This week my teaching venue was a huge, beautiful old stone house built in 1877, not far from Barcelona.
For the last nine years, one of my dearest friends and Spanish translator of my books and classes, Monica Martin, has brought me here to teach. People usually come from all over the world, but this past weekend my teaching was translated into Spanish, and so I met for the first time many practitioners from all over Spain, as well as from Switzerland, Germany, Los Angeles, France and the UK. We saw a beautiful healing.
A woman came barely able to walk any stairs. Her trouble began in 1998 during a particularly difficult time when she developed bursitis in her knees, and was left on a gurney in a hospital and forgotten about with a tourniquet around her knee while under a general anesthetic. Following that event, she was unable to walk properly again.
The stressful period during which the knee problems emerged was work-related and her decision to soldier on and not complain about her grossly unfair treatment at work caused a buildup of unexpressed rage over the following years. Eventually that rage was expressed to her family regularly after work.
We found that the guilt that resulted from that repeated action caused her literally to cripple herself in punishment.
She agreed that if she hadn’t had the outbursts, her Liver would not have been able to vent the rage and she could have died as a result of a stroke. The pulses pointed clearly to the Bladder Divergent channel. The pulses showed that she had plenty of resources available to move the pathology.
The treatment was extremely simple: gua sha the ring around the chest, and needle the confluent points of the Bladder divergent channel (BL-40, BL-10) and then jing well point (BL-67). The gua sha proved very interesting. As I brought the sliding cup back and forth, across her back from side to side at the level of GB-22, she released an enormous amount of pent-up energy through astonishingly deep and very loud full-throated free laughter. In between laughs she commented that it wasn’t her laugh, that she didn’t recognize it, that she was staggered at its sound.
I kept going with the gua sha and she kept laughing for a long time, a striking laugh of profound release. Afterward, she got up from the table and her energy was unrecognizable. Twenty-five years of self-torture had just melted away. Acupuncture is such a gift. I can’t wait to see the healings this weekend.
Ann Cecil-Sterman
L’Era, Girona, Catalunya, Spain
December 7, 2022