established in 1990supporting the wisdom of parents and babiesA
journey in exploring the importance of the Heart-uterus,
|
|---|
| Courses for: Midwives, Doulas and Birth Educators |
Before
I get into the substance of this article, I’d first of all like to
say how much I appreciated the response to my previous article. From Japan
to Israel and Italy, from Australia to Canada and Austria, I have been
in communication with shiatsu practitioners and parents. I now feel part
of a truly international body of shiatsu practitioners. I would like to
express my thanks to all of you who work for the Shiatsu Society and those
involved in producing this newsletter. I would also like to thank all
of you who filled in questionnaires for my book. I am still working on
it - juggling teaching and my shiatsu practice with caring for my toddler
hasn’t left much time over, but it is still happening slowly and
I will keep you informed.
Some of you may remember Nicola Pooley’s interesting article on the Heart-Uterus meridian in this newsletter a couple of years ago. Since so much of my work is with pregnant mums, I was very excited by this connection. I was already doing a lot of work exploring the uterus as an “extra-ordinary” organ and immediately began investigating the relevance of the Heart-uterus meridian in pregnancy. I noticed that especially in the first trimester, the Heart often felt quite hot and to balance the energy in the Heart-Uterus meridian, I was working with settling the Heart energy - often simply by holding one hand over the Uterus and making a good connection with it as an organ, and balancing it with the Heart organ. The heat would disperse along the connection. Women would say that they felt much more emotionally settled and often able to begin to make connections with their pregnancy and their baby. It also seemed to have a beneficial effect on easing nausea. I became interested in why it would have this effect and so looked up references to this meridian in Bob Flaws book “The Path of Pregnancy” (Blue Poppy Press). This was before the excellent Giovanni Maciocia’s book “Obstetrics and Gynecology in Chinese Medicine “ 1998, Churchill Livingstone) had been published. Flaws mentions the Heart-Uterus in relationship to the chong mai, the Penetrating Vessel. Some of you may work with the Penetrating Vessel meridian, but it was not one which I had particularly explored, nor had my colleagues, or students. It runs over the same area as the Heart-Uterus meridian, as its pathway in the abdomen/chest follows the Kidney meridian, up to KI 21 ( or KI 27, depending on different sources). Both the Heart-Uterus (Bao mai) and the Penetrating Vessel send Blood down to the Uterus. When conception occurs, Blood is no longer lost due to menstruation. The Penetrating Vessel with the Heart-Uterus meridian continue to send Blood down to the Uterus, but the foetus is not yet sufficiently developed to make full use of all this Blood which accumulates in the Uterus and tends to want to counterflow back upwards. During pregnancy, Blood is gradually transformed into milk and moves from the Lower Burner to the Upper Burner (regulated by CV17, which is why this is an important point for stimulating breast milk), also aggravating this upward flow of energy. There is also a strong connection between the Penetrating Vessel and the Stomach meridian. Penetrating Vessel passes through ST30 and the Stomach helps the Penetrating Vessel in its job of sending Ki and Blood down to the Uterus. As the Penetrating Vessel counterflows back up, it affects the Stomach, causing it also to move upwards. This upwards movement of the Stomach is aggravated by a weakening of Spleen energy in pregnancy. Since Spleen generates and transforms the Blood, the increased demand for Blood after conception to nourish the foetus may impair the Spleen’s function of promoting transformation and transportation.. It is this dynamic which a main cause of nausea and vomiting in the first trimester. By the end of the first trimester, the foetus begins to make full use of the Blood being sent down by the Penetrating Vessel and Heart and a better balance is restored. This is why morning sickness usually ceases around the end of the first trimester. I immediately began working with both the Penetrating Vessel (PV) as well as the Heart-Uterus meridian in women who were suffering from nausea. Most women do have some kind of nausea, even if only mild. I found I usually included work with Spleen and Stomach, and often used HC6. I began to understand HC6 in a different way, when I realised that it is the associated point for the Penetrating Vessel and works with SP4. Making this connection as well as working directly on the Penetrating Vessel made a huge difference to my work. One woman in particular stands out. She had had dreadful vomiting from early in pregnancy for several weeks and had been unsuccessfully treated by a homœopath. Homœopathy is often extremely successful for morning sickness. My partner, who is a homœopath commented that it was likely to be a difficult case. I found a lot of heat rising in the chest, with constriction in the throat, signs of disharmony in the Penetrating Vessel. The Heart was full and hot. The work I did in the session was very effective in balancing and settling the PV and HT-Uterus, but even I was amazed how the sickness immediately stopped, and, she wasn’t sick again during the pregnancy. I spent a lot of time feeling for the difference in qualities of the energy of the Heart - Uterus meridian, the Conception Vessel, the Heart Protector meridian, the Kidney meridian and the PV. They all run so closely to each other, sometimes even overlapping, that I often would ask myself how I could be clear which one I was working on!! I gradually began to feel the difference in the qualities of each meridian. One way I found useful when working with the PV was to make connections with the Kidneys and the Essence, as well as with the Blood. Being an extra-ordinary meridian, the PV derives its energy from the Kidneys and circulates Essence around the body. This led me on to explore the relationship between the Penetrating Vessel , the Governing Vessel and the Conception Vessel. We all know that CV is the Sea of the Yin Channels and the GV is the sea of the Yang - and essentially they are one circuit, representing the basic cellular energy of the body. They act as reservoirs for the other meridians, being able to absorb excess and send out more energy in times of shock. Working on them represents more deeper constitutional work. The Penetrating vessel is known as the “sea of Blood” and some people say that it forms with the CV and the GV , 3 pathways of the same meridian. After I brought Macioicia’s “Obstetrics and Gynecology in Chinese Medicine”, I became aware of the other