Can a Japanese facial massage really rub out wrinkles while harmonising your body and soul?

The brochure about facial harmony promises me a blissful journey from head to toe. My guide on this journey is Japanese-born yoga teacher and shiatsu practitioner, Fumi Yamamoto.

Dressed in white and lavender with a face that radiates a happy healthiness, Yamamoto immediately exudes a sense of calm befitting someone experienced in the art of healing. But she tells me this hasn’t always been the case.

I don’t need makeup any more! Yamamoto boasts and I squirm in jealous awe of her flawless complexion that glows without a skerrick of makeup.

Yamamoto asks me to lie down on a shiatsu futon and kneels beside me, placing her hand on my lower belly. She instructs me through a round of abdominal breathing exercises to calm me before doing a shiatsu diagnosis of my ‘hara’ (abdomen).

Just as I am starting to wonder what my hara has to do with my face, Yamamoto starts to explain that she likes to get an overall sense of what’s going on both physically and emotionally.

Life challenges us and the stress, unexpressed emotions and painful experiences often remain in our face and body. You may have noticed the mental or physical state of a person by simply looking Facial harmony is a gentle yet powerful massage technique that releases the stress locked in the muscles of the face, head and neck through a soft rhythmical touch.

Yamamoto draws on her knowledge of healing techniques including Zen Shiatsu, reflexology, kinesiology and yoga as part of her treatments.

Most of my clients come to me initially for beauty effects, but they soon realise the benefits are not just skin deep, Yamamoto tells me as she starts to work her fingertips in tiny rhythmical circles over my forehead and the entire surface of one side of my face.

No products or equipment are used, no bright lights or lectures about the sorry state of my skin. Phew! This feels better than any facial I’ve ever had. I start to wonder off into a meditative lull feeling a release of energy like rain falling throughout my body. I am completely relaxed.

I’m almost about to nod off when Yamamoto asks if I’d like to see the changes in my face. At this stage she has worked over only half of my face so the comparison between the face I came with and the face I’ll leave with is apparent. She holds a mirror up and I’m amazed. Lines on my forehead and around my eyes have softened and I have defined cheekbones.

As I squeal in delight at my natural facelift, Yamamoto explains the joy she gets from seeing her clients starting to notice their faces.

Although facial harmony can’t change the shape of a face, it does bring it back into it’s natural balanced state. The touch stimulates the connective tissue of the face, where collagen and elastic fibres are stored. It relaxes the nervous system to improve blood supply and lymphatic flow, removing harmful cellular waste products.

The end result is an ‘uplift’ as the muscle layers move freely to support each other and the skin with improved muscle tone and shape, skin texture and colour.

Best results are achieved over a series of seven treatments spaced a week in between. The space between visits gives clients space to observe changes in their face and in their life and they release old emotions and blockages in the body. Yamamoto encourages her clients to keep a journal throughout the process to increase their self-awareness.

Yamamoto works the other side of my face, massages my neck and shoulders and then finishes off with reflexology on my feet. Yes, this is bliss from head to toe! My treatment ends with some corrective yoga and food advice so I can keep my new face.

Seeing yourself differently helps you see your life differently, Yamamoto says. So life’s challenges become tiny stepping stones instead of obstacles to you having the life you want.

Roxanna Minonna - Dancing the Divine

Roxanna Minonna (Roxy) is a Tantric Goddess, temple dancer and facilitator of a powerful way of initiation for women through dance called Dancing the Divine. On a retreat I attended with Roxy, she opened the floor to questions about sex and relationships and here’s what she had to say.

What is Tantric Sex?
First up Tantra is an attitude. It’s not about penises in vaginas. That’s part of it. But it’s about taking our sexual energy – our lowest vibration, base primal energy – and transmuting it to our highest frequency (for spiritual awakening and raising consciousness). It’s about bringing the masculine and feminine together to meet in harmony. That’s what making love is. 

What is the role of the feminine in the Tantric Tradition?
As women we are the keepers of the lore. The lore of nature. We set the tone of our communities. We women are the glue, the ghee in the dahl, we are what keeps it together. 

