Jeanne Elizabeth Blum presents Woman Heal Thyself

Jeanne Elizabeth Blum: I want to begin our discussion with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi: “There is a soul force in the universe which if we permit will flow through us and produce miraculous results.” That is really how the healing system that I developed came into being. I gave up my will about using the forbidden points in acupuncture. Although medics have known about these points for 5,000 years they have taught that they have an extremely damaging effect on a pregnant woman’s body. In fact, the only teaching provided by oriental medicine is to stay away from them because they cause miscarriage.

When I was a student I became obsessed with them. I ran around asking everybody who might know “what about the forbidden points, when can you use them, what have you found out?” All I got in response was, “what have you found?”

After I graduated, I volunteered at an orphanage in Mexico. One day a woman who was four months pregnant was tumbled in surf and started bleeding profusely. The doctor was away and there were no phones, so knowing that I had some therapeutic training, they came looking for me. I put the woman in bed and kept her warm but I really did not know what to do with her—I’d never been face with this type of emergency.

So I began to pray. And the first thought that came to me was “use the forbidden pregnancy points”. The thought was insistent. Eventually I stepped out of the way and let whatever was going on in the universe do it’s work through me. The woman was losing massive amounts of energy through four of the forbidden points on her body—two in the lower ankle area and two in each hand. If you’ve ever stepped behind a vacuum cleaner when you’ve been vacuuming and felt the rush of the air that comes out of it, that’s how it felt when I put my hands over them. I asked the woman to create a closed energetic circle of her own energy in her upper body and the energy stopped leaking immediately.

I placed my hands about six inches above her ankle and literally pushed her energy back into her. She stopped bleeding within a few minutes. And I understood for the first time how incredibly powerful those points are—in appositive way. I’ve been working with this system ever since then.

I started messing around with them on myself—when I got my period, because that’s the only time we know we’re not pregnant. Some pretty amazing things happened. I cleared up a class three pap smear in four months and in six months I got rid of endometriosis which had plagued me since 13 years old. My gynecological history was pretty severe. I had cramps that were so bad that by my early 30’s I was on heavy medication yet was still plagued with pain. I had chronic PMS. My hands would swell up so badly that if I didn’t remove my rings in good time they’d have to be cut off. I suffered depression after my period. If I was lucky, I had one week a month when I felt normal.

What you end up with is 52 decent weeks out of every year, which is the way it should be. Oriental medicine focuses on the root cause of how we get ill in the first place. Specifically, the Chinese maintain that when we have emotional imbalance of any kind, then we become ill. And it’s always different for everybody because we’re all individuals.

For example, the lungs process grief and sorrow from the body. Their physical function is to breath in and out but their emotional function is to digest grief. If we don’t cry when we feel like it, or if we don’t mourn the death of a loved one, then our grief builds in the body and shows up in colds or respiratory disorders. I’ve met many people who, when they get really sad, come down with a cold that they didn’t catch from anybody. It’s the body’s way of weeping, of getting rid of it. Unresolved grief will manifest as disease eventually, as asthma or emphysema, or—God forbid—even lung cancer.

The Chinese sages said everything in the world either has masculine properties and is called “Yang” or has feminine qualities and is called “Yin”. They also distinguished everything in the universe by the five elements; fire, earth, metal, water or wood. And they associated colors with all of these; red, yellow, white, blue or black or green. They even divided our bodies into feminine and masculine paired organs which worked together in tandem. This is where the Oriental approach differs from ours in the West.

That’s not to say that there aren’t amazing Western doctors who understand the potency of Oriental therapies. There’s one who works at Columbia Presbyterian in New York. He’s a noted heart surgeon and when he goes into surgery, he brings with him two women who are hands-on-healers. They not only feel energy with their hands, but they pass it on to their patients as well. One woman stands at the feet of the patient and works a point called kidney one or the “bubbling spring,” because the kidneys are the storehouse of all energy in our body. When our kidney energy drops, we feel listless. The other woman stands the patient’s head and works all the points of the upper shoulder in the neck area. These are the gates; they’re very powerful centers in the neck and upper back, where energy actually comes in and goes out of the body. This doctor’s work demonstrates how Eastern and Western medicine can work really well together.

