Relieving your Pressure with Acupressure

A traditional “acupoint” model showing the meridian map of the body. This map is used for both acupressure and acupuncture.

All the Relief Without the Needles

In our last blog we briefly touched on the history and benefits of massage therapy, and for this week we’d like to take a look at some of the specific techniques of massage therapy. For example, we offer acupressure massage sessions at Inprana, but what exactly is that, and how can massage therapy help complete something like chiropractic work too? Let’s explore that now!

 

Registered Massage Therapists are trained in different skills, and techniques than other physical therapists or chiropractors, however, massage therapists often work closely, as we do at Inprana, with other practitioners. One application of an RMT’s skill set is in pre-chiro assessments and treatment. One way an RMT helps to do this is simply by helping the patient feel relaxed. As we discussed in our last entry, achieving that state of mental and muscle relaxation helps the body heal, and can help a chiropractor better perform their work without having to overcome the tension and stress that may be there otherwise.

 

Massage therapists may employ a wide range of techniques to achieve this, from muscle shaking, and full-body rocking, to “limb jostling” it helps to cause reflex muscle relaxation, decreased muscle tone and loosening of joints.

 

As we work on these areas it also helps to balance the meridians and create a positive flow of ki throughout the body. This effect the patient feels during massage is also due to the practical act of fluids between the blood and lymph vessels in the body within joints and around muscles, as the massage stimulates and releases these so they can function better too.


What about acupressure massage then? Where does it fit into this? If you’re thinking that it may be related to the practice of acupuncture you wouldn’t be wrong, except for acupressure does not use needles. The pressure points or areas of focus for the massage are the same however and the general goal is as well. If you’d like to learn more about acupuncture specifically we have an older blog on it here, as well are always happy to answer your questions on the topic!)

Working the meridians acupressure massage helps key points of your body do their best possible job of healing

Acupressure massage as well can be widely applied for specific treatments, but also just as a general treatment in your regular routine. Whereas much of what an RMT does for pre-chiro work will be directed by the needs and case of a chiropractor’s patient; acupressure is something everyone, at any stage of health, can benefit from receiving.

 

Working the meridians acupressure massage helps key points of your body do their best possible job of healing with the physical muscle and joint relaxation it brings, as well as the mental benefit with stress relief it provides.

 

So whether you’re complimenting your chiropractic treatment, or just looking for a good routine form of massage to help you relax and work your meridians, a Registered Massage Therapist may be exactly who you want to see today!

 

– Ming Fong (Joyce), your Registered massage therapist & Acupuncturist at Inprana.

 

*Disclaimer: Energy healing releases any energy blockages or improves pranic energy which allows regeneration of tissues at a cellular level and stimulates innate healing mechanisms of the body. It does not attempt to diagnose, treat, or cure illness.

History of Massage Therapy?

A common setup for Massage Therapy is to create a calming space. Stones and other tools like rollers are often used as well by the practitioner.

Helping patients and muscles relax for over 5000 years.

This week we’d like to take a quick detour from our study of the Chakras and look at a closely related field of work, massage therapy.

 

At Inprana when we look to help balance your chakras, massage therapy is one of the tools at our disposal to help do this, in fact, it’s been used dating back to 3000BCE (even possibly earlier) in India for life medicine.

 

Massage therapy carries with a lot of benefits, and one of them is helping to achieve balance in the body through calm and relief from pain. In doing so like sound therapy or acupuncture, we can help move the negative energies through your body, and achieve balance while enabling it to do its natural healing job.  

 

But how exactly does massage therapy work on your body? Well simply put, it helps you relax. On a more complicated level there is a direct link between massage and your nervous system, and an involuntary response it has with massage therapy. Not only can this emotionally help when dealing with rehabilitation or other sources of pain, it promotes healing in our soft tissues as well by helping blood circulate and stimulating our nervous systems.

 

Understanding message therapy requires understanding this relaxation response, again on a very basic level as your body relaxes you just feel better. On a chemical level within our bodies it helps to release serotonin which is our natural way of provoking a smile. When were dealing with a lot of pain, emotional or physical however, it becomes hard for our bodies to naturally release serotonin, and this is where techniques used in massage therapy and other holistic healing programs can encourage it to release.