Women have come to the planet to give birth, but not just to other humans. Everything that you see happening right now on our planet, woman has birthed. Consciously or unconsciously, we’ve allowed it to manifest through our collective womb. So our role is to be totally conscious of what it is that we wish to give birth to. Feminine energy is the receptive counterpart that represents love. The masculine counterpart is the initiating energy that represents consciousness. So for us women as representatives of the feminine energy, our work as it stands right now is to make our way back to holding the feminine energy on the planet. In order for us to come back to the feminine polarity we have to be able to FEEL.

And this is the woman’s role on the planet. We are able to take negative energy and transmute it into love. That is our alchemy. Men are feeling much more crippled than women (ask them and they’ll tell you). Masculine energy responds directly to the feminine. So when we as women break down the bullshit, men will be free to respond to that. So we’ve got to sort it out amongst ourselves. We’ve got to recognise we are all just drops in the ocean, but it is our responsibility to look after our drop. So when we women get it sorted men will have something different to respond to. Until we take responsibility for our role, we can’t blame them for what we are feeling.

How does female energy work?
The way of the woman is being willing to feel everything. We are lucky in that we can generate energy from everywhere. Women build our water element from being in nature, from singing and dancing, yoga and meditation, from being in the company of other women and from sex. But when we overuse the head through too much discussion, intellectual work and mental stuff, we are draining our positive pole. One of the easiest ways for women to drain their energy is by gossiping. The great irony of course is that women are so exhausted, but if we all understood that we are just energy sitting in a sea of energy that is readily available to us we’d have more energy than we know what to do with. 

How does the energetics of lovemaking work?
If you think about it like two batteries with a positive and a negative charge, a woman’s positive pole is the breasts (they stick out) and heart, and her negative pole is the vagina. For a man it’s the other way around, his positive pole is the penis and his negative pole is the heart (his heart is like his vagina). So during the act of lovemaking, the goal is to balance the negative and positive poles so that a woman can take the positive energy in her heart to feel in her sexual centre and likewise, a man’s sexual energy in his penis opens his heart. During lovemaking, the energy exchange that happens when she’s in her positive pole (breasts) and he’s in his (penis) creates a cycle of the energy that can be cultivated to awaken the Kundalini energy and bring the energy through the heart to the crown of the head for spiritual awakening. 

How do we become orgasmic?
You don’t become orgasmic. You are born orgasmic. It is the essence of who you are and the nature of everything on this planet. If you look at the trees right now, they are making love to the sky. Your breath is sex. Everything is sex. So for a woman to say ‘I want to become orgasmic’ it is a process of undoing where she has tied herself up. It’s the refraining from everything we DO that allows the orgasmic-ness to be there. You can go into spontaneous orgasm without another person to be seen for miles. Just breathing can take you into orgasm. But it’s about learning to feel again. It’s about being able to stop the doing so that you can feel the subtle energies of the body. 

The other part is about bringing awareness to what it is that prevents us from being in our feminine energy (conditioning, beliefs, experiences), because the womb holds onto everything. So often in a sexual encounter a woman might be going into it with an agenda of trying to be loved, feel beautiful, get attention, or get a car. So start to become aware of any of your agendas in approaching lovemaking, and any of your hang-ups where you might have been wounded in the past, where you felt exploited, shut down, where it might have felt too full on. Notice how you create coping mechanisms and sexual personalities, identities and patterns.

How do we support men in becoming better lovers?
If you are grounded in your feminine energy you are able to guide a man without telling him what to do). Your energy will guide him. The moment you are telling him what to do you are in your masculine energy. There are ways you can communicate with him by sharing what your intuition picks up without coming down on him and making him wrong. As you come to understand your energy you can begin to move with your energy in a way that is transparent for the man to follow. 

One of the biggest services you can do for you man is to stop trying to be his mother. You can still nurture a man without mothering him by understanding the distinction between mothering a man (telling him what to do) and serving him from a place of devotion to the god in him. 

