OMG, it’s Emotion!
e·mo·tion
/ə’mōSH(ə)n/
noun
plural noun: emotions
a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others.
instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge.
Acupuncturists use hands and fingertips to palpate clients and to take their pulses. As our practice deepens, our hands and fingers become ears and eyes to the client’s body.
In my session with clients, when I palpate their bodies, I often receive the energy that the body is holding as visual images and/or emotions through my hands. My sensitivity is more geared toward detecting emotions that are residing in the body and how they affect the overall health of the clients.
I had a client who came to me with exhaustion, anxiety, and chronic hormonal issues. She was an art teacher and a mother of three children. Her husband was often away for work. One of her children was being bullied at school, and she was considering withdrawing her from school. She expressed how important for her to support her children and her art students. She didn’t sleep well and didn’t have much appetite. She suspected that it was due to the perimenopause and wanted to try acupuncture.
Her pulse was showing excess and deficiency in various places. When I palpated her body, it felt like rough sand was running through my hands. It felt prickly. A wave of grief, grudges and longing for attention went through me. I inquired if her relationship with her parents was easeful. She shared that her father passed away when she was younger, and being the youngest of the siblings, she didn’t have much memory of him. Her mother was busy raising kids by herself while working full time. Her mother was strict, and my client wanted to do her best to make sure she didn’t become a problem to her mother. She also shared that she didn’t know how she felt about not having a father growing up because she didn’t remember him.
Before the treatment, I asked her what she did to take care of herself and her needs. She seemed genuinely confused and stuck. So, we did a little exercise of locating and feeling in her body of her confused and stuck feeling. She located it in her solar plexus and described how it was spreading down to the tip of fingers. Being an art teacher, she seemed to be sensitive to the energy flow and described the sensation as a wave of heated prickles. As she was feeling the sensation of it, she recognized that’s how she felt when she was feeling anxious. A few minutes passed and the sensation passed away. After her acupuncture treatment, I still remember her remarks. “Oh, this is how the world feels like!” My recommendation for her was to seek counseling in conjunction with continuous acupuncture treatments to release unexpressed grief and longing for care when she was young. The realization that came to her was “OMG! It’s emotion!” and this helped her move forward in our work together.
Why do I talk about emotions in the acupuncture session?
In Chinese Medicine, balanced emotions are recognized as healthy and natural energy that bring harmony and nourishment to the internal system. When emotions are excessive or repressed, they disturb the Mind and Soul, alter the harmony of internal organs and physiological system and manifest as various diseases.
From a western medical perspective, the limbic system in our brain plays a crucial role in controlling and regulating various emotional behaviors. It also produces and releases various hormones that help regulate autonomic nervous system functions such as heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, digestion, and sexual arousal. Therefore, when our limbic system is overactive, production and release of hormones become abnormal. As a result, we experience various physical symptoms such as heart attack, high blood pressure, shortness of breath, indigestion, and low libido.
To give an example of how emotion can impact our body is when we experience broken heart syndrome caused by extreme emotions or stressful situations. It causes the body to release a surge of stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. This temporarily stuns the heart muscle as the blood flow in the arteries is reduced and produces symptoms similar to a typical heart attack.
My own journey with emotions and acupuncture
My repressed trauma surfaced up to a subconscious level during a private meditation session in 2015. It brought out a lot of repressed and suppressed emotions, and I realized that I was not in a good place. Over the next four years, I attended several retreats that helped me to open subconsciousness. During that time, almost every day, I sat down in an empty room and let out all the emotions that I couldn’t express in the past. I also did a lot of exercises to burn lingering energy from the emotions.
This is what I noticed as I was going through my own journey of releasing emotions. I was afraid to feel my fears, sad to feel my sadness, shameful to feel my shame, too angry to feel my anger, too anxious to feel my anxiousness, too annoyed to feel my annoyance and so on. I often got pulled into the energy of emotions and became one with it. I often judged my emotions and wanted them to go away as soon as possible.
Eventually, what really turned around my state of being was a combination of counselling and acupuncture. I have two counsellors that I have worked with since 2021. The one I regularly met with has guided me to a place where I can observe and feel the energy of emotions without being attached to them. When it happens, I am in a truly freeing and expansive place. I feel that I am a part of the life force, and so much gratitude floods into me. It is a place I wish everyone experiences. Being in that place, there’s a natural understanding of emotion. It is valid, has its own use, can be very playful, is neither good nor bad and above all, it is here to enrich life. Whatever event that triggered the emotions no longer feels serious, good, nor bad. It became just an experience!
Acupuncture plays a vital role in helping me to get to this place more easefully. Science keeps discovering about the efficacy of acupuncture and one of the amazing things that Dr. John Longhurst, a cardiologist and a professor at University of California Irvine, found when he was alive was that when an acupuncture point was stimulated, it sent a message through the peripheral nervous system (a network of nerves that runs throughout the head, neck, and body). Then, the message is being carried to and from the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord). As a result, body produces neurotransmitter or hormones (chemical messengers) to help body to regulate and eventually back to homeostasis (a tendency toward a relatively stable equilibrium). Basically, our body is very intelligent and produces our own medicine.
Counselling helps me to arrive at a cognitive realization, whereas acupuncture helps me to arrive at a somatic realization. Because I am a human being with a physical body, somatic realization is crucial in totality. Without bodily experience where energy can be felt, cognitive experience leaves a gap to fill.
Invitation
There’s a wonderful saying by my other counsellor who I see for parenting education, and I want to share with you. I hope it serves as a warm and reassuring invitation to your emotions that want to be heard and felt by none other than YOU.
“Nothing you say or do is admissible in the court of my love.” – D.L-
If you are interested in learning more about how acupuncture can help you with your emotions, I would love to meet you. I offer acupuncture services in both Langley and Surrey and have immediate availability. You can learn more about me by visiting my bio here.