…our overall state of relaxation towards pain carries with it a lot of benefits from stress relief to helping with conditions like hypertension and even insomnia…

Serotonin and our overall state of relaxation towards pain carries with it a lot of benefits from stress relief to helping with conditions like hypertension and even insomnia, to name a few. As we stated above this is not just due to the emotional response, but the physical as there is a direct link between increased blood flow and lymph node circulation and our overall health.

 

Beyond helping to improve circulation, massage therapy helps the muscles relax. When were stressed and especially dealing with frequent pains, our muscles tense up and essentially are constantly exerting themselves which doesn’t create the best environment for healing.

 

By relaxing our muscles however we help them naturally heal by promoting that “down time” with the relaxation response massage therapy creates. This also benefits our nerves as they can become compressed with muscle tension, and spasms. This can even influence the relaxation, and increase healing potential of deeper tissues as the muscles above, like our meridians and chakras, are tied together and have a sympathetic response.

 

Here we can see whether you’re dealing with frequent physical pains, or looking for a way to help relax after those long, brutal work weeks, massage therapy is a relatively simple, yet long proven method to help us reduce emotional and physical stress, and help our bodies do their best possible job of naturally healing.

 

If you’d like to learn more, or schedule an appointment please reach out and let us know. We’re always here and happy to answer all your questions and help you achieve a more balanced, and stress free lifestyle with massage therapy and many more programs!

 

– Ming Fong (Joyce), your Registered massage therapist & Acupuncturist at Inprana.

 

*Disclaimer: Energy healing releases any energy blockages or improves pranic energy which allows regeneration of tissues at a cellular level and stimulates innate healing mechanisms of the body. It does not attempt to diagnose, treat, or cure illness.

The Heart of Balance

A common symbol for the Anahata or heart chakra. The heart chakra is the fourth primary chakra in our bodies.

Getting to the Heart of the Matter

If you’re an avid reader of our blogs, you’ve probably noticed a trend when we bring up certain meridians or chakras and how they tend to relate to scientific or cultural understandings of those body parts. 

 

It should come as no surprise, then, that the ancient concept of the heart chakra is rooted in the concept of love, our capacity to love, and, perhaps most importantly, our ability to love and forgive ourselves. 

 

You can also assume that the unruly emotions of love like jealousy, fear of commitment or being egocentric are representations of when this chakra is out of balance. The heart chakra can make us short-sighted and stick to grudges that only hold us back, bitter and unwilling to forget past events that preclude us from receiving love with new experiences. 

…when we seek to balance our heart, we mean both our emotions and how those emotions manifest in our heart’s health.

On the other end of our balance, the heart chakra can make us too willing to give of ourselves to others and even risks making a victim out of ourselves as we become easy to manipulate emotionally and blinded to our own needs and rights in that regard. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be a loving person, but it should never come at the expense of your own health and wellbeing. 

 

An imbalance in these concepts can lead to health issues for our physical, earthly reality too. Stress, depression, and even simple loneliness from an inability to commit to others and rise above our egos can manifest in the body physically. For example, stress has been linked with causing inflammation which ultimately can become a contributor to heart disease itself. So when we seek to balance our heart, we mean both our emotions and how those emotions manifest in our heart’s health. 

 

As we mentioned above, while the chakras and meridians always represent a very spiritual way of understanding the world, they also connect to our physical realities and the overall health of a given body area. Their imbalances help inform us about the potential physical ailments we can deal with and what might be the best courses of action to help enable our bodies to do their best possible natural job of healing. 

 

If you’d like to know more, or this sounds like something you’d like help balancing in your life, please let us know today. We are always here and eager to help you achieve your ultimate state of well-being and natural healing.

 

– Dr. Rogini Thirukkumaran D.C., BSc. – Shakti Chiro

Your Holistic Chiropractor, Energy Healer, and Founder of Inprana Integrative Healing

*Disclaimer: Energy healing releases any energy blockages or improves pranic energy which allows regeneration of tissues at a cellular level and stimulates innate healing mechanisms of the body. It does not attempt to diagnose, treat, or cure illness.

