Five Element Acupuncture: Mind-Body-Spirit Healing for Depression

Five Element acupuncture can facilitate healing from depression in unique ways. Emotions and memory are held in the tissues and energy of the body, below the level of consciousness, linking body and mind. Much of this emotional material, especially early childhood experience, is pre-verbal or non-verbal memory. It can’t be accessed through language and the thinking mind.

Five Element acupuncture helps us safely access traumatic emotional material held in the body. It creates a container where pre-verbal emotional material can be released without consciously re-visiting painful memories and life experiences. Patients often say they feel better without knowing why. It feels as if something just left, leaving the person lighter and brighter.

Along with facilitating the release of emotional material, Five Element acupuncture simultaneously addresses physical symptoms that often accompany depression, such as poor concentration, sleep problems, headaches, and body pain. Physical and emotional symptoms have the same root cause, and Five Element acupuncture treats the root. Acupuncture has a balancing, or homeostatic, the effect on systems of the body. It can help resolve hormone imbalances, immune problems, and other physiological issues that may underlie or trigger depression.

A third way that Five Element acupuncture helps depression is by reconnecting us to the web of life. The cycles of the Five Elements operate within us and in the world around us. Our bodies and minds respond to signals from the outside world. We are creatures of the earth, and we are social creatures. We thrive on meaningful connection with the natural world and with each other. Illness begins when that connection is lost. By restoring the Five Elements within the body/mind, Five Element acupuncture creates the opportunity for reconnection that heals.