Acupuncture and Emotional Imbalance: The Importance of Awareness in Treating the Root

Abstract

Stable lifestyle changes are notoriously difficult to achieve: from medication adherence, to diet and tobacco use, to the complexity of the relationship patterns that are so often associated with depressive and anxiety states. In medicine—both Eastern and Western—we apply exogenous chemical, herbal, or energetic therapies to shift the patient into some new balance. So often, to be effective, these therapies must be continually reapplied, even if with lesser frequency, to maintain the new balance point. True change implies that an internal reorganization has occurred such that the new balance point is endogenously sustained. This inherently entails the engagement of the patient's Shen/awareness. From a root and branch perspective, it is only then that we can say the root has been treated. Traditional Chinese Medicine, Five System Channel Theory, and modern neuroscience perspectives on the roots of emotional imbalance are compared. Repeated rebalancing of Zangfu and/or Vital Texture pathologies does not address the root because patients' lifestyle choices bring them out of balance again and again. A novel acupuncture approach is described in which the somatic concomitants of the recurring emotional states of dysphoric syndromes are regarded as Ah Shi points, local/distal treatments are designed around them, the patient's awareness is engaged, and internal reorganization results.