Extraordinary Acupuncture

It has become conventional wisdom in America that acupuncture therapy is effective for treating the ordinary. By ordinary, I mean day-to-day issues. I tweaked my low back lifting something heavy the other day, or I feel stressed at my job. Even the United States military pays for its veterans to receive acupuncture. Isn’t that wild! What is less accepted is acupuncture’s role outside the day-to-day purview for treating deeper existential issues.

A patient mentioned that she has been experiencing a lot of dreams surrounding her long-deceased husband. It was done in an offhand way that dismissed any expectation that martial processing was something within the scope of our therapy. To appropriate a meme about apps: yes, there is a channel for that.

But the channel is not one of the ‘ordinary channels’, the primary channels most people are familiar named after organs: the spleen channel, the heart, or the lung channel. After all, marriages are not day-to-day issues. No, this requires the implementation of an extraordinary channel, which is coincidentally what the ancients named the eight vessels governing our deepest bioenergetics.

According to Chinese medicine bio-anatomy, we have 12 primary channels named after the organs through which they primarily flow. They circulate energy throughout our body in a daily cycle. Those primary meridians are fed from overflow of the 8 extraordinary vessels (EVs). EVs flow in cycles not in days but in 7-8 years. They exist in our body before we are born and are the deepest sources guiding development through our lifetimes. From a biomedicine perspective, one might say EVs regulate our epigenetics. EVs inform capital ‘I’ ISSUES such as our purpose, sexuality, fertility, partnerships, aging and sense of self, amongst other things.

EV treatments are powerful. They can truly approach the root of longstanding entrenched issues. EV treatments should only be administered when the patient is ready and repeated with sufficient processing time. The sessions in some ways resemble therapeutic counseling. The acupuncturist like a counselor listens carefully to the patient to understand the issue.

Unlike a counselor who might talk it through with the patient, the acupuncturist allows the needles do the talking. Informed by the patient’s story as well as their physical symptoms and pulse, the acupuncturist needles the corresponding EV. The vessel activates energy within the patient resonant with the issue they are struggling through.

In the example above with the patient and her departed husband, I used the dai mai or belt vessel for their first treatment to circulate latent stored emotions. The patient’s loss was sudden; she had likely compartmentalized her reaction at the time to protect herself and keep going in life, but those emotions remain stored in her body and may manifest in any myriad of ways from physical pain to constipation to skin rashes. The belt vessel is a common initial opening treatment as a first processing step for traumatic experiences.

Two weeks later, the patient reported feeling lighter. I proceeded with a yin linking vessel treatment to engage emotional introspection with her past. The yin linking vessel links our blood, carrier of our consciousness, with the events of our past. Subsequently, the patient reported that the dreams about her husband reduced. Unlike day-to-day issues, which can resolve in days to weeks. These existential issues play out in our lives over months to years; however, extraordinary acupuncture is a valuable tool to direct a patient’s own energy to guide the psyche through these challenging life thresholds.

If you are struggling with big life issues, consider adding extraordinary acupuncture to your holistic treatment plan. It activates the deepest parts of ourselves to work through the big questions of our lifetime such as: who am I? what is my purpose? how do I move on? where do I go from here?