Essay on "Meridians & Points" Class

We started to learn about higher level healing massages than the basic relaxation healing patterns. We learned several complete patterns of healing massage, such as:

- one involving the bladder meridian
- one for nausea
- one for deficient kidney qi
- one for knee pain
- one for sciatic pain
- one for head aches &
- one to revive yang.

We learned the 5 elements;how each is different, and how they interact. This helps me to see the many aspects of an individual. If I refine my [health] intakes over much time I may be able to see more fully who my clients are, and how to treat each individual.

I believe we were all inspired by the movie, "9000 Needles." It truly showed the power of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) healing. I was also inspired by the movie, "Something Unusual is Happening, We don't Know What."

We learned when to use toning & tonifying.

We learned and focused on ways of bringing the best and highest good from ourselves and others. This is a very good space for a healer to be in. This included a "Pay it Forward" exercise.

Having our red book, "Fundamentals of Chinese Acupuncture" will be good for referencing the points and meridians to use for acupressure point holding. In our yellow book, "Traditional Acupuncture - The Law of the 5 Elements", I like the section on "Traditional Examination." I can foresee incorporating these suggestions into a good complete intake, especially for longer-term clients. The book, "The Web that has No Weaver" has given me a very good overview of the societal mind-set that includes Traditional Chinese Medicine. I start to be able to think more in this way. It is good for letting my Western-raised mind see/feel into what TCM really is.

We have learned and practiced "Smiling Heart Qi Gong" 3 times per week. This has become one of my favorites. I have also been practicing a daily hour-long qigong for my own specific health issues; for several weeks now. This has become more important to me. And, as I learn more, I may be able to suggest qigong to clients who may be open to it.

Being introduced to [health] intakes from the complexity of TCM [Traditional Chinese Medicine] means seeing a person much more thoroughly as an individual. Therefore, I may be able to help clients better as who they are; rather than from the perspective of a very brief Western style [health] intake and diagnosis. Knowing the acupressure points and meridians will help me help specific clients. And, it also gives me a direction to go towards more thoroughly learning specific helpful points.

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The Secret

Life has many different secrets that human beings still have to discover. Meridians and their points are one of these secrets. Personally, it made medicine make a lot more sense to me. I have a better understanding of how the body works now that I have learned about meridians and their paths. Meridians are like a map of your body with secret treasure points. Each point corresponds to different organs, which effects your body in different ways.

Everyone wants to be healed from their sickness. It doesn't matter how significant the sickness is, everyone wants to be free of it. It's human nature to want to be healed or want someone else to be healed like a family member or close friend. Meridians are the new hype these days because its a secret map of where your body needs help healing. If one of your meridians are deficient then it's a possibility that maybe the meridian organ its connected to is deficient as well. For instance, if your GB21 (Gallbladder) feels tight and knotted, then it may make your neck or shoulder stiff.

If someone feels dizzy, cold, or has a shortness of breath then they could look up which meridian corresponds to those symptoms. After you have found which meridians help the symptoms then you could massage those points and the symptoms would most likely disappear. This new kind of thinking has really opened my eyes. It's been around for centuries and I had never heard of it before.

I am almost out of massage therapy school and I am glad that they taught us about meridians and their points. This is information that I will use for the rest of my life because it makes sense that your whole body is connected. So, if a certain organ isn't up to par it would definitely have an effect on other areas of the body. Something about disease made a lot more sense and gave me hope for the future. Learning about meridians was another puzzle piece to my big picture of life.

acu-therapy

After five months of massage therapy school, our class got to the part we had all been waiting for : Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Points and meridians was one of our TCM classes. What are points and meridians? Meridians are invisible pathways on our bodies that connect acupoints to each other, as well as internal organs. The qi (energy) flows through these meridians. The meridians are like highways, when you experience a strong emotion, such as grief or anxiety, your qi gets blocked, similar to a traffic jam. Acupressure restores the smooth flow of qi. Acupoints are specific body points through which qi of organs and meridians can reach the body surface.


