Interesting case today and perhaps the highlight of the week. I saw a homeless man with a mountain of debt and with one single penny and two sticks of beef jerky in his pocket. He’d had a job in a store but neglected to pay his parking fines which accrued so much interest that the bill became insurmountable, leading him to lose his apartment. He then lost his job and ended up on the street.
We talked at length about his journey. He said he felt strangely liberated being homeless, that there was so much less to worry about, that he could get food, shelter at night if he wanted it, and a daily shower. I asked him where he wanted to focus his treatment and he said he couldn’t imagine being on the street long term, but he couldn’t see anyway forward. His real problem was that he had never felt resourceful. There was a history of never having had enough.
The pulses showed emptiness of the Liver—it wasn’t storing Blood—and an absence of connection between Liver and Heart. In other words, as I applied pressure from the moderate to the deep level of the Liver pulse I felt it disappear. If I applied slight pressure to the Liver pulse and released pressure from the Heart pulse, there was no response in the Heart pulse (no surge in it). So the left wrist showed a dearth of resources stored in the Liver and therefore not much to share upward with the Heart—the Liver was not storing enough blood. The Spleen had an ascending vector, meaning the Spleen Channel had the capacity to ascend blood from the Liver to the Heart, so the problem didn’t lie with the Spleen.
I asked him about sleep problems and palpitations and of course they were affirmed. Blood is both a metaphor for general resourcefulness and literally the most precious post-natal resource. A person who feels they cannot generate enough resources for any purpose is usually a person deficient in blood. So the treatment strategy was to build blood.
I chose Liver Divergent deep-superficial-deep because of the name of GB-1, the Virgin Bonehole, meaning the crevice into which one needles to invite a new vision related to restricted resourcefulness. CV-2, the other confluent point of the Liver divergent is a key point for blood building especially when deficiency is chronic. CV-14 is on the trajectory to relax the pericardium, LR-14 cues the Liver to store blood. LR-5 treats the (unhelpful) idea that we are not in control of our resourcefulness.
He went into a very deep rest and when I roused him, he reported that he could receive air into his lungs more easily. I hadn’t treated the lungs, but acupuncture is not measurable medicine: his body was already adopting a more receptive energetic state. He reached into his pocket and with a truly beaming smile, handed me the penny and one of his two sticks of beef jerky.
Ann, NYC
Artwork: ‘Heavenly Qi Seeps into the Bone’, Ann Cecil-Sterman 2016