What is Jin Shin Jyutsu? An Interview with Judy Andry: Part One

Today SevenPonds speaks with Judy Andry. Judy Andry has been studying Jin Shin Jyutsu since 1984. She was one of the first three members of the Jin Shin Jyutsu Advisory Council in 1998 and she has a small private counseling practice in New Orleans. She is the author of the book A Touching Goodbye: The Gentle Use of Jin Shin Jyutsu At Times of Critical Illness and Death, which focuses on the impact that Jin Shin Jyutsu can have on those who are nearing the end of life. 

Credit: Kathy Anderson

Kimberly: How did you get started with Jin Shin Jyutsu?

Judy: I was working at Sacred Hearts and I had private classes and seminars and talks on adolescents, which was all a lot to be doing, and then our only daughter got engaged to be married, so we started working on this wedding. It was all positive things, but I started having headaches and aches and pains. It finally got to the point where I ached somewhere all the time and instead of complaining about aching, once in a while I would say to my husband, “I don’t hurt.”

When we sent out the wedding invitations, I got in touch with my friend Charles and I told him, “Listen Charles, you keep telling me about this acupressure work you’re doing. I need to know where you go to study that. I have to go the day after the wedding because I’m dying” Then there was this silence and he said, “I’ll be there in 10 minutes.” Thirty minutes later, I was lying on the bed fully clothed talking with my husband as he was touching me. Jin Shin Jyutsu is a process where you touch a person in two different places at a time and wait until you get pulses, and then you move one of the hands and you wait again. You are harmonizing the underlying energy flow in the body. So he was doing this to me, I was lying there, and I promise that within 15 minutes I was about to burst into tears because I absolutely knew the right thing was happening to me.

Kimberly: Is Jin Shin Jyutsu very easy to perform?

Judy: Yes! That’s why I wrote my book on Jin Shin Jyutsu. Anybody can do it. If you want to become a practitioner, you can help someone and learn things that are a little bit more complicated, but as far as practicing it goes, anyone can do it.

Credit: Wikipedia

Kimberly: Do you have any stories about how you’ve helped your clients with Jin Shin Jyutsu?

Judy: Yes. I had one woman who had all of these skin rashes and a whole list of ailments. She came to me for about a year, once or twice a week, and she ended up recovering so beautifully that she became a practitioner herself.

I also started organizing classes to have a Jin Shin Jyutsu teacher come in to teach five day classes and this lady who I had worked with, who became a practitioner, that she eventually took over to become the sponsor of the five day classes. We have a nice group of people down here now who mainly started doing it because it helped them so much.

The first time I went to a Jin Shin Jyutsu class, I didn’t know anyone and I couldn’t understand a word that Mary Burmeister was saying. During intermission and lunch breaks and things, I would wander up to people and say: “What brought you to Jin Shin?” and everyone who I talked to would tell me some astounding story about how Jin Shin Jyutsu had helped them.

Kimberly: So it is a meditative process even when you are practicing on someone else.

Judy: It is. And it is an amazing process to be a part of when you are helping someone that is critically ill. They don’t always die, and in fact a lot of people get much better. Everyone eventually dies but sometimes when you are practicing Jin Shin Jyutsu, they will get better. Other times, when you are practicing on someone who is critically ill, they will get progressively worse until they pass away.

You can read part two here.