You can use acu-therapy to treat:
- headaches
- ortho issues
- weight loss
- addiction
- fertility
- colds
- insomnia
- the list goes on and on.

Basically, any disease you can think of, can benefit from acu-therapy. As a massage therapist, I would not be able to perform acupuncture, but can use non-needling techniques on points. Acupressure is a technique that we have frequently used. Our class has learned acupoint patterns to combat nausea, fatigue, frozen shoulder, sciatica and knee pain.


Now for the fun stuff. Moxa, cupping and gua sha, oh my. Moxa is quite possibly the most delightful herb in existence. It is a variety of mugwort, that is compressed and then burned. You can use it on specific points and meridians that are deficient. By the end of a session, I feel warm and tingling, it is an amazing feeling. Cupping and gua sha are two methods that help remove stagnation, and when I say stagnation, I pretty much mean pain. We have all had those "knots" the size of a golf ball that won't go away. After 15 minutes of having a suction cup placed on the knot and two more cups along the meridian, my pain was 90% gone. Gau sha brings stagnation to the surface, by using a tool to scrape the area. I am sure this might sound painful to some of you, but these treatments are WONDERFUL! I am excited to use them in my practices.

Massage For Insomnia

I was given the assignment of blogging about a "disease" and the benefits of massage therapy, as a homework assignment. Near and dear to my heart, I chose insomnia. For years I have been dealing with this issue and until recently just thought it was something that I needed to find the right prescription for. Why do people have insomnia? I read a concept a couple months back, that changed it all for me. Internal disharmonies make the spirit restless and it cannot be properly housed, and the spirit will wander.
So, how do we fix that? First, we need to address the disharmony. Treatment for this disease should include massage therapy. Regular massage can decrease your stress level on a physical and psyche level. If pain is a factor in insomnia, therapeutic massage relieves pain, promoting better sleep. Massage also increases seratonin levels, which produce melatonin, which governs our circadian rhythm that regulates our sleep cycle.
There are several acupressure points/protocols that a massage therapist can stimulate to encourage sleep. Application of essential oils can also be very beneficial. Fill a 15 dram bottle with a carrier oil, add 4 drops of lavendar, 2 drops of bergamot, 2 drops of marjoram, 1 drop of clary sage and 1 drop of ylang ylang.
I definitely recommend seeing your TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) practioner to find the source of your insomnia, then find a massage therapist that you vibe with and enjoy the peaceful sleep you will find.

Plant Spirit Communication Experience

My intention here is to provide details of a personal experience in the hopes that others interested in the topic of Plant Spirit Communication will embrace this ancient method of Knowing and find confidence in their own experiences.

It was nighttime and my throat felt oddly hot and swollen.  I looked in the mirror and discovered I had a hot red rash starting on my throat and moving down onto my upper chest.  Spots on my throat had rasied welts, but it didn't look like hives.  Hmmm.....

My mind went back to a recent energy healing session I had done with a client.  During this session there was an intense energetic exchange, and I remembered they also mentioned having a skin condition.  Did I pick this up and physically manifest it in myself through their energy?  How interesting to be in a situation that was now going to force me to quickly learn how to clear this in myself.

I immediately put several drops of essential oil in a little bit of carrier oil and dabbed it onto the area.  The carrier oil felt a little heavy on my skin, but it was the fastest thing I had immediately available.

The next morning I woke up and it was worse.  I could visibly see the lines of my Stomach meridian outlined in the rash which now had traveled from my throat and upper chest down across my abdomen all the way to my upper legs.  The most concerning area was still at and just below my throat.  This is a Wind-Heat rash.

Start Self-Treatment:
1. Make a topical spritzer:  Witch Hazel, Herbal Hydrosol, 2 essential oils.  Very soothing - immediately lessened the heat (redness) and itching.

2. Drink a tea of Chinese herbs that release the exterior (open the pores) to assist the rash in venting.  I drank this every few hours throughout the day.