What affects do alcohol and drugs have on our sexual energy?
Substances like alcohol and drugs take you out of your body and that’s that. You might think it’s making you feel more connected to yourself, more open, and allowing your heart to open but it doesn’t. Over time using drugs and alcohol to relax you will only serve to drive the tension deeper inside you. Through conscious lovemaking you can release that core tension, so why would you want to put it all back in through substance abuse? Cannabis is especially emasculating for men and as women we need to be aware of what energy we are taking into ourselves (literally) through lovemaking. 

Women can be such bitches to each other, so how do we learn to trust each other?
It’s not about being ‘nice’ to each other. It’s about getting real. And the more we get real with ourselves, the more than transpires to our relating with each other. The deep mistrust we have for the feminine is a deep distrust that we have developed from abandoning ourselves. When we are totally clear in ourselves nobody can hurt us. It’s also about starting to look at the demands and expectations we place on other women. I don’t expect a whole lot from women. I know in myself how gnarly, competitive, jealous, manipulating I can be. But if I can see that in me and still have love and compassion for myself, I can see how that comes up for other women and stop the misunderstanding between us. 

What about competition between women?
Competition is not the way of the woman. It’s a man thing and in their world it’s healthy because it’s the way they improved themselves. Men would get together to see who could shoot the fastest so we knew who could get the food for the family. So competition is about who is the strongest and how can we share these skills for the survival of us all? The moment women go into competing with each other it’s a very scary day because the feminine energy is like the glue of the society. So if there is some frequency floating in that energy about needing to be a princess or have the biggest car, you’ve got the beginnings of something that needs to be addressed in that community. A mature woman knows there is an infinite supply of abundance and knows that competition is futile.  How can you compare one woman’s beauty to another? You can’t say one is more beautiful than another. It is like looking at pebbles. They are all exquisite. They are just all different. So what are you competing over? It’s just little girl stuff.

For information about Roxy’s workshops and upcoming dates visit Dancing the Divine.
To read my interview with Roxy about her story, click here© Kris McIntyre 2009. 

 ‘When you dance you meet yourself.’
     Roxanna Minonna, Tantric Goddess and Temple Dancer 

Roxanna Minonna (Roxy) has a wisdom way beyond her 30 years. She has an uncanny ability to channel her teachings but there is also a sense that her profound and honest understanding of ‘woman’ is on account of her personal journey. It hasn’t been an easy one. A drug-user at the age of 12, a heroin addict at the age of 17, a disenchanted soul at the age of 21. But somewhere along the way, Roxy found the courage to grasp on to something that gave her life meaning. It became a way of initiation for women through dance. But this is no ordinary dance. This is Dancing the Divine.

ROXY’S STORY (in her own words)

Kris:             Tell me about your personal journey. Where did it all start?
Roxy:            (Laughs) I think I was born with it. I was a sexually curious child. That was just my nature. I grew up in a ‘normal’ Australian middle-class family but would also say I was a very conscious child who grew up in an unconscious family. Even from a young age, I had a lot of past life memories of being a yogi and a temple dancer. But it wasn’t until much later than I understood what it was all about. 

Kris:            What were the obstacles you faced on your journey?
Roxy:            Well, the first obstacle I faced was the drug addiction I fell into. And I would say that the habit was my way of trying to deal with what I saw as insanity on the planet but was not able to cope with. Drug addiction was a way of being in a state of bliss that was closest to the most real state of being for me. But I eventually gave up the whole drug journey when I realised I wanted to reach those kinds of states naturally. I’d hit the end of the road. I’d done every drug I could have done, as hard as I could, in every way that I could. But at 17 I felt like an old lady and I looked like one too. I had such bad skin, I was really sick but I was starting to sense that there was something greater out there. On one level the drugs gave a kind of consciousness but then on the other hand inhibited it because it was destroying my body. So I realised I was limiting myself and it then became all about achieving those states of consciousness naturally. 

