The moment my acupuncturist told me that my left shoulder pain was actually my liver being ‘too hot’ and my spleen being ‘cold and damp,’ I laughed. Six weeks later, I’m eating my scepticism with a side of humble pie.
We track everything from REM cycles to heart rate variability through devices, which had almost made me forget what it feels like to lie still while someone reads your pulse for three minutes, studies the colour of your tongue and diagnoses you as though they’ve seen your insides. At the wellness centre, Aumlife, my TCM (or Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner), Dr Durgesh explained her diagnosis, “Your liver pulse is wiry, like a guitar string pulled too tight.”
In Western terms, I’d walked in with chronic shoulder pain, rosacea flare-ups, disrupted sleep and a peculiar anxiety that lived somewhere between deadlines and existential dread. I spent seven hour-long sessions with 20 to 50 needles sticking out of me and Dr Durgesh calmly burning dried mugwort around me (an essential part of TCM acupuncture that helps to stimulate energy). The needles are just a pinprick and sometimes, depending on how stagnant the flow of energy along a particular meridian was, the poke felt ‘heavy’. Some points create a dull, spreading ache: something I’m asked to look out for and practitioners call “de qi” or the arrival of energy. One needle on my stomach triggered a shooting pain in my foot, which Dr Durgesh took as a sign that the black coffee I’d had on an empty stomach that morning had aggravated my system. Another in my ankle somehow made my shoulder release. The first few days were actually incredibly relaxing and I was egged on by the almost immediate benefits (my shoulder pain was significantly reduced after 2 sessions). The later sessions required more patience; the miraculous results had begun to plateau and it made me realise how we take a normally functioning body for granted so easily.
Where Western medicine sees separate systems — digestive, nervous, endocrine — TCM sees one continuous conversation. Everything connects to everything else. My practitioner maps these connections like underground rivers. There are 14 major meridians carrying qi through the body. The liver meridian controls smooth flow of emotions, while the spleen governs transformation of food into energy. It’s a framework echoed by other healing traditions too. Mumbai-based energy healer Upasana S, who works across Reiki, sound healing and somatic modalities, describes the same underlying logic: “Any pain or symptom showing up in the body is its way of communicating deeply stored emotion or trauma.” She recalls a client who arrived with chronic upper back and shoulder pain, convinced there was no emotional component. But through their sessions, the woman uncovered a self-generated pressure and need to ensure her brother was proud of her, despite his unconditional support. “You may not even realise you’re holding on to this pressure. When she realised it and was able to navigate it, the pain started reducing,” she adds.