pathways of the Penetrating Vessel. As well as starting in the area between the Kidneys, passing down through the Uterus and emerging at CV1 (like both the CV and GV), emerging at ST30 and then flowing with the KI channel up to KI21, it then fans out over the breasts and continues to flow up to the throat, circling around the mouth and going up the forehead where it “oozes into the Yang and irrigates the Yin” (1981, Spiritual Axis). It has another path from CV1 which flows inside the spine(some authors say up to the level of BL23). Another branch flows down from ST30 down the medial side of the leg to the medial side of the foot, where it splits into 2 branches following the Kidney and Spleen Channels. It thus influences the whole body, except the arms. This underlined for me its links with the GV and the CV and re-affirmed for me once more, the importance of working on this circuit of energy, which involves the Kidneys, Uterus, Heart, Brain, Blood and Essence. In Western terms this circuit can be seen as representing the hypothalamus-pituitary-ovarian axis and so is responsible for ovulation. Since a baby draws so much on the Mother’s Essence and Blood, both at the time of conception as well as during the pregnancy and the birth, both the Kidneys and these 3 meridians will often need support. I have heard and read many shiatsu practitioners being wary of working with what they call “boosting” the Kidney energy in pregnancy, as they say it would divert energy from the baby. I never could understand this precaution, as I believe that as Shiatsu practitioners we are trained to read the body in such a way, that by tuning in to each point, we know how much or how little to work, and if we need to work at all. I have found that many women need work on both the Kidney organ and the Kidney meridian during pregnancy including work on points which some authors contraindicate in pregnancy such as BL23, BL32. I have never noticed that this kind of work has an adverse effect on the baby. My understanding is that the mother and baby are one unit. If the mother has more energy, the baby also benefits and grows. This relationship of interdependance continues postnatally - some people even say up to 9 months or longer. Because all these 3 meridians flow through the Kidneys and the Uterus and circulate the Essence, one of the ways I developed for working with them as a circuit was to make this connection in my work. As I continued doing this I found more and more I was drawn to the relationship between the Kidneys and the Uterus, in several different ways. This seemed a incredibly powerful connection to make. It was very nourishing for the mother, it would often help with exhaustion in pregnancy, help her be more aware of the baby, sometimes stimulate movements of the baby. I then discovered that there is in fact a Kidney-Uterus meridian. Both Flaws and Maciocia mention it, but neither in much detail. It is also known as the Uterus Channel, whilst the Heart-Uterus channel is known at the Uterus Vessel. . Finding this direct link between the Kidneys and the Uterus, has encouraged me to develop more ways of working with it and deepened my conviction of the importance of Kidney work in pregnancy. This all fits in well with the cosmological sequence which Sonia Moriceau recently described in this newsletter. Since Sonia first introduced this sequence to me in around 1988, I have worked with it a lot. Water is the foundation, Kidneys storing the Essence and also being the source of the Fire of the Gate of vitality - hence the source of water and fire. The Kidneys have a direct communication with the Heart. You could say that the water - earth-fire axis is represented by the Kidney-Uterus channel ie water-earth relationship and the Heart-Uterus channel represents the earth-fire relationship. All of these relationships have helped me to understand more about how the Uterus functions as an extraordinary organ. The Uterus in Chinese medicine includes the fallopian tubes and the ovaries. It is in the Lower Burner and it stores Blood. Some sources differentiate between menstrual Blood and other Blood, saying that menstrual Blood draws on the Essence for its material basis and Kidney water is its source - so there is a mutual relationship of Blood and Essence in menstruating women. In pregnancy, a new emphasis is given to the Uterus by its vast change in size, and as the pregnancy progresses, connecting with the Uterus and the baby, supersedes a full hara diagnosis. Over the years, I have developed many ways for pregnant mums to connect deeply with their wombs and with their babies. One way I have found very powerful, which is actually very good for infertile women as well, is to visualise the womb filling the whole body. Having becoming more aware of the importance of the Heart, the Kidneys and the CV-GV-PV circuit, I began to integrate these into meditations, visualisations and exercises. I realised that a lot of the exercises I have been working with over the past 9 years in my weekly classes with pregnant and postnatal women have been working the CV, GV, PV circuit and have more consciously developed this connection. Because the CV and GV and the Ht uterus and Ki uterus are easy meridians to find and to follow I have began teaching them to midwives and massage therapists who work with pregnant women, as well as the mums and dads themselves. I have been very pleased with how effectively they have been able to integrate them into their work. I find that they are extremely useful meridians to include during labour itself - especially for re-affirming the mother-baby link, as well as all manner of difficulties such as exhaustion, pain relief, bleeding. In the immediate postnatal period they support work in many ways eg helping the mother recover well, for breastfeeding difficulties, bleeding, exhaustion, depression. Penetrating Vessel is especially important as it regulates the breast and because of its strong relationship with Blood. As understanding of all these relationships, made such a big difference in my work with pregnant clients, I began to experiment with how it affected my non-pregnant clients. The immediate group of people to whom this instantly seemed relevant was women with menstrual problems, infertility or going through the menopause. Again it made a big difference. Gradually I have begun to realise that it is an important connection to make at any times of big changes in people lives - not just those linked to female reproduction. Times of crisis - shock, external or internal, emotional or physical. I have included it with clients suffering from severe depression. I have even now begun to include it with my male clients, with success. But that is a whole other story!!! |
Information: |
Copyright © Well Mother 1990-99. All rights reserved.