Kris:            So, how did you make the first steps from drug addiction to health?
Roxy:            It was a long journey and one of really following my heart. It was hard work. I had to wake up every day and think I could use drugs and die or I could follow my heart and that felt like death too because it felt like something I wouldn’t survive doing. So it was a choice of death or death and I choose death! I began to explore various modalities of healing. I had a very sick body to heal but the gift in it that was it became my own case study.  So transformation and purification became my life. And by healing myself all my ancient knowing was reawakened. I had to find something that was bigger than me, something worth living for that was beyond conventional life. To have a husband, mortgage and kids was like buying into a story that I couldn’t relate to. But taking wild adventures out into the forest and dancing all night totally turned me on. In reaching those altered states of consciousness naturally it felt like something I could live for.

Kris:            Who were the people who supported you along the way?
Roxy:            There are so many pieces that make up the whole picture of my journey, but the key pieces were willingness to grow and the people who came in to support me. When I first came out of rehabilitation, I did some training with William Whitecloud in Byron Bay. Through William’s Living From Greatness workshops I learnt how to reconnect with my spirit. It gave me the basic toolkit in how to forgo the ego and instead act from my heart and use my intuition. It also gave me a framework for how to run transformational workshops (according to what your spirit is here to bring to the planet – whether that is through dance, speech, writing a book, becoming a mother or whatever a person’s particular gift is). 

During this time I was living in a very spiritual community and was supported by a dear friend, Tanner. His loving presence allowed me to bring consciousness to everything I was experiencing and also allowed me to get over all the judgement of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ of my past. This was a kind of ‘cocooning’ period during which I did many workshops with Osho facilitators that enabled my transformation. Part of this included the rites of passage through Anna Davidovich’s ‘Unveiled’ women’s initiation and developing my healing practice with Dominique Vollares. I then went on to study David Deida’s writings. Inspired by David Deida’s work, my quest then became about exploring the connection between sexuality and spirituality (which is the essence of Tantra). In this quest I developed the Dancing the Divine workshops that ultimately led me to my greatest teacher, Shantam Nityama, who I continue to work with today.

Kris:            How did you come to know what your gift was?
Roxy:            During the women’s initiation with Anna Davidovich the other women there saw the sacred priestess and temple dancer in me. So I began to explore that through dancing in erotic dance clubs. These were high-class clubs, more like gentlemen’s clubs where the customers sat on plush velvet couches and sipped on champagne. I thought this was the best job in the world. I loved it. I had a background in theatre that I’d left behind but it was so much a part of who I am – an extroverted, underground, crazy freak-woman! I’d gone a little wild for a few years during my healing period so the next step was for me was to emerge from my cocoon, shave my legs, put on a pair of stilettos and strut my stuff. It was a transformation like that of the ugly duckling into the graceful swan! It was a bit of a golden age for me. I seemed to be having a different experience to the other women in the club mainly because my motivation for being there was for spiritual development not for the money. I was there to celebrate my life force and uncover truths about myself. I was there because I was on a healing journey and I found that the men who approached me came into that space for healing too. That’s when the light turned on. I realised that when I shined in my feminine essence it fulfilled my purpose for being on the planet and also healed those in my presence. This was an ancient memory and I had found my gift. It was confirmed five years later during my initiation with Nityama. 

Kris:            So, originally your work as a dancer was for men not women?
Roxy:            I could be cheeky and say it still is for men but I realised to really serve men I had to work with women first.  I realised this when my regular customers started to bring their wives. It occurred to me that there was so much more and the club was limiting that. I knew I had to let go to find what was beyond this. About a year later I was surrounded by a group of spiritual sisters (friends) who had also been strippers. I had the idea that together we could create the ‘Temple of the Goddess’ and offer this to the conscious men in our community who wanted to honour and receive the Goddess. We really went out on a limb and we didn’t know what we were doing, so at the eleventh hour we cancelled it. I came away feeling really sad because I could still feel something trying to come through me but I didn’t know what it was.

Kris:            So how did you figure it out?
Roxy:            At this time I was meditating a lot and something strange started to happen. Every time I closed my eyes I was overcome with the presence of elders. I don’t mean old people, I mean ancient women. They were these wrinkly, old crones and they communicated to me through their presence. The message was that they wanted to work through me. I didn’t need to know what to do I just had to be willing to show up.  All I needed to know was that it was to be called Dancing the Divine and it was a sacred sexual dance for women.  Then the out of the blue the phone would ring and someone would ask me to teach me them erotic dance. I realised, ah-ha, it’s not about me dancing for the men anymore but about teaching women how to dance for their lovers.