3. Diffuse essential oils in the air.  Because the rash was over my lung area, I wanted to breathe in essential oils deeply to assist on the inside, and to support my immune system.

Ask Plant Spirits for Help:
That night I was doing QiGong - a long, slow form called Hun Yuan Qigong.  I was in a deeply quiet and meditative state, feeling wonderful energy flowing througout my body.  In this state, I asked in my mind "Any Plant Spirits out there want to help me out?"

Almost immediately I saw (in my mind) a leaf appear from my left.  As I looked at it, my first thought was "Clover", and I 'heard' "Yes! Yes!"  Then the scene changed and I kept seeing green plants that had red in the middle.  The red color seemed to be important and I finally understood - "Oh, Red Clover?" and I 'heard' "Yes! Yes!"  Now I saw visions of beautiful patches of red clover surrounding a fallen tree.  As I admired this, the dirt around the base of the tree kept being shown to me.  Why is the dirt important?  It's dry, sandy, dusty.  And I understood it meant Clay.  (Yes!)  I have Sonne's #7 Liquid Clay - I need to drink it.  (Yes!)  After this understanding, it was as if the Red Clover and I energetically danced together.

I had never used Red Clover before so needed to research it before moving forward.  I found 2 books on Native American herbs that both stated it is used for skin rashes.  In European American herb use, it is used to cleanse the blood and has an affinity to the neck.  In Chinese herbology it is used to clear toxic heat from the blood.  All of this confirms the herb sounds like an excellent choice.  In addition, because the rash was along my stomach meridian, drinking the liquid clay would help to clear internal toxins from my digestive tract.

I immediately drank a large glass of water with clay and continued to spray my essential oil/hydrosol spritzer.  The next day I purchased Red Clover from our local supplement store and took a dose.  Taking it, I almost immediately felt cold energy moving in my Stomach and Spleen meridians in the lower legs.  It was thin, cold, and moved all the way up to my neck.  Within hours the rash was 75% improved.  Thank you my beautiful Plant Spirit friends!

Red Clover is now one of my honored friends and I will help her fulfill her destiny by using her to help many others.  I know that even though the rash was physical to me, it was more so my teacher.  For this I greatly appreciate it, and thank it for what I learned.

Learn exact methods of Plant Spirit Communication in my On-Line Essential Oils Course series. The first lesson goes over this topic in depth.

meet your meat

Most of us don’t think much about the foods we put into our bodies or how they affect us and the environment. Not only that, we also rarely think about where our food comes from and how it got to be in that nice white shrink wrapped tray we see sitting on the grocery shelf.

Today, with increasing evidence of diet’s crucial effect on health and longevity, more people are investigating this question: is the human body better suited to a plant based diet or one that includes animal protein? Two areas should be considered in this search: the anatomical structure of the human and the physical effects of meat consumption.

Eating begins with the hands and mouth. Human teeth (like herbivores), are designed for grinding and chewing vegetable matter. We don’t have the sharp front teeth for tearing flesh that carnivores have. Carnivores generally swallow their food whole, not requiring molars or a jaw that can move sideways. The human hand does not have sharp claws, but has opposable thumbs, which is better suited for harvesting fruit and vegetables, than to killing dinner with our bare hands.

• · Meat eaters have claws, herbivores and humans do not have claws
• · Meat eaters have no skin pores and perspire thru the tongue, herbivores and humans perspire thru skin pores
• · Meat eaters have sharp front teeth for tearing, with no flat molar teeth for grinding, herbivores and humans do not have sharp front teeth, but flat rear molars for grinding.
• · Meat eaters have strong hydrochloric acid in stomach to digest meat, herbivores and humans have stomach acid 20 times weaker than carnivores
• · Meat eater have salivary glands in the mouth that are not needed to pre-digest grains and fruits, herbivores and humans have well-developed salivary glands necessary to pre-digest grains and fruits.
• · Meat eaters have acidic saliva with no enzyme ptyalin to pre-digest grains and fruits, while herbivores and humans do.