 

 

 

 

Turning Thought into Expression with the Throat Chakra

Vishuddha, or throat chakra is the fifth primary chakra.

Understanding the Throat Chakra, and it’s role in our bodies

The throat, or “vishuddha” chakra, has long been associated with language, speaking, and expressing ourselves. 

It is the place where the needs of our bodies or lower chakras are vocalized by the thoughts of our minds or higher chakras. 

When in balance, the throat chakra helps us speak our minds to benefit our earthly needs and health. Whether it be speaking up to express the symptoms of a disease to a doctor or speaking the words, you hope to gain the attention of someone you like – the throat chakra is where our internal expressions manifest from in our external world. 

As we like to do, let’s try to relate this to the body’s physical anatomy. Here it may be the most obvious how the throat chakra relates to our body functions, as the vocal cords in our throats are the literal instrument we use each day. 

…what our throat chakra ends up manifesting in the real world is determined by our overall balance and wellbeing in life.

Our previous blog about Sound Healing knows that sound is vibration. This process is exactly how your vocal cords operate in order to create sound and speech. Yes, the tone and meaning of our voices can have an impact, much like sound healing on ourselves and others. 

For a simple example, let’s look at what happens when we stub our toes. The lower parts of your body or chakra are the source of the pain. This is moved throughout our bodies until the crown and third eye chakra process it, where it is then manifested in our physical world as an utterance through the throat chakra, usually in the form of a cathartic curse word or two. 

This is where the balance in our throat chakra is important as it is influenced by the balance above it in the higher chakras. The difference between cursing the world for your folly and perhaps the balance found in cursing yourself, as an honest admission, you should watch out for that table’s edge.

Therefore, what our throat chakra ends up manifesting in the real world is determined by our overall balance and wellbeing in life. While stubbing our toes is rather trivial of a life experience, this idea is easily extrapolated to everything we say as an expression of our internal, mental, and spiritual state. 

Do we remain conscious of how our utterances will affect others or are we blinded by ignorance or a specific point of view into saying harmful things, which only further our own imbalance and potentially that of others? 

In all things in life, striking a balance is important, and here with the throat chakra, we can really see how that balance can positively or negatively track from other places of the body to our daily lives and attitudes. 

If working on how you express yourself while trying to achieve inner balance is something you’re interested in, please let us know today or schedule an appointment; the Inprana team is always ready and eager to help you achieve balance and your ultimate state of wellbeing!

– Dr. Rogini Thirukkumaran D.C., BSc. – Shakti Chiro

Your Holistic Chiropractor, Energy Healer, and Founder of Inprana Integrative Healing

*Disclaimer: Energy healing releases any energy blockages or improves pranic energy which allows regeneration of tissues at a cellular level and stimulates innate healing mechanisms of the body. It does not attempt to diagnose, treat, or cure illness.

Taking a Look at the Third Eye Chakra

A statue of the Buddha with a prominent third eye feature.

Helping You Open Your Eyes To Healthier Living?

The Third Eye chakra is both the commander of your senses and their regulator. Last time we spoke about the seventh, or highest, most chakra, the Crown Chakra. We touched on the balance inherent in maintaining the health of the seventh chakra, as it trickles down into a sense to influence the health of all other chakras. Today we’re going to look at its close neighbour, and ultimately the chakra which helps the Crown Chakra influence all the others.

In this way, we see its role in interacting with the Third Eye. It represents the universal meaning of “om” within its “omnipresent” control of our perception of reality and beyond it into our inner thoughts. We could even look at it like the crown chakra is its north star, and what it makes its course by to steer the ship of your inner mind and health. When it’s out of balance, we can steer towards blindly forging a path in life or charting our course by every passing vessel instead of the balance and constant north star.

We see this relate to a physical location in your body, of course, our mind. We can see the literal meaning of the third eye as it regulates and sorts out all our sensory inputs and reactions to them.