They say the organs work in tandem, seesaw, and in two hour slots. They have a peak time of efficiency and they have a low time, when they’re most vulnerable to energetic depletion or to disease setting in. The stomach’s peak time is between 7 and 9 am, when we’re usually looking for breakfast.

The peak time for the lungs is between 3 and 5 am in the morning. How many of you have woken up in the middle of the night from a deream and although you may not remember what the dream was about, you find you’ve been crying. It’s all happening on lung time and you r subconscious is getting rid of old grief and old sadness that you no longer need to hang on to.

The large intestine is the partner of the lungs and it’s peak time is between 5 and 7 am, which is when most people go to the bathroom and have their major bowel movement of the day.

The kidney peaks between  5 an 7 pm, which is a perfect time to exercise. Go jogging in the evening when you come home from work. You’re going to clear out old stale energy and boost up your reserves.

The heart peak time is between 11 am and 1 pm which, interestingly enough is a time when heart attacks often occur. One of the things that happens is that each of these organ pairs pass energy on to it’s opposite. If you have a heavy lunch, your stomach pulls energy away from you heart. Heart attacks also frequently occur at big family gatherings—where there are also big arguments. That’s because the liver processes the emotion of anger. And if you’re eating and arguing, what you end up with is a triangular pattern of the liver pulling energy form the heart, the stomach pulling energy from the heart, the heart working hard to pump blood to the stomach—for digestion—and the next thing there is overload.

In terms of Chinese medicine, the kidneys also process the emotion of fear. And many women who have been abused as children whether emotionally, physically, or sexually, often experience patterns of bladder or kidney infections. No matter how many doses of antibiotics they are prescribed, they never quite get rid of them. Fear can also solidify in the system and form kidney stones.

This approach certainly throws a fresh light on addiction. If somebody has an awful lot of grief or sadness, maybe from their childhood, or during their early Twenties if relationships never panned out, they frequently turn to narcotics or alcohol because the drugs help numb their grief. A friend of mine decided to give up smoking. She locked herself in a hotel for ten days and all she did was cry. When she finished crying, she found she fond she was incredibly angry. Then she began having nightmares and se begin to remember that she had been sexually abused by her father. In giving up cigarettes, she accessed these enormous pools of grief she had been stuffing since childhood. In accessing her grief to the point of its depletion, and energy exchange took place and she was able to access the root cause of her anger. She was furious.

These are all the things associated with the kidneys. In her recovery process, what she had going on was liver, lung, and kidney energy flows until she processed the memories of her incest and healed. She doesn’t smoke anymoreand she gave up alcohol too, which also numbs anger.

The gall bladder is the liver’s partner. It’s issues deal with control. Occasionally, when someone’s had their gall ladder out, they go through a period of a few months when they feel like their lives are out of control. That’s because the energy flow which governs this organ, takes over and does what that organ would do.

It’s the same with people who’ve lost limbs. They can’t believe it because they can still feel the energy which flowed through the limb. In fact in some hospitals, physiotherapists will actually massage the limb that isn’t there anymore. They find their patient’s recovery time is much faster then. Again, they’re working with the energy flows which extend out from the body. Doctors are beginning to understand more about illness by being able to study this “aura” or magnetic field. They do this with MRI’s. You can tell someone’s health by the feedback you get from magnetic imaging.

Each of the five elements is also associated with a particular color. For example, in many cultures, people wear either black or white during periods of mourning. The Chinese know why. White is associated with the metallic lungs, and wearing it helps clear grief from the body. If you wear black, you are giving your kidneys—the storehouse for all energy—a powerful force to pass on to the lungs. The kidneys pass on this energy to help with the grieving.

