The Art of Acupressure and Healing the Eyes Part One

BEH PODCAST EPISODE 30
THE ART OF ACUPRESSURE AND HEALING THE EYES – PART 1

We’re going to start as we typically do. I’m going to talk a little bit and we’re going
to start today with what’s going to be a two-part talk. We’re going to be talking about
acupuncture and other aspects of oriental medicine that relate specifically to eye
treatment. All of you doing the program know we do acupressure. That’s a newer
technique for acupuncture, although its origins are very ancient. I have been doing
acupuncture for many years. I bought my first book on acupuncture in 1972. Grace had
also studied acupuncture, and had included acupuncture in her program from early on.
When I started working with Grace, we worked on further developed and refined the
acupuncture techniques in the program.
Going back for many centuries, there have been techniques described in
acupuncture and oriental medicine to try to help people with eye conditions. In fact,
there are practitioners across the globe that do acupuncture for these diseases. There
is a Danish man who has trained people in Canada, Turkey, Denmark and many
practitioners in the US many who teaches a particular style of acupuncture that has
some benefit for the eyes.
I don’t want to go into a whole talk on the theory of oriental medicine or the
theory of acupuncture, but one thing I do want to make clear in this talk is that Grace
had studied acupuncture, and I have extensively studied acupuncture and do a lot of
needling in my office. If I thought doing acupuncture with needles was what you needed
to get benefit for your eyes, I would be proposing that for everyone. Truly though, what
we found is that acupressure done even halfway correctly is as effective as
acupuncture.
Now you may ask, how can that be? How can pressing on a point be as powerful
as needling it? Well the reason that it can work as well is that needling requires a
practitioner, and you’re lucky that practitioner treats you once a week. If you really have
a good relationship with them, you might get a treatment twice a week. The people that I
am describing who do acupuncture around the world would have you come live next to
their office for a week and would treat you twice a day. That gets to be really, really
expensive. With acupressure, each individual treatment is not as powerful, but you can
do it almost every day. The repetitive, gentler treatment done more frequently has as
much benefit overall.
I am not just saying so. There are many books about acupressure that show it
can be just as effective as acupuncture. I am going to be putting up pdf versions, not
that you need to be reading about acupressure although they’re interesting. The books
cover the history of acupressure and we will be covering them in the fall. In fact, we will
be putting up a whole library of pdf books for alternative health. You won’t be able to
print them, but you will be able to download them or read them online. You can put them
on an iPad or a kindle reader - that works well. The Kindle is quite convenient because
you can enlarge the type.
Just to get back to the acupuncture, one of the notions in acupuncture is that all
methods of stimulation have a similar effect. This result is true whether you are
stimulating points with needles, pressure, heat or even a laser.
Another important notion is how connections generally work. In the theory of
acupuncture often the top of the body is connected to the bottom. The left is connected
to the right. The inside is connected to the outside. As a result, a lot of the points that
are most powerful for treating the eyes are not around the eyes. There are some points
around the eyes, but if you just work around your eyes you are missing out on a lot of
the important points. I want to encourage you to go back to look at your workbook if you
haven’t recently, and look at the points on the hands and feet. Those are especially
powerful. A lot of the acupuncture points if you are needling are these points on the
hands and feet. So, make sure you’re doing those points.
We’ve revamped the work book we’ve revamped the videos and so we’re going
to be making those available if you’re already in the program and you want to buy an
updated copy of the workbook and videos, you’re going to be getting a mailing within
the next couple of weeks that will describe how you do that. If you just joined in the last
few months, I forget when the cutoff for that is, we’ll be sending you that update for free.
So, that’s about all I want to say this time. Next time well be going into a little
more of the actual theory of what you’re treating with acupressure. But the takeaway
message for today, or the most important thing is that, first these techniques from
oriental medicine, stimulating points on the body some of which are quite distant from
the eyes are a very powerful treatment for eye problems. The second thing is that
stimulating these points by pressure versus stimulating them by needling them if done
on a regular basis, gets you all the benefits you would get form needling. The
disadvantage is that it puts the burden on you to do the work. The good news is that you
can do the work, and you’re not going to be spending thousands of dollars. I really
mean thousands of dollars. A series of treatments at the center up in Vancouver is
$10,000. In Turkey, it’s closer to $18,000. It doesn’t come cheap. There’s real value in
being able to do this yourself even in just the money you save. The downside is that
you’ve got to do it yourself, so if you don’t do it, it doesn’t get done.
The one reason why you might go see and acupuncturist is if you had other kinds
of health problems that could be treated well by acupuncture instead of taking a drug
that might have adverse consequences for your eyes. You might need to seek out a
professional if you are looking for more than just these particular things we have you
doing for your eyes.