Cupping Therapy: Treating the Root of Disease
You’ve seen the post cupping aesthetic masterpieces of perfectly circular subcutaneous hematomas, aka. Suction purpura or insert your own hickey slang at the risk of laughing a little. But really guys, think Michael Phelps, Summer Olympics 2016. That was a fun time to be working in a clinic because everyone wanted to know, “What the heck is cupping therapy?” One on my favorite healing modalities to perform and receive, actually! Cupping is not just affecting the body at a surface level as it may look. The kinetic energy from aggressive negative force actually pulls & dislodges stress that exists at some of the deepest levels in your body. We’re made up of 99.9999% space. Um what? Yeah guys, life is wild like that. The negative force from the suction extends through your cells to affect blockages potentially existing at an osseous level. If you’re sensitive enough, you can feel stress being released from fascia that exists around your skeletal system & organs during therapy. I can, and it allows me to have an extremely comprehensive understanding of what is actually going on in there. This can be validated in school and books, but my greatest resource is awareness, so I feel it’s my duty to share!
Everything holds a certain frequency & most things we see with the naked eye contain tangible elements. As we move through life we create certain imbalances & clutter of these frequencies & elements within our own bodies. We internally acquire external vibrations through thought, breath & food. When we engage muscles, experience trauma, or focus attention somewhere, an abundance of these vibrations are sent directly to those places for support. If you overstress an area, it begins to overwhelm tissue, creating stagnation. Blood can overflow outside of vessels collecting in areas that is shouldn’t be. Qi can stop moving through meridians creating excess movement in isolated systems.
These clutters & blockages are the root of disease. Our meridians & vessels carry imperative supplies to every organ in our body. You can picture these vessels & meridians flowing through you as fluid as rivers & streams flow through forests. Just as a river can become burdened & blocked by debris, our vessels & meridians can as well. The act of cupping, quite literally dislodges all of that blocked debris by aggressively pulling it towards the surface. Once dislodged, your body’s lymphatic, circulatory, digestive & pulmonary systems begin to take over removing the waste naturally.
Sure, you can treat the symptoms of dysfunction with pain medication or supplementary drugs, but if you fail to treat the source, then your symptoms will return and eventually form an entirely new set of problems.
So, ultimately, the goal is not to create an aesthetic masterpiece of perfectly circular suction purpura on a patient, no, but to dislodge toxic stress from areas of your body that have blocked the free flow of qi and blood within your organ systems. Once you have new space in your body! What are you going to fill it with? Try filling it with love, gratitude, and mindful nutrition.
You can use the color & composition of your cupping marks as indications to where your body is carrying the most blockages. In most cases, the darker your marks become, the more severe the buildup of stress. It makes obvious sense though, right? If you have more blood that has collected outside of the flow of its vessel, then you’ll have more debris to pull to the surface. As your marks become closer to the color purple, you are usually dealing with older blood that is a result of a very chronic disorder.
Health can be really confusing and difficult to treat if you look at it under a microscope, isolating body functions and disharmonies. All of our body’s systems work together in chorus to create our fuctioning self! If you step back and treat the body as a whole, it becomes much easier to find imbalances & you avoid neglecting imperative systems that work toward rebalancing your health.
So, next time you have a problem, don’t ask your MD about the trendiest pharmeaceutical that big pharma is pushing to mask symptoms for population control. Ask your acupuncture physician or naturopath about ways to get back to organic vibrant health. Just maybe cupping is that technique!
Namaste,
Kelly Bailey
Meditation.
This is a meditation to strengthen confidence in your body’s ability to heal itself. By building this confidence, we encourage ourselves to not accept symptom maintenance as our first option, but explore alternative forms of health care that actually look for the source of our symptom.
To begin: Sit or lay in a comfortable position, begin to take deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth. Repeat this affirmation out loud 8 – 108 times (if you’re feeling extra ambitious!)
“At the root of every human cell in my body, within my own DNA, I hold all of the information & healing power that I need to live with vibrant health.”