Kris:             How did your workshops evolve from there?
Roxy:            I started teaching one-on-one classes in erotic dance. But I was teaching these women and thinking, ‘I don’t want you to mimic me. I want to see YOU!’ I realised that stripping is the last part. I had to look back on how I ever got to becoming a stripper and all the fears I had to face about being rejected, the shape of my body, about being hairy and even wondering why anyone would pick me? Erotic dance is a big journey because it forces you to clear a lot of your own internal trips and limitations around your own beauty. I wanted to develop the classes from one-on-one to group workshops, so I called three of my best friends to come along and help me. The night before it started I meditated on what I was going to do and had a terrifying experience. It was like that scene at the beginning of the movie ‘Trainspotting’ where the guy is getting off heroin and falls through the bed and gets sucked into a toilet full of crap. I had a similar feeling as though I was falling through the earth and was surprised not to find myself in a pile of shit. I was in cold sweats with fear and had no idea what I was going to do or say. And all that I was doing was asking four of my best friends coming over to play! But the next day, this stuff came out of my mouth from nowhere and I stepped into this role as a person who knew exactly what she was doing. Who is this person? I was just as surprised as my girlfriends. But all that happened was that I was available enough to be a portal and the channelling just came. So I started to trust that and found myself being constantly guided as to what to do next and it would happen. From there I took a different turn and went to India to study yoga. Whilst I was travelling I learnt a lot more about love and relationships. I’d met a man, fallen in love and was learning about divine union. But I ended up falling into the illusion of following a relationship at the cost of who I really was. I knew I’d have to walk on my path again and ended up in Austria (because that is where my guidance told me where to go). In Austria I ended up meeting someone who had done my workshop in Australia and she took me to Switzerland and my international workshops magically unfolded from there.

Kris:            So trusting the ‘flow’ of things has been an important part of your journey?
Roxy:            Absolutely. Even to the point where I eventually came back to Australia to work for my dad as a financial planner! (Laugh) Yeah, it doesn’t really fit the story but my dad needed my help and I flew back from India to give it. I’d been there for about a day when I realised that the only reason I was there was to try and understand where most of the people I was dealing with were coming from. So I was living with my dad, in the city, going to an office, I even had a straight boyfriend (away from my tribe, travelling and Byron Bay which was my ‘home’) and in my meditations I asked if I could go back to Byron and the answer was always no. One day I got the response, ‘you are going to do your workshops right here’. The next day I found a church hall and booked a space to run my workshops. So in doing that there was this huge process of moving from the masculine to the feminine for me. I negotiated with my dad to do four days in the office and one day for Dancing the Divine. But I’d spend all that day crying because I didn’t know what I was doing. So I had to take two days off – one for crying and one for the workshops! Then eventually I weaned myself off the office job completely. I kept tuning into what I needed to do and I’d get ‘go to the beach’. How to explain that to a hard-working family? I couldn’t enjoy myself because I thought I had to be working which surprised me. I realised it wasn’t just me but a strong conditioning for all of us. I realised it was part of the healing process for the women who were going to turn up to the workshops because that was what was going on for them. So magically and miraculously, people came to the workshop and they went from one day to a weekend and it grew from there. Things changed very quickly and four years later I was running workshops constantly around the world. 

