Acupuncture Protocol for Harnessing Rage

Russell talks about Spring

In only two months, the Trump administration has issued the following executive orders in an all-out campaign to push transgender people out of public life and rollback their rights:

-forcing government agencies to issue passports and visas to trans Americans in contradiction to their declared gender

-blocking funding for reproductive health care organizations worldwide, disproportionately affecting LGBTQ+ people,

-banning federal funding or support for youth gender-affirming care for those under 19

-banning trans women and girls from sports and schools under the threat of having federal funding pulled

-banning trans people from serving in the military

-prevention of trans athletes from obtaining visas to participate in the Olympic Games

-entirely eliminating websites providing transgender health information

-direct threats and attacks on hospitals and clinics offering gender-affirming care

-the removal of federal funding from any medical school or hospital that researches gender-affirming care

It's Spring now so all the Insta-puncturists make their posts about the Wood Element and its correlative emotion: anger.

I don't like talking about anger. I prefer RAGE.

Rage, to me, is closer to the feel of the Wood Element/Spring which is about LIFE FORCING ITSELF AGAINST THE RESISTANCE OF THE STATUS QUO, in this case, the bleakness of Winter.

The impulse of Spring is toward creation and growth; to bloom again out of the darkness. The vernal movement is rising up from the ash of Fall’s grief.

Anger is just one part of it, but of course TCM school always manages to flatten emotions down to a single identifiable mode, as if explaining a feeling to a robot-alien who has only-recently arrived on our planet. I don’t know people who experience feelings like that.

The catalyst for Spring (and the rising of Wood) is not just anger, but the collision of many rambunctious feelings: hope meeting frustration, self-worth and disgust.

Determination born from clarity and contempt, ferociously breaking through the impossibility of what is.

The seed cracking open, tearing itself apart, and pushing itself through freeze to grasp the Sun is rage. All bloom is defiance.

What on earth did you think could turn the barren of Winter back to Summer’s blossom? Benevolence? Wishing? Love? Of course not, don’t be ridiculous.

It’s the fury of seeing the world dark, brittle and cruel; knowing it could be nourishing, colorful and alive. It’s the delirious refusal to accept what is, in favor of what could be.

To dismiss this as just “anger” misses it. It’s mutiny. This is the Wood Element, the vernal impulse: repression, finally released. The evolutionary spirit of emergence in action.

I love rage. All my favorite people are filled with rage. I love seeing rage in my patients. When I see rage in a patient, I know they are going to be ok.

Which is why I’m always so disappointed in those practitioners who still frame rage as pathology or poison, and mistake “healing” for quelling it. They are missing the point of Wood entirely. Rage’s job is to create something new. To quell that is to play-act that things are fine just as they are. But they aren’t.

These practitioners who equate health with “politeness” never made any sense to me. This cosplay as the gentle, apolitical, nonjudgmental whisper-voiced, billowy-yoga-pant-wearing obsolete healer trope is frankly one more thing that pisses me off.

We are long past the days of telling people “calm down; it’ll be fine.” We are past doing Four Gates on a wiry pulse.

There is so much to be enraged about.

I see this list of executive orders targeting trans people–a historically oppressed population (who, it always bears repeating, is less than 1% of the population)–for no reason except to stoke a culture war and I’m not just angry. I’m heartbroken and furious. I’m piss-fuck enraged.

I see Trump systematically dismantling DEI under the guise of “let the best person have the job;” meanwhile every one of his cabinet is blunderingly incompetent and unprofessional. I see the extent to which they protect Israel’s war crimes, arresting students off the street. God help the “healer” who thinks they should temper my fury.

To quell rage, even through ambivalence, is to re-freeze Spring; is to unbloom a flower. Stifling rage is like unwriting a poem. Fuck that.

The point is not to squash rage; or vilify it; or make it polite. The point is to USE IT; to make it radically productive of the newness it envisions.

My protocol for rage forms an alloy between the Liver’s fury to grow into something new, the Heart’s insight and curiosity, and the Du Mai–the Sea of Yang–the physiological embodiment for the sturdiness and capacity to stand upright and move towards one’s life impulse.

Use the rage for its Yang, and solder it to the very same impulse which prompts every infant to pick up their head and look out at the world, craning their face towards the Sun.

Take all that rage, dump it into your Heart, and then send it up the spine like the brawny mast of a sail, navigating in the dead of night, against the wind and odds, in fucking rough water. Go.

GB-41: Zu Ling Qi "Tear Falling on Foot" Wood point on the Wood channel, transmitting point for rage, promotes the essential virtues of Wood: clarity, ambition, directed growth with purpose

SI-3 Hou Xi “Back Ravine” Why a random point on the Small Intestine meridian should be the Opening Point for the Du never made any sense to me, until I understood it in exactly this context.

It’s the Wood Point on the Fire channel. It performs the exact instruction I want: putting Wood and Fire back in functional relation to each other, rejoining vision for the future with the deep curiosity and pursuit of meaning.

SI-3 bonds planning and perspective to the Small Intestine’s capacity to sort out the Heart’s desires. It both uses rage as kindling for the Heart, and gives the Heart’s illumination momentum and action.

DU-4 Ming Men “Gate of Life” mimics a hand on the small of the back, providing a gentle bit of support. I think of that whole posterior band of the Dai Mai (Du-4, UB-23, UB-52, Gb-26) as a weightlifter’s belt, easing the tension.

DU-10 Ling Tai “Soul Tower” and DU-11 Shen Dao “Spirit Path”

Ling Tai and Shen Dao are a pair which reunite Shen and Ling, the twin sides of “Soul.” (KI-24 Ling Xu and KI-25 Shen Zang do this on the front side of the body.) Both couplets are positioned anatomically over the Heart: to needle them together ignites Heart Yang which paves a way forward on a spiritual path:

The imagery of Du-10 Ling Tai is a tower which provides a limitless perspective–360 degrees of clarity– for people who have become imprisoned by their past experiences and now lack optimism or imagination for improvement.

DU-11 Shen Dao instructs, now that you see the new road, get on it. “Spirit Path” is the nudge of Yang to get out of the tower and onto the path, taking the new lucidity and clarity and using it for good: the liberation and care of others.

Du-20 Bai Hui is classically translated to "Hundred Meetings" because half the acupuncture channels converge on this point; however I prefer the alternate translation of "Hundred Possibilities."

Du-20 opens the "celestial dome" of the head and connects to the cosmic womb and collective consciousness in the North Star. It is said that the Big Dipper pours your destiny- the curriculum you have to learn in the lifetime- down from the cosmos into you through Du-20, which is why the skull bones around Du-20 dont close up for months.

Needling Du-20 accesses this cosmic umbilical cord, and in doing so, can offer a widened perspective on one's life so that one may be able to recontextualize their existence with expanded wisdom through time and space. What would you think of what causes you suffering today, if you could see your life from a year away? or 10 years away? or 1000 years away? Du-20 offers that vision, light that is endless and omnidirectional.

Du-20 is a reminder that you do not need to know what comes next. You don't need to understand the plan. You were never in control any way. Lots can happen. Your life is guided by a grace and intelligence you may never understand. Float above yourself from a 1000 years away, and consider a hundred possibilities.