Spring Equinox CEU Finger Scissors

Finger Scissors

Here is a Gallbladder and Colon meridian disentangling exercise for people who are really not sure about the difference between their rage and their shit, and they don’t want to fling shit at somebody when they are angry.  

I learned this back when I was obsessed with what I called meridian entanglements, or meridian bleed-throughs. These are places in the body where the energy of one meridian, or one point on a meridian, was dominating or muddying the flow of another meridian, or points on that meridian. The solution had to do with alternately pulling the digits associated with the two meridians (one of them was usually a Wood meridian) to create contradistinction between the two associated muscle trains, all the way up through the affected area. In this case, the affected area is Gallbladder 21 overflowing into Colon 16, and we remediate through finger scissors. 

There was someone with whom I was sharing these discoveries, who taught me a lot, and who may have even taught me this move—I can’t remember. Was it Thomas Merrill, from whom I have learned so much about the body? If this was your teaching and I took it (and ran with it), please let me know and I will credit you. 

You take your two fingers, put your arms straight out… Let me see if I can do this sideways, so that you can see. You are going through your fingers like this—back and forth. Try putting your arms straight, really tight, with tension on them. Then scissor your fingers, with tension, back and forth, so that you can feel the muscles in your arm sliding back and forth against each other in your forearm.  

You should feel the two different muscle trains, feeling that as it goes up your shoulders, into your shoulders, feeling those two different muscle trains. You need enough tension that you can feel them; not so much tension that you just about paralyze yourself. That helps your Gallbladder and Colon meridians disentangle themselves.  

The gallbladder meridian has an extended meridian to the middle finger. Very convenient, right? That movement helps the two meridians free themselves up, so that you can say, “This is my shit. I’m not going to fling it. This is my rage. I’m going to ground it and open it, so that I’ve got Kidney—this is my skin in the game my friend—and I’ve got heart. What kind of ruckus can we have here in the space called Hope?” 

Oh, and by the way, I’ve found that growling really helps in doing any of these Opening the Gates exercises. It’s really good to do some growling. Squat, squirm, shimmy open. The worst excesses of anger, inward and outward, happen when it’s just escalating up and out, and the gates downward are not open. 


To learn about all of the “Opening the Gates” exercises for grounding our anger (and other practices for a healthy springtime), you can find it in CEU course Spring Recharge: An Equinox Healing CEU.

To join the discussion, find us on my Perennial Medicine discussion listserv (all are welcome).

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