Kris:            How did you meet your mentor Nityama?
Roxy:            I was back in Byron Bay for four months when Nityama came to run a workshop there. I signed up for the retreat but was so arrogant that I thought ‘what do I need Nityama for? I’m already there.’ But surrendering to it him was a very profound experience. When I asked Nityama about it he basically said, “Because you’ve been a strong woman all your life you’ve never had a man stronger than you. So it’s time for you to be initiated?” Initiation – well, that is a book in itself! For me Nityama initiated me into womanhood. So that is quite radical given that I had been teaching women about sacred sexuality for four years. To taste my own nectar, to feel my love in sweet surrender was the most deliciously humbling gift that I wish for every woman to experience. So encountering Nityama has taken my work to a whole new level and I endeavour to serve his vision as it dovetails into my own. Initiation into Tantra was actually having my heart consciously broken open. As I understand it women are here to represent love on the planet. Nityama has the gift to break our heart with consciousness and connect it to our wombs so that we are free to make love with our whole body. Hearts still get broken without initiation, but without the consciousness that comes with it we go around trying to protect ourselves from love. 

Kris:            So, what is the purpose of Dancing the Divine?
Roxy:            Divine union. It’s about the bringing together of the masculine and feminine, both internally and externally, and connecting to our divinity through dance. The workshops are designed specifically to support women in coming back to their female essence. We live in a radically immature society where we are all more or less infantile in terms of our sexuality and relationships. We are really no more than children in these big bodies looking like we know what we are doing, but we are confused as hell and miserable. I think this epidemic of sexual immaturity is the result of removing initiation from our culture because the role of initiation is the empowerment of an individual. So my work is to assist women in growing up out of their little girl modes so they can reclaim their sexual pleasure. That is also what Nityama is doing. In tribal society when a woman comes of age (when she starts menstruating) the women come together and they decide what man amongst them has the qualities of sensitivity and consciousness that in her first sexual experience she will know herself as an orgasmic being. So initiation into your sexuality and your pleasure is a key fundamental experience that marks a shifting in your consciousness from being a child to being a woman. So until we have this thing that says you are no longer a child you are now an adult we are still little girls. As far as I’m concerned turning 21 and getting drunk isn’t it because it doesn’t tell me anything about life other than how to get out of my body. The rites of passage that we do in Dancing the Divine are of a different nature. They’re within a women’s space and the focus is on being in the body. Its purpose is to shift a woman’s consciousness. Throughout the process she’ll come to a realisation about what she wants to bring more of into her life. And then the ritual, the rite of passage, is where she embodies that and her spirit dances whatever needs to be cleared or witnessed in relation to what she wants to bring into her life. So it’s a way of the woman deeply embodying a shift instead of going to a counsellor and talking about it. It’s a kind of unveiling. 

Kris:             What do you think are the most common obstacles women face in enjoying their sexuality?
Roxy:            As Nityama says for the most part most of us are walking around like men. As we start to untie ourselves we realise we were being conditioned into being men even before we knew we were women. We are talking about connecting with a part of ourselves that we’ve never experienced or even known was there. The process of coming back to our feminine energy is about coming back to FEEL all those places and the pain associated with where we have abandoned ourselves. So most of the work we are doing in Dancing the Divine is about stopping what we are doing that is not serving us. If you stop pruning a shrub it will go wild on you. That’s just nature. The same thing happens with us. The moment you stop allowing the orgasm happen it will. The next thing you know you’ll be walking down the street and you won’t be able to stop yourself from being in total bliss! Most of it is our belief systems and the religious and social taboos imposed on us.  There’s so much of energy unconsciously put into controlling ourselves that its no wonder women are exhausted. When we stop trying to control ourselves we discover how much energy is available to us. 

Kris:            It’s interesting that your mentor is a man. Why do you think there has been an absence of women teachers along your path?
Roxy:            Yes, that’s an interesting point. I’ve been very disillusioned with the lack of feminine guidance in our world. There are lot of women teaches and leaders but most of them are men in female bodies. We have to search hard for examples of real feminine energy in our society because it is not recognised, valued or supported. Nityama is guiding me back to my feminine energy. Through his experience working with thousands of women using his deep understanding and the polarity of his masculine energy, he has helped me and has influenced the way I work with women. I don’t think I’m better than any other woman but what I am saying is that we as women need to come together to break down the collective rift between us and work together again as sisters are intended to. In my work I am hoping to provide a space for women to learn from other women. You see, women come together to understand our sexuality but we need the opposite polarity (the masculine) to experience it. 

For information about Roxy’s workshops and upcoming dates visit Dancing the Divine.