. It depends on what the receiver’s Ki needs. Because I have been influenced by other modalities like Spiritual Healing, Neuro-muscular technique and some Shamanic work, I tend to add whatever may be necessary to my Shiatsu sessions. I think that Pauline’s expansive teaching approach gave me the confidence to apply these to my therapy work.
What would you say is your biggest contribution to Shiatsu?
I’ve always felt that having a good solid foundational structure to anything can help it to flourish. To my students, I sometimes describe the techniques of Shiatsu as a framework on which they can hang their healing abilities. The framework gives stability from which they can develop. Over the years I think I have focused on helping both my School and the organisations I have worked with to create structures so that they can develop and flourish. For example, when I set up the Glasgow School of Shiatsu, I created the course and support that I would like to have had when I was training. In the early days of the Shiatsu Society, I was involved in developing the Core Curriculum, and that structure has gone on to be the basis of the Diploma in Shiatsu which my friend and colleague Annie Cryar worked tirelessly to have placed on the Regulated Qualifications Framework in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Scotland has its own different Framework).
I was instrumental in developing the Society’s scheme to ratify Shiatsu Schools, so that their graduates can go directly onto the Society’s Register of Practitioners. That Ratification scheme is based on a similar one that was used in the Further Education College where I worked for 17 years. I was lucky enough to be “head hunted” into a lecturing post at a large Glasgow FE college because they needed a massage tutor who had some knowledge of Shiatsu. Under the guise of “Advanced Massage” I was able to teach foundation level Shiatsu to hundreds of students studying for a Diploma in Complementary Therapies. The experience of being in mainstream education and teaching Shiatsu, Anatomy & Physiology, and how to run a complementary therapy business, was invaluable both in developing the teaching at the Glasgow School of Shiatsu and, perhaps more importantly, giving me insights into how mainstream educational structures and practices could be used in the Society to create a strong “quality assurance” system (Ratification) which would also allow individual Schools to operate in their own unique way.
I saw you wrote many books; can you talk about it?
I only wrote three books, or four if you count the very little first one that I wrote and published myself in 1987 because the only books then were “Zen Shiatsu” by Masunaga, and Ohashi’s “Do-it-Yourself Shiatsu”, which were hard to get hold of. The first properly published book was in a series on complementary therapies by a company called Element Books, which doesn’t exist anymore (Editor’s note: to see the list of Elaine’s books, please look at the end of this article). They asked me to write it, and they said, “this is what we want you to write about”. It was a small thin book just with black and white drawings but I’m very pleased to say that it was translated into Dutch, Portuguese, Czech, French, Italian and I think Spanish as well. It’s nice to know that my words got out there internationally.
Then Element Books put that small series into a bigger illustrated series, and they asked me if I would expand what I had written. It’s what I call my “big book” – The Complete Illustrated Guide to Shiatsu. It was then taken over by HarperCollins and is now out of print. It is really the first-year course book for my students. It has the basic beginner’s sequence and then there’s information about the meridians and some guided meditations and so on. If you read it, it’s like you can hear me talking to the students and explaining as I do in class.
The third book which I co-wrote with my colleague Vicky Smyth is The Extended Meridians of Zen Shiatsu. This grew out of a project that we had with our second and third year students from way back. When we started teaching the Zen meridians, we had Masanaga’s chart which is lovely, but it looks a bit like the Paris Metro or the London Underground if you are new to it, and the students go “it’s so hard!”. I asked Vicky, who is an artist as well as a Shiatsu practitioner, to draw out each individual meridian and we gave these to the students as individual sheets as they learnt each meridian. Then we thought, why don’t we just compile it into a book? Carola Beresford-Cooke suggested that we should approach Singing Dragon, which is her publisher. We talked to them, and they thought it was nice but needed something extra, so I thought why don’t we make it a colouring book like the Anatomy Colouring book. Poor Vicky had to re-draw all the meridians to make them in an open line so they could be coloured in. It became an activity book with the format of a meridian picture on one page and then some little notes and tips from me about location on the other page, with lots of blank space for writing notes. It’s an activity workbook. Those are my three books, and they are really all about the basic underlying structures and techniques to the Shiatsu that I practice and teach.
I sometimes say that I’m going to write a fourth book which is going to be The Quirky Book of Shiatsu – all about the funny little things I say to help people remember things when they’re learning. But I’ve been saying this for the last 15 years and I haven’t started it yet!
My focus is on practicing and teaching straightforward Shiatsu techniques, introducing people to Shiatsu to begin with, and connecting those who are within the Shiatsu community. In April 2025 I go to Japan for the first time – it feels like a bit of a pilgrimage and I am looking forward to connecting with some interesting Shiatsu people there.
Wow, so I wish you a happy travel to Japan and thank you very much for this beautiful moment.
All the pleasure is mine.
Notes
- [i] Jon Sandifer is the author of many books. Among them “Acupressure: For Health, Vitality and First Aid”, Element Books Ltd 1997
- [ii] To know more about this French teacher, you can also read Terésa Hadland interview
- [iii] Originaly this book’s title was just “Shiatsu”, written by Shizuto Masunaga. To know more about this change of title, read the interview with Ohashi.
Elaine Liechti books
- The Shiatsu Manual, G. Thomson, S. Atkinson, E. Liechti, 1994, Headline Book Publishing
- Shiatsu: Japanese Massage for Health and Fitness, E. Liechti, 1997, Element
- Shiatsu: The Japanese Healing Art of Touch for Health and Fitness (Complete Illustrated Guide), E. Liechti, 1998, Element Books
- The Extended Meridians of Zen Shiatsu: A Guidebook and Colouring Book, E. Liechti & V. Smyth, 2016
Author
Trained as a chemist, she has been an assiduous practitioner of the martial arts since 1996, particularly Shito-ryū-style karate, of which she is 5th dan. She has also competed in karate and taekwondo (1st dan), and has been teaching karate since 1999. She has also been teaching yoga since 2019.
It was through her martial training that she discovered the “points” that bless this or that organ. To quench her curiosity, in 2013 she began training in shiatsu, first in Zen Shiatsu with Paul Banester and Gerry Rixen, then in various stages. She then met Ivan Bel, with whom she continued her training and joined Ryoho Shiatsu. She loves to travel and is keen to meet other schools of shiatsu.
- Interview with Elaine Liechti: the lady of Glasgow - 15 April 2025
Transcription
