Last Thursday in the mentorship we had a potent discussion about trust.
The word trust in our culture infers expectations of people’s behavior. “I trust you not to: abandon/abuse/assault/disregard/disrespect/steal from/take advantage of/betray/ me.” If one of these things happens, we say, “my trust has been broken”. And so it has. But trust has a much broader implication in Chinese medicine.
The word trust appears in only one acupuncture point name, Kidney 8, “Gateway of Trust”. Since the points came thousands of years after the channels, we can say that the element of trust is a key function of the channel on which it appears: Yin Qiao Mai—the Heel Stance Channel. Yin Qiao Mai’s function is to restore one’s sense of oneself. It brings self-confidence, alignment with one’s blueprint, and the requisite trust in one’s gut, which is the source of all truth. As the channel goes through the solar plexus it connects one’s self esteem with the act of knowing. Knowing what is right for the self, and equally, knowing what is not right for the self enables a person to stand in alignment with both the world and the blueprint, hence the word stance in the channel name.
Nearly always, before we are disrespected, or abused, we have been sent numerous, sometimes a constant series of signals that an abuse of trust was going to occur. I hear these stories regularly. A patient told me last week that when her mother was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer and given a short prognosis, her boyfriend at the time did not show up or visit her mother in the hospital, causing her to doubt his commitment to her, and yet, she married him, with disastrous consequences. And also recently, another patient’s business partner years ago had secretly forged a signature for a small personal bill when my patient was out of town, and yet he entered into a joint business with that person, with catastrophic outcome. And then there are the little signs that could be no problem at all if they don’t create the telltale slight tension of doubt that arises in the gut, but which are very important if they do create that sensation. These can include: not showing up, a disrespectful email with no apology, forgetting an important date and not seeming to care when reminded, rarely asking how you are or about how your interests are going, taking things without asking, disrespecting your space.
And so, if these things happen and there’s discomfort about them, and then down the road the person demonstrates something that is terminally damaging to the relationship, the question is not so much about their breaking of trust, but our breaking of our own trust in ourselves. We didn’t trust ourselves. We were shown over and over again through sign after sign; yet we overrode the faint, persistent unrest in the gut with what our mind was telling us: “settle down, it will get better, you’re being overreactive, it’ll work out, don’t worry about what happened this morning”.
Treating Yin Qiao Mai returns the patient to their natural state of trust in their own solar plexus. With that in place, we can can feel free to trust with confidence, knowing that we have regained our inborn ability to feel the signals that will arise reliably in the gut—signals in alignment with each blueprint—signals to take some kind of action.
Ann Cecil-Sterman
Manhattan
26 May 2026