Another important difference is the comparison of digestive tracts. A piece of meat is just part of a corpse, and its putrefaction creates poisonous wastes in the body. Therefore meat must be quickly eliminated. For this, carnivores possess digestive canals only three times the length of their bodies. Since man, like other vegetarian animals, has a digestive canal twelve times his body length, the rapidly decaying flesh is retained for a much longer time, producing a number of undesirable toxic effects.

Our kidneys are greatly affected by these toxins, as the kidneys extract waste from the blood. Even moderate meat eaters demand three times more work from their kidneys, than vegetarians do. As a person ages, meat eaters are more like to acquire kidney disease or failure than vegetarians.

During WWI, the Danish government, dreading the possibility of severe food shortage, stopped feeding the nation’s grain to livestock in order to produce consumption meat, and instead fed the grain directly to the people. The result was a 34% decreased death rate by illness. After 1 year of eating meat again, the death rate was back to the pre-war level.

In 1958, Japan (which has a larger plant based diet than the US) had 18 deaths related to prostrate cancer, while the USA had 14,000 deaths. Men in the early stages of prostate cancer, who switched to a vegan diet, either stopped the progress of the cancer or even reversed the illness.

Another study in 2002, looked at the influence of a very low-fat vegan diet on subjects with rheumatoid arthritis. After only 4 weeks on the diet, almost all measures of RA symptoms decreased significantly. A vegan diet affects the immune processes that influence arthritis. The omega 3 fatty acids in veggies are a key factor, along with the near absence of saturated fat. (for more info check nutritional strategies for inflamed joints and other conditions by Michael Klaper, MD)

Scientific research has established the superiority of a vegetarian diet from the point of view of nutrition, the ecological system, better health and less vulnerability to deadly diseases like cancer, heart attack, and diabetes. A high intake of animal protein causes an excessive excretion of calcium, thereby causing loss of calcium from bones, which in turn increases the risk of developing osteoporosis, kidney and gall bladder stones. Excess protein from a meat diet has been linked to a ten time increase in cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, kidney disease, stokes, and diabetes. Dietary cholesterol is only found in animal proteins, and stays in our bloodstream creating “plague” in our blood vessels and is a major cause of heart disease. Lipitor, a medication for high cholesterol, is the most prescribed drug in the world.

The human body is unable to deal with excessive animal fats, indicating the unnaturalness of meat eating. However; carnivores can metabolize almost unlimited amounts of cholesterol and fat, without adverse effect. A high-fat, low fiber diet, has been linked to an increase in colon and rectal cancer. The result of this diet, is a slow transit time through the colon, allowing toxins to do their damage. A vegetarian diet, provides the ample fiber from vegetables, fruits and grains, and is naturally low in fat. The National Geographic reported that three longest lived tribes (the Villcabamba of Ecuador, the Hunzas of Tibet and the Azerbaijaines of the Caucuse) in the world, were Centenarian Vegetarians.

Meat contains accumulations of pesticides and other toxic chemicals up to 14 x more concentrated then those found in plant food. Large amounts of antibiotics are being fed to livestock to control bacterial diseases, which are becoming immune to these drugs at an alarming rate. Of all antibiotics used in USA, 55% are fed to livestock, and in turn are passed on to people who eat their flesh. The resistant disease is not just in the animals receiving the antibiotics, but in humans as well. Welcome, MRSA (methicillin resistant staphylococus aureus

“If people ate grains directly instead of cycling them thru livestock, the benefits to the ecosystem would be staggering. There is not a single aspect of the ecological crisis that would not be immediately and profoundly improved by such a transformation”. JOHN ROBBINS author of The Food Revolution. Let’s hear some facts about the environmental ramifications of an animal based diet.