The Sixth Chakra is also referred to as:
The Third eye chakra
The Brow chakra
The Ajna chakra
The Bhru Madhya
The Dvidak Padma
The most common Sanskrit name for the Third eye chakra is “Ajna,” which means “command” or “perceiving.”

We draw on it for our wisdom and deeper understanding of the world around us, or our close-mindedness and rash judgment should it be off-balance and closed, hence the term.

Some people place our Third Eye Chakra in close relation to the pineal gland, a gland in part responsible for the release of melatonin, which is a chief aid in our sound sleep.

Based on our perception of light during the day and lack of during the night in good health, our Third Eye helps us regulate the sleep we need, with the healthy REM cycles and restorative dreaming it brings.

Beyond sleep, where our health is concerned with waiting to maintain an open but balanced, Third Eye Chakra can also be seen in addictions and personal ignorance towards other destructive habits with our health. In some ways, your Third Eye is that honest voice in the back of your mind. The voice you should listen to as it’s seeing beyond the present and speaking in concern for your overall health in the future.

Here too, we can see, while the Third Eye chakra is the commander of our body, and thus the lower, more earthly chakras, it can also be overwhelmed to close itself by its desires when left unchecked and unbalanced.

However, just as it can be closed, it can always be reopened. Working on your third eye chakra, along with the others, can be personally fulfilling and help you open your eyes to realizing a healthy state of being overall. After all, when we make healthy choices a habit it only enables our body to do its natural job of healing all the better!

Contact us today to book an appointment, or let us know if you have any questions about how Inprana can help you balance your chakras!

– Dr. Rogini Thirukkumaran D.C., BSc. – Shakti Chiro

Your Holistic Chiropractor, Energy Healer, and Founder of Inprana Integrative Healing

*Disclaimer: Energy healing releases any energy blockages or improves pranic energy which allows regeneration of tissues at a cellular level and stimulates innate healing mechanisms of the body. It does not attempt to diagnose, treat, or cure illness.

Understanding the Crown Chakra

The symbol for the Crown, or Sahasrara Chakra.

Finding Balance From the Top Down

You’ve probably heard us at the practice use the term chakras, or seen it in many places online while discussing holistic, and spiritual healing.

Simply put, if you remember our blog about acupuncture and meridians(if you missed it, check it out here), the chakras are another way of identifying, or mapping out those areas of the bodies where our energies funnel in, become trapped or circulate from.

As you may guess from the description, the crown chakra literally sits at the top of our bodies. Like a spiritual solar panel, your crown chakra absorbs and is the key to bringing in cosmic, or pranic energies, into your body, and its balance is essential in the function of your body, and other chakras.

When you think about the relation to your body this makes sense. Your brain is the sensory centre of the body. Every sight, perception and thought you have originates and is influenced by it, in a way circulated around your body. Without the crown, nothing gets anywhere in the body.

Much like trying to manage the turmoil of our own inner thoughts at the time, the crown chakra is about achieving a sense of balance between our spirituality, and our earthly reality. Or, those thoughts that keep us aware of our daily, earthly needs, and those thoughts that inspire us to reach for and contemplate the cosmos itself.

balance is essential for the proper function of the other chakras

However, this is an emphasis on this balance as if you become too rooted in the world around you and you lose the sense of your soul and spirituality, and vice versa. Literally having your “heads in the cloud”, makes you lose sight of your everyday needs and tasks. Extreme thinking, or lack of thought, on either end causes an imbalance that can affect your mental health, and your overall health by consequence.

This is where, much like working on the meridian points of the body, or with the intent of Reiki we are trying to encourage natural change, and balance in the body when we aim to work with the crown chakra.

While that may seem almost counterintuitive with spirituality, this down-to-earth balance is essential for the proper function of the other chakras, and therefore the body and its ability to naturally heal.

For mental health, it’s easy too to see how the crown chakra can help serve as a means of analyzing and looking at when someone may be emotionally or spiritually stuck.

