In Japan, blind acupuncturists are preferred due to their enhanced ability to feel the meridians. They have shown that being able to use felt sensation in the practice of acupuncture in this way is not only possible, but an advantage to practice. However, one does not have to be without sight to be adept at feeling qi. Qi perception is an ability that everyone has, but some people are naturally better at it than others. You can read more about this in the article, qi perception is a variable trait.
How I use qi perception in the practice of East Asian Medicine
Most of what I write here comes from my personal experience. I have the experience of being able to feel the channels within my own body and on other people’s bodies using my hands. I talk a little more about this in the article the real reason why acupuncture works. In practice, I use the ability to feel the channels to determine where there are blocks in the flow of the channels of my patients.
Each of the channels has quality and directionality, like rivers or streams. Some rivers have a lot of qi and move quickly, and therefore can create more noticeable problems when they are not flowing correctly. This is the case for the Jueyin厥陰 (Liver-Pericardium) meridian, which is a high-frequency channel running from the big toe to the tip of the middle finger that can cause a lot of pain or overall bodily havoc when it becomes blocked or diverted. A diverted channel is one in which the qi is not staying in the lane of its own channel, and has gone off course, often spilling over into other channels or areas of the body, and influencing them as a result.
In the case of the channels that do not generally have as much qi, the problems that arise are comparatively more insidious and less overt in the way of pain and symptoms. However, although the symptom presentation is less overt, issues with these channels are not inconsequential. When these channel problems are left untreated, a small problem can persist over a long period of time unnoticed, and during this time, can develop into a much more severe symptom presentation that is more systemic and chronic in nature, thereby derailing the overall vitality and resiliency of a patient over time. In other words, a problem that was initially a minor channel issue, can become increasingly more difficult to treat, and thus take more time to resolve and for the body to heal completely.
All pathologies are a lack of flow
In East Asian Medicine, all pathologies are said to be due to a lack of flow. This pearl was imparted to me early on in my education by my teacher, Brandt Stickley. And, it was one of the most valuable things that I ever heard in my six-year stint in graduate school. In one sentence, it defines how the practice and paradigm of acupuncture and eastern medicine differs from western medicine. And the concept of flow and qi are inseparable. In the practice of East Asian Medicine, qi includes the perceptible flow of qi in the channels (the realm of acupuncture treatment) as well as the flow of qi systemically in the body (the realm of herbal medicine treatment), although both the qi in the channels and the body as a whole are constantly communicating and influencing one another, so to affect one is to affect the other.
The flow of qi or lack thereof also manifests in the everyday experience of life, which includes things like behavioral patterns, emotional tendencies, or aspects of consciousness. These patterns can affect and shape reality and our individual experience over time in predictable ways. Over the course of thousands of years of the acquisition of knowledge and experiential practice of the medicine, people took notice of the way that qi flow would create predictable corresponding manifestations of physical symptoms and behavioral presentations. Over time, through a long period of experiential testing and subsequent observation, it was also discovered how acupuncture or herbal medicine could be used to remedy specific problems in the flow of qi.
Eastern medicine incorporates immaterial aspects of reality into practice
This understanding and acknowledgement of how unseen forces affect physical reality is one of the main ways that the paradigm of East Asian Medicine differs from Western Medicine, which denies the existence and influence of the unseen, immeasurable, aspects of reality. However, the current theories from quantum physics, now help validate much of the pearls of wisdom from our ancient past from a scientific perspective. The core jewel from both quantum physics and the crux of East Asian Medicine is that energy informs matter, and vice versa--that there is a wave-particle (energy-matter) duality that oscillates back and forth to shape our perception of reality. In the way of human experience and clinical practice, the qi flowing within the channels and systemically throughout the body, is continually oscillating back and forth to influence the physical material tissues and structures of the body, and vice versa. This is the basis for how East Asian Medicine works. This relationship between energy and matter is one of the reasons why Eastern Medicine is said to approach understanding the human body and health as a microcosmic reflection of the macrocosmic workings of the entire universe.
