In recent years, piercings of many different kinds have become increasingly popular. While a few years back it was typical for only women to have a single ear piercing for their earrings, now it has been pretty normalized for people of any gender to have whichever piercings they want, and many like having more than one earring per ear!
It’s no wonder, as piercings can be a great way to express yourself creatively, and at the end of the day, it’s a fun way to decorate your body so you feel your best. But what if all of these trendy ear piercings are doing more than just decorating your ears? What if they accidentally provide you with other things too?
On a wellness level, acupuncture points are directly connected to your body’s meridians ofenergy, and poking in the right place can affect your emotional responses, your moods, and even different physical aspects, such as relieving certain pains!
Ear piercings are literally poking through your ear, and if they hit one of these points, then they could be affecting the wellbeing of your body and mind! (Which in most cases, will be good. Kind of like an accidental bonus that you get from your piercing!)
But let’s take a deeper dive into all of this.
Wellness and acupuncture:
Acupuncture is a holistic treatment that comes from Chinese medicine, which has been developed over thousands and thousands of years. In Western culture, it might seem like a bit of a leap of faith to picture meridians of energy running through our body, but tapping into the energetic framework of the body, through treatments such as acupuncture, can have many beneficial effects, and can relieve many physical and mental ailments.
Of course, not everyone believes in the effectiveness of acupuncture. But for those that have tried it, the results are incredible.
Through acupuncture, the specialist in charge of the treatment is essentially tapping into your nervous system, and can from there make slight changes to help increase your energy levels and mood, as well as your overall well being. Most people use acupuncture to relieve stress and anxiety or to relieve certain pains such as headaches. Musculoskeletal pain is also one of the main things that acupuncture is used for, as it can be very effective at relieving these problems, and making you feel brand new.
There are then also several acupuncture points that deal with the mind, and with your emotional state. Your energy has a big impact on your day-to-day life, and using acupuncture can set you on the right path so that you are overall happier.
Acupuncture in the ears:
Okay, so what does acupuncture look like in the ears?
Well, each ear has around 300 acupressure points, all of them correlating to specific organs of the body or emotional expressions from the mind, meaning they are a sort of roadmap for all acupuncture in the body. They are essentially full of pressure points that can be used for acupuncture treatments of all sorts.
This means that when you pierce your ear, you are almost guaranteed to be hitting one of these acupressure points, as there are so many, and the piercing is therefore constantly tapping into your body’s meridians of energy.
But, is that good? With acupuncture treatments, the needle is placed in the right exact spot for a certain amount of time and then removed. And that serves to redirect or tap into the energy so that it flows better or is slightly redirected. With a piercing, the “needle” is constantly placed in that same position!
This is actually completely fine, and it is something used by auriculotherapy (ear acupuncture), to diagnose health conditions, and to provide long-term acupuncture treatment to certain points.
Professional acupuncturists will be able to explain how a piercing can be placed in a specific spot, in order to stimulate the reflex points of that area and the flow of energy of that particular acupressure point. This can regulate your body and mind in specific ways and can help alleviate pains or ailments, as well as improve wellbeing related to the organ or emotional expression being targeted.
So essentially, all of these trendy ear piercings that you don’t give too much thought about could have a permanent effect on your wellbeing and energy. Depending on where and how it is placed this can be good or bad.
Ear piercings and your wellness:
Some piercers are aware of the correlation between piercings and wellness, and they have created a niche within their practice that deals with placing piercing in certain acupuncture points of the ear, depending on what the customer needs or wants. (So, depending on what kind of ailment they want to relieve, or what energies, organs, or emotions they want to improve.)
For this, there are two main things that the piercer needs to consider:
The metal used for the piercing:
Metal has a big impact on the energy flow of your body, and in Chinese medicine, it is highly understood that you need to be careful about which metal you use. Especially with piercings, as if an acupressure point is constantly stimulated it can become drained.
As a general rule, both gold and silver are used to preserve energy, so those are the best metals to use in piercings.
Gold is usually used for activating energy, and silver is usually used to drain or sedate energy. So depending on the way you want to affect the energy flow in the acupressure point, you can use one or the other.
The placement of the piercing:
The placement of the piercing is the most important factor to consider, as you will hit different acupressure points depending on where the piercing ends up. It’s important to be very exact and precise, especially as the ear has so many points!
As we mentioned, there are around 300 acupressure points in each ear, so we won’t go through them all. But here are the main correlations between different points in your ear and your wellbeing:
- The lower lobe: anxiety
- The mid lobe: eyesight
- The upper lobe: depression
- The flat of your ear: stress eating
- The rook of the ear: stress in general
- The helix: insomnia
- The daith: migraines
- The conch: chronic pain
- The tragus: sugar cravings and similar
- The industrial: allergies of different types
Depending on where the piercing is placed, and what metal is used, your energy flow can be affected in different ways!
However, something that acupuncturists sometimes disagree on is whether the effect is truly permanent, or if it fades away after some time. The shift in your wellbeing will be the strongest right after the piercing has been put in and for the following days and weeks.
But after some time, roughly once the piercing has fully healed, some people notice that the effects sort of wear off. This could be because the body becomes desensitized to the shift of energy, and it learns to flow around it so that the piercing no longer matters much in the grand scheme of things.
This can also vary from person to person, as no two bodies are the same!
