You may just as easily be asking: make me laugh, make me feel antsy, make my limbs move involuntarily, make me burp, or make my abdominal muscles move in a comfortable, wave-like fashion? OR, make me remember something unexpected from a long time ago, significant or insignificant? These are all common responses to a treatment, and all are signs that the needles are working.
Everything that has ever happened to us is stored in our soma (body). This is not a metaphor, but, as body-workers, Vipassana meditators, yoga teachers, somatic therapists and trauma therapists can tell you, quite literal. Not only can muscle tissue and fascia contain memories, but even hormones and even gasses that you have become sequestered safely away. When releasing large muscle groups, it is not uncommon for the room to smell like chemicals that the patient has been exposed to earlier in her lifetime. When a patient comes in, their symptoms and life history suggest areas to work in, and when these areas are released, emotions, memories, and sensations can come to the surface. The body’s memory is fascinating and precise. If you have ever experienced a big shock, or lost an important person in your life, you may notice that your body remembers the event on its anniversary even when your conscious mind does not. Some examples are a 9/11 first responder who experiences a severe chest cold every year around early to mid September. (The lungs are associated with grief in East Asian Medicine.) Or someone who was assaulted unexpectedly by a stranger, only to feel pain at the same time of year the following years in the same areas of her body where she hit the ground. When someone has a seemingly unrelated symptom out of the blue, I make sure to ask, what happened in this month in other years of your life. If the symptom is related to a somatic memory, that question will prompt an answer.
This is especially true with scar work. Scars are a rich area to work in, as they invariably block the fascial planes and tissue beds that make up the meridians. Over time this can cause an imbalance. Sometimes when taking a life history I will notice that an injury to a channel is followed one or more years later with problems in the associated organ. This is an example of how constricted tissue in one part of the body can affect another area. I continue to be surprised by the responses elicited by scar work. I have seen several instances where releasing scar tissue prompted the patient to have a pre-lingual memory. That is a very, very early memory, yet the body knows. (This is especially interesting, as scientists theorize that it is the syntax of language that allows us to form memories. These clinical experiences, however, suggest that the body’s memory functions differently.) I have had patients feel very specific phantom sensations; after working around a decades old C-section scar, one patient had to check her lower belly repeatedly because she kept feeling the same sensation of leaking fluid that had alerted her many, many years ago that some stitches had ruptured. Of course, there was no leaking fluid, but this sensation persisted on and off for a week.
And so it is with emotions. Whether or not we are working on a visible scar, there are sections of our bodies that become stuck by strong emotion. Acupuncture works to course the qi through all the riverbeds of the body. As stuck areas begin to flow again, whatever was in the stagnant areas comes to the surface to be experienced and pass away. The emotional release that happens on the table helps your body to work more completely, which means symptoms will resolve and you will feel lighter.
If you suspect you have some stuck emotions or stuck tissues, book a session with me and we’ll do a complete life history to see how I can best go about unsticking your tissue planes.
Photo by Amanda Flavell