The Joy of Feeling: Bodymind Acupressure/Jin Shin Do by Iona Marsaa Teeguarden. Tokyo & New York: Japan Publications, 1987.

Reviewed by Mitch Hall

The Joy of Feeling is a joy to read. It is a beautiful book abounding in lively wisdom about our sentient nature. Iona Teeguarden brings together Taoist philosophy and acupressure theory with modern humanistic psychology--mutually illuminating classic and modern insights in her contribution to the healing arts. The subtle Japanese system of "bodymind acupressure" is called Jin Shin Do, “the way of the compassionate spirit."

Through Jin Shin Do, Teeguarden is able to put her finger--literally and figuratively--on the client's embodied blockages to authentic feeling. She uses radial pulses and significant areas of muscular tension to assess patterns of emotional inhibition or distortion. By gently yet firmly holding acupoints in various combinations, she releases muscular armoring and rebalances body energy. The client can consciously integrate, with the therapist's assistance, the imagery, dreams, or past scenes that the process evokes. The author trusts that "feeling is healing." She understands the value of being free to feel and express the whole spectrum of emotions, not just those popularly deemed "positive." "We can choose to feel or not to feel; we cannot choose to feel just some feelings. Our feelings arise to enliven us, and to connect us with our real inner nature."


The systematic five-elements model that Teeguarden has developed from her practice she calls the "emotional kaleidoscope." She makes careful distinctions between feelings that we frequently confuse, such as joy and happiness, sensitivity and hypersensitivity, grief and sadness, dream and illusion; she gracefully interweaves theoretical constructs with case studies.

The patriarchy, in the East as in the West, has denigrated feelings in ways as varied as the ascetic, the macho, and the bureaucratic. Thus, The Joy of Feeling contributes to a much needed, major cultural shift toward a healthy embracing of our feeling nature. As Teeguarden writes, "Descartes said, 'I think, therefore I am.' No. I feel, therefore I am .... The course of life's river is accessed by feeling and intuiting."


She affirms the joy of feeling, but she does not naively assert that all feeling is joy; she compassionately acknowledges the pains that lead us to retreat from feeling. Yet we cannot claim our share of joy without feeling our way through the layers of emotional and physical tension that block us from our true being. Consequently, Teeguarden affirms, "Getting in touch with the body and its feelings is a way to get in touch with the core Self, which is both strong and wise."

Review originally published in The AHP Perspective, October 1988. San Francisco: Association for Humanistic Psychology, p. 16.