Seitai Therapy (or Sei-Tai) — not to be confused with Sekkotsu Bone Setting, which is also called Seitai — was created by Haruchika Noguchi (1911 – 1976). It’s a form of physical therapy, education, and coordination exercises that aims at rebalancing the body to function at its optimum level by using its own resources and innate abilities.
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Within Seitai, the concept of Taiheki is of primordial importance. It states that each body has a certain tendency in sensitivity, temperament, movement, and personality. Noguchi defined twelve types of Taiheki, applicable to psychological and physical characteristics, which are related to the state of the five lumbar vertebrae.
Noguchi also designed exercises specifically applicable for each Taiheki, to adjust them when they’re unbalanced. A well-known set of exercises within Seitai is the Katsugen Undo, which is about following our spontaneous inner and outer movements within our own consciousness in order to allow the body to keep itself in harmony and heal itself where and when necessary.
At the basis of the Katsugen Undo exercises lies the Seitai concept that our life processes know what sort and how much exercise we need, and that the required exercises arise from within, stimulated by our unconscious sense of our own needs. Thus, our body knows perfectly well what it needs at any given moment, and we just should learn to allow it to do its work.