When you are fumbling around in your closed tin the morning trying to decide what to wear, be aware of the colors you are inclined to pick out. For example, if you are attracted to brown, black or green, you might need to process stuff from your body. These colors give energy.

Another interesting thing about Oriental medicine concerns the acupuncture of the ear. Our ancestors wore earrings because they understood they could balance their energy by doing so. The ancient teaching is that all energetic channels meet in the 300 acupuncture points in the ear. We call this branch of oriental medicine Oracular therapy and I specialize in it. Even Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, treated women with menstrual disorders by ear piercing. How his knowledge as lost, I really don’t know. In any case, the traditional point of piercing is actually the intuitive or the psychic point. Gold acts as a stimulant and silver tones the point down.

When women begin to go into menopause, their kidney flow becomes depleted. After that, the heart energy flow becomes depleted and then th espleen. In terms of Western medicine, the spleen takes care of our immune system but energetically it governs our sexual organs and emotionally, it processes guilt and anxiety. Every time you start beating yourself up because you think you’ve done something wrong or you regret a relationship that didn’t work out, you spleen has to deal with your self flagellation. Strangely enough, most of the women that I have worked with—including myself—who have suffered from infertility or menstrual problems, have spleen related energy blocks.

It’s easy to start working with your own points because they are all very accessible. There’s not one of the 24 points that somebody else would need to massage for you.

The most powerful point on the spleen energy flow is known as spleen six and is found about a hand size above the ankle. It’s easy to find, because everybody’s hand width fits their body.

Another powerful forbidden point is called large intestine four or “hokoo” in Chinese. It’s also known as the great eliminator; it can be used to get rid of constipation, nausea and migraine headaches. If massaged when you are pregnant, it will bring on a miscarriage within one to three days, especially if you combine it with spleen six and some of the other forbidden points.

Since the large intestine’s job is to rid the body of impurities, it’s function is also to distinguish between pure and impure thoughts and activities. Every time you judge yourself or you judge somebody else, you large intestine will be affected.

Most people are pretty judgmental, including myself. So large intestine four or “hokoo” gets congested and hurts. It’s also a very good point for stopping a panic attack. Actually the early stages of menopause are so strange and debilitating that many women suffer from panic attacks. Acupressure here can stop them in a couple of minutes.

A number of the forbidden points actually help men to get over problems such as impotency, semen leakage or prostate problems. One of them is triple warmer four, which is found in the back of the hand. It’s one of the forbidden points, but it really affects a man’s libido, amongst other things. There’s another point, which is not actually forbidden for women called vessel fourteen, in the back of the neck. If you man is having problems in bed, give him a nice neck massage and drive your finger into the governing vessel fourteen. You’ll get a reaction.

When we learn to work with our own bodies we take back our power. The forbidden pregnancy points, serve to stop illnesses, PMS, cramps, endometriosis, and increase fertility. You can even learn to bring on your period every month. This way you can stop being so passive as regards pregnancy. Just bring on your period every month: if you don’t know you conceived you don’t know you’ve aborting anything.

You can prevent menopause if you want to stay younger and have children later on. Or in menopause, you can simply work with the forbidden points during the full moon, and energize the earth organs, spleen, and sexual organs—because in menopause you get a triangular situation going on between the kidneys, the heart (palpitations, hot flashes)and the spleen.

To figure out the nature of your own energetic flow, Oriental doctors begin with the pulses. There are 12 major pulses and each corresponds to an organ; there are six in each wrist. What you will find is that some points are very painful, which means that they’re congested, there’s a lot of old, stale, energy that’s blocked up in them. There are two directions to massage the points. One is a counter clockwise direction, which gets rid of old, stale energy and clockwise brings in new energy. Sometime they’re very painful, and sometimes there’s no feeling in tem at all. Then you don’t have to press them that hard.

The Chinese understood 5,000 years ago that just like the body ahs blood vessels in it which carry blood all over the body, that there are channels of energy, just like the blood vessels. If you get a blood clot, you know what happens. Now, if you get and energy block, you know what to do.