Excerpt from ...

The Tao of Piercing: Ancient Wisdom for Contemporary Health and Pleasure

By Jeanne Elizabeth Blum

As a therapist of Traditional Oriental Medicine, over the last sixteen years I have become increasingly alarmed by the number of people piercing all parts of their body, with many of the studs and rings going into the areas of major acupressure points; historically, acupressure was created thousands of years before acupuncture.

This piercing phenomenon troubled me because in Traditional Oriental Medicine we understand that it is vitally important to use the correct type of metal--gold or silver—when balancing the body's health. Gold has one effect, silver yet another. Many piercings could be affecting the wearer's health without them even knowing it; especially the long term effects which can creep up bit by bit, in some cases, potentially disastrous.

Body piercing, including the art of tattooing, is not new; in fact it's been around since the dawn of man, and ear piercing was systematically used to treat people for medical problems in ancient China at 2000 BC.

In Egypt, they were piercing as far back as 4000 BC. Pharaoh Akhenaton, 1379-1362 BC, formerly known as Amenhotep IV, who revolutionized the religious life at that time, had a pierced navel as a rite of passage into his manhood, as did predecessor pharaohs, and his successor Tutenkamen.

The man who was really considered to be father of Western medicine however, was a mathematician from the Greek island of Kos, who spent a great deal of his time working to "square the circle" and believed that a simple life based on the principles of fresh air, water therapy for cleanliness, rest, and a good diet were fundamental for perfect health. He treated the body as a whole, and was the first physician to believe that thoughts and feelings were an integral part of creating that health, and that the brain was the primary part of this "thinking" process. This man was born in 460 BC, his name was Hippocrates, and treated his female patients at his health center on Kos, with ear piercing and gold and ruby earrings to eliminate menstrual and fertility related problems; he died at the age of 83 in 377 BC.

Clearly, the ancient ones understood what they were doing. How did they know? In a nutshell, they understood that if you placed gold in a ch'i-point it would stimulate that point, bringing in or transmitting good, new energy to the body, and if silver was placed in a point, it sedated, toned down, or dispersed the energy altogether. Similar to the reason behind having an antenna, which brings you clear transmission of your favorite radio music--or even television antennas and receiving dishes—these gold or silver adornments in our bodies pick up the similar frequencies and transmit them into us.

The Chinese especially, with their Traditional Oriental Medicine, never took this treatment method lightly. They knew that you could tell a person's physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and energetic health by taking, or feeling and 'listening to' twelve pulses; six in each wrist, at a deep and a superficial surface level. They could also tell if a disease would develop, years later, because the abnormality registers in the pulse corresponding to a certain organ, long before the obvious degenerative physical symptoms appear. And they observed the face, eye area, mouth and tongue for clues to organ imbalance.

We're piercing now in the twenty first century, unconsciously, way back down the genetic DNA line, because our primitive ancestors did and knew it was good for them, we've got the inherited desire to do it, but we're mostly unconscious of the equally ancient theory behind our pressing urges to pierce.

What the Tao of Piercing does is tell you that ancient theory, as simply as possible, theory on how to do it right, pierce correctly. It shows you the charts for ch'i points all over the body, and remember you don't actually have to pierce the deeper level of the actual flow in many cases, you just have to be right over the entry point--like the radio antenna--to always pull in the good energy from the universe, the Source of our being!