Part 1 of 2

Love and Fear. Hope and Despair. The exhausting emotions of trying-to-conceive, a roller coaster of switching between sympathetic and parasympathetic, playing havoc with the stabilisation of the digestive and reproductive feedback loops.

In this course we will look at the spectrum of the heavy and difficult emotions that fertility patients field, from the fear to the constant switching between hope and despair, to the self loathing and confusion that associates with guilt and blame, to the intense anxiety and back to the fear. Emotionally the fertility journey can be fraught with destabilising undermining emotions that wreck havoc upon one’s sense of self esteem.

We will examine these emotions in the context of their correspondences, both to the classical understanding of the 5 Spirits, the Shen, Hun, Po, Yi & Zhi, and also in the context of the spirit association to the elements of the 5 phases. We will discuss the corresponding impact these emotions can have on the connective pathways of the channel systems as exemplified in the Sheng & Ke Cycle theory.

This presentation will examine the importance of how acupuncture can be used to treat these complicated, multi-layered often tangled emotions.