The Power of Acupressure

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I recently found a knot in my lower back. In my last blog, I shared with you that at some point, I started developing a theory that this knot was caused by fear – which I’ve been dealing with and processing a lot of lately. In an effort to ease my pain and fear, I started using a tennis ball to massage my back. To my delight, I felt a difference after doing it just one time. So I committed to doing it the next few days.

And what happened next shocked me.

Surprise #1

First, I cried, but honestly that wasn’t that surprising since, as I’ve shared in some of my blogs and videos, I experience crying as a form of release pretty often and I was alone in my room, so it made sense that my body felt like it was safe to do so.

Surprise #2

What was slightly more surprising was how much I cried and the intensity of the feelings that I experienced as I did so. As I cried, all my present fears came to me: all the fears I had decided to face a few weeks earlier concerning my career and my entrepreneurial and artistic ambitions, all the fears that what I do and who I am isn’t important or appreciated, and, more primal fears like not knowing whether I would have shelter or a sense of safety in a month.

Surprise #3

But what was even more surprising than that was that, at the end of it all, all I could do was laugh, like belly-laugh sort of laughing.

To explain, about a year or two into my spiritual journey I formed a theory (yes, I like my theories lol) that I would slowly be led down the chakras, beginning at the heart, and then back up past the heart chakra, into the throat chakra, then the third eye and finally the crown chakra.

Manipulated photo; originally provided by KoolShooters on Pexels

And for a time it seemed to hold up. Following two heartbreaks, which were an introduction to my heart chakra and my spiritual journey, I experienced things, which partly sprung from my first heartbreak, but also were sourced from difficulties at work, that triggered my solar plexus and challenged me to learn how to set boundaries and raise my level of self-worth.

I next was led to start expressing my creativity and actually bring my ideas to life, as I started to embrace the gifts tied to the sacral chakra in the form of Unbound Creation. But then, things came to a halt.

For a very long time, I felt like I was stuck in a loop and eventually I started thinking that my theory was wrong – that I wouldn’t be led to work on my root chakra, which rules safety, shelter and the basic needs of life, afterall. How could I? I’m lucky to be able to say that these concerns had never been present in my life and that, based on my current standing, I couldn’t foresee them ever becoming issues. But that’s when, just a few months before my lease was to end, the housing market grew wildly and I was forewarned that my rent would be increasing by $100/month were I to sign a new lease.

So, after allowing myself to cry tears of fear, I thought to myself, “this is what you get for wanting to work on your root chakra” and, even though it was an objectively sobering realization, I thought it was hilarious. I started laughing at my younger self, both for the false confidence that I would never face the possibility of going without my basic needs and for doubting that the Universe would eventually find a way to let me work on my root chakra… It’s good to trust that you will always be okay (and you will be, even if you experience times where you go without the basic needs), but I was taking these things for granted, so, of course, the Universe responded.

Surprise #4

The last surprise I had was that after crying and then laughing, I started coughing – out of nowhere, it seemed. And it wasn’t a dry cough, either. I could sense that there was something in my throat.

After about a minute, and sorry if this is TMI, my cough started to cause the release of phlegm. And I was simply shocked.

I sensed that the phlegm had literally been created in response to the emotions I had been feeling and that there was no other real explanation… I mean, I wasn’t sick or anything.

But still, this idea felt a little woo woo, even to me, so I framed it as logically as possible. I thought to myself: “yes, it’s due to my emotions, but probably not directly. It’s just that I had been lying on my back, crying for a while and crying can stimulate the nasal passages.”

But then, one or two weeks later, I was lying on the tennis ball again and again it was bringing up my fears. Eventually, without first crying or laughing or having any other physical emotional response, I started coughing again, that same phlegmy cough. And this time I coughed up an even larger amount of phlegm. Suffice it to say, I immediately felt like I was in the Twilight Zone

Screen Capture of The Twilight Zone

This time I couldn’t explain away the direct connection between me lying on the ball, applying pressure to certain points on my body, and the subsequent coughing and release of phlegm. Then I remembered that my neighbor who is really interested in Qi Gong and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) once told me that his TCM doctor had advised him to stop eating cream cheese because it made him ‘phlegm-y.’ I didn’t really understand how cream cheese could do that, so I didn’t take him literally at the time and thought maybe it meant something else in the world of TCM, but when reflecting on the experience I just told you about, I eventually made the connection:that physical phlegm could be caused not only by sickness, but also by the things we eat, things we do and the emotions we feel.

So, of course, the first thing I thought to do was to verify whether my hunch was correct. And, sure enough, I found that it was. As it turns out, “phlegm is a pathological accumulation of fluids, which are usually transformed, transported and excreted with the help of qi[. E]motional stress can cause Qi deficiency or Qi stagnation and sometimes both, leading to the accumulation of fluids. (Phlegm-Heat in Chinese Medicine; Giovanni Maciocia)

In simpler terms, emotional stress lowers qi, which results in an increase of fluids, which are then converted into phlegm.

So, the second thing I did, after this initial confirmation that my thinking was correct, was to try to identify whether this point in my mid-back was a trigger point. After a quick search, I was able to identify it as either UB-22 or UB-23. I know this ambiguity seems to undermine my logic, but both possibilities are interesting. Apparently, UB-22 “resolves dampness, opens the water passages, regulates the transformation of fluids,” (acufinder.com) which, since phlegm is an accumulation of fluids, means it’s directly involved in the regulation of phlegm… Whereas UB-23 is one of the most effective points to “tonify the Kidneys,” which the Kidneys affect “fear, anxiety, Clarity… Trust, and Paranoia.”(acufinder.com)

Also, while lying on the tennis ball, I noticed different tight spots in my glutes for the first time and it felt like the areas were all tethered together. It literally felt like the knots were anchor points with a rope running between them which initially got tauter whenever I pressed on any of these points, so, of course, I looked up what points these were and found that they fell along the urinary bladder and kidney meridians. Then, I realized I had been getting headaches and had been feeling knots in several points along the left side of my spine and so I looked up the entire path of these meridians and found that the UB meridian runs all the way from the inside corner of the eyes, up around the skull down the length of the spine, directly to the sides of it, and down the back of the legs.

Source: Quizlet

Then I remembered that a few days earlier I had pressed a point on the inside of my left thigh and, when I looked up the kidney meridian, found that it ran down along the inside of the thighs.

Source: Curative Cupping

All this taken together, I concluded that both my UB and Kidney meridians were blocked, which makes sense as these are linked to the emotions of stress and fear and, when blocked, cause thirst, dark urine, sugar cravings and headaches, all of which I had been experiencing in recent weeks.

For a long time, I had heard that acupuncture/acupressure uncover a connection between things that – on a purely logical, superficial level – seem unrelated. Now I was experiencing it first-hand.

This is an ongoing exploration of acupressure/acupuncture, so I’ll make sure to update you guys on any interesting new revelations I may have as things continue to unfold, but this is where I’ll leave the conversation for now. If you have any questions or any experiences to share of your own, please drop them in the comments. I think this stuff is fascinating and would love to know if any of you guys have had similar experiences or if you think this is all just crazy-talk.

And if you liked this blog, then check out some of my other related blogs.