The best instrument for qi perception is the human body
In the practice of East Asian Medicine, the human body is the tool that has been used historically and can still be used today to directly understand what was written about in the ancient texts in the way of qi and the meridians. By leveraging one of the most sensitive instruments in existence, the human body, reliable information can be obtained to validate and understand qi and how it can be used in clinical practice. Each of us today, with the gift of this instrument, has the ability to experience and confirm the findings of the ancient sage-physicians. By directly experiencing the activities of qi through embodied practice, we can create an internal dictionary of that corresponds to meaningful and consistent interpretations. In the practice of acupuncture this relates to being able to feel the qi in the channels, or in the practice of herbal medicine, to be able to feel the qi of herbs to know how they can be reliably used to treat certain patterns. This relates to the correlative correspondences of East Asian Medicine, a systems theory that connects certain observable patterns to specific effects or manifestations.
Feeling is both subjective and objective
In the dominant cultural western perspective, feelings or sensorial phenomena are siloed into the realm of subjectivity, but feelings are both subjective and objective. When two people are adept at feeling qi, they can reliably come up with the same information about what is happening. They will be able feel a person’s channels and independently find blocks in the same locations. They can describe certain qualities of the channels such as the relative frequency or force of the flow of qi. Two people can taste a specific herb and come up with the same determinations of its thermal nature (qi) and corresponding movement pattern (flavor). This is the basis for eastern herbal medicine.
All of this is not an intuitive exercise, although intuition is an aspect of human experience that has been welcomed in the practice of East Asian Medicine, just not to the exclusion of the intellect and critical thinking. The ancient eastern masters were far from random in the way that they thought about nature and the body, as well as the visionary ways that they elucidated the interrelated concepts of resonance, relationships, and interconnectedness. And the experiential aspects that they wrote about thousands of years ago, can be objectively confirmed using embodied experience today, especially once a person has developed their body instrument to an advanced degree of perception. Although the ability to perceive qi naturally varies from person to person, each person is working with the same hardware in the way of the nervous system, which has remained relatively unchanged over hundreds of thousands of years, and thus, there is consistency from one human being to another, irrespective of time. Some people can develop more advanced abilities with consistent practice, or sometimes via a spontaneous experience that opens up their nervous system and energetic anatomy in new ways, such as a spiritual awakening, significant trauma, or near death experience.
Qi perception is vital to understanding East Asian Medicine
What’s important to note here is that there have historically been some challenges with creating a cohesive framework within the practice of East Asian Medicine because there has been a lot of misinterpretation, mistranslation, and superstition that has also intermingled with the medicine over time. This is why it is important to understand the fundamental theories behind the medicine and why things work in a way that is directly experiential, clearly explainable, and observable in practice. Just because the medicine is inclusive of the immaterial aspects of reality, does not mean that “anything goes.” The medicine works in a way that seems magical to people that don’t believe in anything that can’t be directly measured using our current instrumentation or approached from a materialistic perspective, but East Asian Medicine is not magical----it is based on the natural laws of the universe and shared embodied human experience. And, what I have seen a lot, even within the world of East Asian Medicine, is that there is unfortunately a lot of magical thinking with respect to how the medicine works, which serves as an impediment to genuine understanding.
Future implications of qi perception in clinical practice
The laws of energy are a fundamental aspect of the universe and its workings, and humanity is just beginning to scratch the surface of the implications for how energy and the unseen aspects of reality can affect apparent physical-material reality. The increasing popularity of eastern medicine in western culture is just one small tip-of-the-hat to this overarching theme that the integration of the seen and unseen is one of many repairs in the torn fabric of human consciousness. The old paradigm that arose with an enatiodromatic gesture toward materialism is being remodeled to one that is more reflective of its inherent wholeness, of a fluidity that exists as a spectrum. In other words, the conceptual dualities of the past that relegated concepts into material-immaterial can, and still, provide a useful constructual framework, but are. never really representative of the whole, or to use eastern parlance, the mental constructs can only ever "point at the moon." The fact that many people are directly having more energetic experiences, as well as increased acuity with being able to feel energy, means that there are more people that will be adept at being able to understand the human body and the promotion of health through an embodied perspective, one that is inclusive of an understanding of subtle energy and anatomy.
Citation
Juniper, Evren. “Qi Perception in the Practice of Acupuncture and East Asian Medicine” Universal Qi, 2022, https://www.universalqi.org/post/qi-perception-in-the-practice-of-acupuncture-and-east-asian-medicine.
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