I remember being surprised in one conversation with Heiner Fruehauf, Ph.D. when he said that he felt 100% of his patients had anxiety—but I now suspect Heiner is right in this view. It is just a question of degree and direction. Are they anxious about relationships, money, the state of the climate, politics, their retirement options, their children, or some other target? And the degree of the anxiety varies considerably as well. It can be debilitating to the point where a person cannot walk out the door to engage with the larger community, or it can be a mild hindrance.
This is quite a statement about the society we have built: Everyone anxious to one degree or another? A sad state of affairs. It really has come to that point. This is the context in which we modern era practitioners do our work, and it is important to be aware of it.
If you pay attention to your body when in a state of anxiety, you will notice the qi ascends and has a hard time then descending. Qi gets stuck above, resulting in tight shoulders and neck, restricted breathing, palpitations, worry, and so on. To help these patients we need strategies for descending the qi. Luckily Chinese Medicine has a lot to say about this problem.
In the Nei Jing we learn that the chong mai has a descending nature. This is helpful. We can treat SP-4 and PC-6 as one easy way of activating the chong. Beyond the use of this master-couple point combination that we all learn in TCM school, we find Li Shi-Zhen had different ideas of the eight extraordinary vessels (8EV). He lists “treatment points” that are not master or couple points. I find this curious because the master-couple point combinations were widely in use by then, but he does not seem to have used them. In the case of the chong mai he lists
ST-36, 37, 39. When I first realized this, I was quite excited. (Miki Shima and Charles Chace by the way did great work translating Li Shi-Zhen’s treatise on the 8EV and combining it with other material from the qi-cultivation community, and Eastland Press did a wonderful job with this book.)
As it turns out I had been interested in these three points for other reasons. When I saw them in the Li Shi-Zhen material for the chong, it went a long way to solving a riddle I was puzzling over. I had been studying the Nagano-style of acupuncture with Shimamura Tsuyoshi, and these three points (or ah shi points near them) were often used in what is called the ST Qi Line treatment. The left leg is treated first and then the right leg. It was explained to me by Shimamura sensei in the third module that for Nagano sensei 60% of his patient treatments had nothing in them but these six points. I still find that astonishing! How could he cover so many bases with just these three points on each leg?
When he first told me this, I was really surprised. Since learning this treatment idea from Shimamura sensei in the first module of the training I had already been using these points on almost all of my patients and knew them to be helpful, but I did not see how they could constitute an entire treatment. He then explained more closely the finer points of Nagano’s point location method, and I started to subtly change how I found the points. My results improved rapidly. I am nowhere near to the level where I could treat only those six points and call it an entire treatment, but I am every day astonished by how much the patient’s condition improves (pulse, shen, voice, color, abdomen…) when I use them. I usually follow contact needling of these ST points with a few cones of direct moxa on each one.
The ST qi ideally descends, and so, absent the chong mai dynamic, we still get significant help for our patients with qi stuck above from these points. But I do think Li Shi-Zhen was on to something with his idea that these points open the chong function, because it seems that more is at play than simply helping the ST channel flow. I realize of course that these points are also influential in other ways as well, e.g., lower uniting points, and that might also account for how effective they are.
Circling back to Heiner’s comment about how ubiquitous anxiety is, we can see where a simple treatment (actually it is not all that simple to find the ideal point locations to treat—that is where my learning is focused at the moment) like this can have such a profound benefit in a culture of universal apprehension. I do believe we are working with the chong dynamic when we get this ST Qi Line treatment right. When I mentioned this tidbit about Li Shi-Zhen and his ideas on these points to Shimamura sensei, he found it an exciting idea as well.
A brief word about point location: When I first studied Japanese Meridian Therapy in 1999 with Stephen Brown (I’ll be forever grateful to him for getting me started on this path.) he mentioned that when you are in Shudo sensei’s study group in Japan you spend a lot of time studying point location. I found the idea strange at first based on my TCM education that I had at that time just concluded. I thought I knew point location pretty well. In an entire year of point location quizzes and exams I had missed only one point. I did not initially appreciate that Stephen was talking about finding the “presently alive” point. Now I consider point location to be a high level skill, and I spend considerable effort trying to improve my skills in it.
I hope this discussion about anxiety and how wide-spread it is and the relevance of the Chong has some benefit for the readers. Of course, Chinese Medicine has many more ideas about how to descend the qi, and I hope in future blogs to explore a few more.
Kind regards all around,
Bob Quinn