Meridians – Your energy highways
In traditional Oriental medicine, the life energy in the human body (various called Ki, Qi, Chi or Prana) flows throughout the body along invisible paths. Most who follow Chinese and Japanese thought call these paths meridians; in India the pathways in a similar energy system are called nadis.
No matter what you call them, you can think of them as the body’s highway system for energy.
This isn’t a lesson in traditional Oriental medicine. We don’t have room for that here. But it’s good to have an idea of what the meridians are, if you are going to talk to a holistic health practitioner, because so many complementary treatment methods rely on them: acupuncture, acupressure, EFT, Reiki, and others.
A deep knowledge of the meridians is not necessary for most people. In the same way that it’s not vital for you to know how all the wiring in your house works in order to live in it, if you can understand that these pathways exist, that they can develop issues, and that these problems with the energy flow can interfere with our physical, mental and emotional well-being, that’s enough for the average layperson.
If you search the internet, you’ll find multiple diagrams or graphics that show the meridians laid over an image of the human body. In many ways these resemble roadmaps, with interlacing strands just like the highways and minor roads shown on a map.
There are 12 primary meridians that go to major organ groups in the human body, and they travel throughout the body, with small branches that reach out in many places. Some of these meridians seem to follow the basic lines of the nervous system and some do not.
These meridians sometimes cross over without touching, like overpasses on a highway, but sometimes they intersect. And just like in a roadway system there has to be some way of making sense of the intersections. Since energy flows along these pathways, back and forth, the intersections must take this into account. And there are no traffic lights in the meridians!
Each place where the meridians intersect, with energy flowing in and out of that point, is called a chakra. Chakra is a Hindi word that means “wheel,” and it’s very apt since the energy flows around that intersection like cars in a traffic circle.
Usually when people talk about the chakras, they are referring to the seven primary chakras that run up the centerline of the human body. However, there are roughly 55 major and minor chakras,
although there are some schools of thought that put that number over 100. The exact number is not important.
Also, as with roadways, sometimes problems develop. Occasionally there are slowdowns in the flow of energy. Sometimes the energy flow can even become totally blocked along one particular pathway or meridian. Sometimes the intersections (the chakras) can also get unbalanced, with energy flowing either too quickly or too slowly or not at all.
If you have ever tried to drive in a place where the intersections were messed up you know how bad that can be. Let a power glitch set all the traffic lights in a city blinking yellow, or turn them completely off, and see how quickly traffic becomes a nightmare.
Each major meridian relates to a certain organ set, and it is seldom intuitive, simply by looking at a chart of the meridians. But time-honored methods and study by Oriental physicians has shown that the relationships are real.
Different complementary therapies work with these meridians in a variety of ways. For example, acupuncture uses very fine needles inserted into the body at particular points along the meridians in order to “unblock” the flow of chi at that point, thus allowing the body to function normally to heal and relieve pain. Acupressure is similar to acupuncture, in that the same points may be used, but instead of needles the practitioner will massage or press on those points to stimulate the flow of chi.
EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), also called tapping, uses a combination of tapping or pressing on specific acupressure points, combined with verbal statements to realign the thought patterns in the client. This has been shown to be effective in aiding clients in a variety of areas, whether mental, emotional or physical.
These three therapeutic methods are not the only ones that work with the energy meridians but they are probably the most well-known.
The importance of the chakras cannot be overemphasized, but we’re out of room to deal with them here. In later columns, I will talk about the chakras and what they do for us. But, as always, you are free to contact me through either this newspaper or at my office if you have questions or concerns.