• · For every acre of forest land consumed by urban development, 7 acres are devoured by the meat industry, for grazing and growing cattle food.
• · Rain forests are being destroyed at a rate of 125,000 square miles per year to create space to raise animals for food
• · Each individual who switches to a vegan diet spares an acre of trees per year.
• · 25 gallons of water are needed to produce 1 pound of wheat, where as 2,500 gallons of water are needed to produce 1 pound of beef.
• · By switching from a meat-based diet to a vegetarian diet, a person would conserve 1,423,500 gallons of water.
• · 1 acre of prime land can produce 40,000# of potatoes, 30,000# of carrots, 50,000# of tomatoes and only 250 pounds of beef.
• · At least 85% of US topsoil loss is directly associated with livestock raising.
• · More than 50% of water pollution can be linked to wastes from the livestock industry.
• · If the US switched to a vegetarian diet, 60% of US imported oil requirements would be cut.
• · A family of 4 that cuts back on meat consumption by 2 # per week saves the equivalent of 104 gallons of gasoline in one year.
• · The livestock in USA produce 20 times as much excretion as does the human population
• · 55 square feet of rainforest is needed to produce 1 quarter-pound hamburger which releases 500# of CO2 in the atmosphere
• · Scientists estimate that the world’s 1.3 billion cattle and other ruminant livestock emit approximately 60 million tons of methane (a relatively potent greenhouse gas that affects degradation of the ozone layer) each year.
• · About 40% of the world’s grain harvest is fed to food animals. Half of this grain would be more than enough to feed all hungry people on this planet.
• · If Americans cut their meat consumption by 10%, it would free enough grain to feed every one on the planet who is presently starving to death.
• · In the USA, grazing has contributed to the near demise of 26% of the federal threatened and endangered species list, including the desert tortoise, pronghorn antelope, sage grouse, black tailed prairie dog, black footed ferret, and bighorn sheep. (www.publiclandsranching.org)
• · Approximately, for each hamburger made from rain forest beef ( Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras are in the top 10), approximately 20-30 different plant species, 100 different insect species, dozens of bird, mammal and reptile species are destroyed. (Campbell’s soup uses rainforest beef, burger king backed down on it use after a 2004 boycott, the rainforest is the largest supplier of rawhide chews for dogs.)

Think of your dogs(or cats, or horses, or “pocket pets”) and their love for you, the faithfulness towards you. Imagine the way they look at you with trust and faith, imagine the happiness when they see you, running to greet you when you come home. Can you imagine killing them and eating their flesh? I have avoided mentioning animal rights until the end, I wanted to lead with the less controversial issues of health and environmental impact. Personally, the animals themselves should be reason enough to eat a plant based diet, but health and environmental impact, also prove this point. Animals suffer when maintained for milk, eggs, cheese and definitely when slaughtered. Their wellbeing is my biggest passion and I will advocate for them as long as I live.

Factory farmed meat and animal product animals never see the light of day, they’re confined to pens that do not allow them to move or turn around. They live in their own waste, forced to constantly breathe in ammonia and other waste products. They are pumped full of antibiotics because of their polluted living conditions. They are fed foods that they are not designed to digest, because it is cheaper and more efficient. They’re pumped full of hormones to make them grow bigger and produce more. They are frequently mutilated without the use of painkillers. Finally, they are often slaughtered while they are fully conscious. So, they basically live a life of hell.

As students and advocates of the healing arts, do we really want to ingest that pain, that poison, that those innocent animals felt? How does that resonate with healing vibrations? It doesn’t. I believe that one cannot heal, while perpetuating the suffering of another being. I do not desire to cause suffering or to be involved in the slaughter of innocent creatures. It is my hope that one day mankind will look back in horror at the carnivorous, murderous habits of its predecessors. The eating of animals will seem as barbaric and disgusting to future man as the eating of human meat now seems to the average American.

He is closest to god who harms no living creature. BHAGAVAD GITA

Sources and information: T. Colin Campbell foundation(www.tcolincampbell.org), www.farmsanctuary.org, physicians committee for responsible medicine (www.pcrm.org), www.forksoverknives.com (available to view instantly on net flix).