Apathy, depression, mental fog and “laziness” can all be traced back to a fundamentally underactive crown chakra, likewise overconfidence and even being pompous with your beliefs can be a consequence of the other extreme. The crown chakra serves as the portal between our earthly reality and our spirituality, and our own willingness to change, grow or challenge our view of the world to strike a sense of balance, and wellbeing.

Obviously, the tricky part is finding that right balance without going overboard in one direction or the other. So, if you feel like you’re struggling to ground yourself, or raise yourself up from earthly problems in your life, we would love to help you find that balance!

Contact us today to book an appointment, or let us know if you have any questions about how Inprana can help you balance your chakras!

– Dr. Rogini Thirukkumaran D.C., BSc. – Shakti Chiro

Your Holistic Chiropractor, Energy Healer, and Founder of Inprana Integrative Healing

*Disclaimer: Energy healing releases any energy blockages or improves pranic energy which allows regeneration of tissues at a cellular level and stimulates innate healing mechanisms of the body. It does not attempt to diagnose, treat, or cure illness.

How Does Acupuncture Work?

This is a model of the human body used to help show the map of meridians and nerve endings acupuncturists use in their work.

Taking the Stress Out of Your Meridians

You’ve probably heard of acupuncture before, as it is one of the most well-known forms of traditional Chinese medicine worldwide, often brought up in pop culture and television. 

 

With records of its use dating back to 100BC, acupuncture is still a widely used form of traditional Chinese and “Qi” (chee) based medicine. 

 

The basic concept of acupuncture is that we have over 2,000 acupuncture points that we refer to as meridians throughout the body. 

 

Much like the chakras, our meridians impact and influence our bodies’ natural healing state and mental health. By manipulating these points around the body, an acupuncturist can influence and promote the movement of energy throughout the body. 

 

The process helps move stagnant energy, and toxic deficiencies, while positively affecting overall health. 

 

If we look beneath the skin towards where the meridians lie, we can find the nerve endings that are dotted all over our bodies. These nerve endings are part of how we feel, and perceive the world around us, sending pulses of energy from the exterior to interior parts of our body like our brains to be sorted out and understood.

 

Here too we can see the way that acupuncture helps promote great overall health with these nerve endings. The needles stimulate those nerve endings, which can help with the health of our nerves or meridian areas, and have even been found effective in encouraging the regrowth of damaged nerves as the patient’s Qi is moved through them.

 

…meridian points in the body directly correspond to related nerve groups and their ability to heal…

A recent study published in Neural Regeneration Research demonstrated how it provided an effective response for patients with nerve damage and even encouraged the regrowth of nerves. 

Interestingly, when only basic acupuncture points were used, the effective rate was around 40%, when the study followed up by focusing on the “Du” meridian, as informed by holistic traditions of acupuncture, that effective rate of treatment doubled to 80%. 

 

This research confirms the importance of understanding and treating the meridians in the body with acupuncture. In fact, the study proved that the known meridian points in the body directly correspond to related nerve groups and their ability to heal and shows why acupuncture has been a trusted holistic form of treatment for centuries.

 

When combined with a holistic therapy program, acupuncture is a great add-on treatment that can relieve physical stresses and help our mind and soul be healthy and clear of energy blockages.

 

Right now I’m currently offering complimentary consultations for acupuncture too. If you’re interested to learn more about how it helps in balancing your Qi, or in seeing how acupuncture could help you, check out my booking link to schedule today!

 

– Danielle Grande, your Radiant Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioner and Acupuncturist at Inprana

 

*Disclaimer: Energy healing releases any energy blockages or improves pranic energy which allows regeneration of tissues at a cellular level and stimulates innate healing mechanisms of the body. It does not attempt to diagnose, treat, or cure illness.

The Intent of Reiki

Charge your soul with positive energy?

With energy healing and the techniques and therapies that we use at Inprana, the Reiki healing technique at its core is about finding and converting those negative pent up energies into positive and healthy ones. 

Originating in Japan, Reiki healing is a non-invasive technique that aims to help balance the body’s chakra system with an infusion of positive energies from the practitioner.

When broken down in Japanese, Reiki stands for Rei – “Higher Power” and, of course, Ki – “life energy.” Together the word symbolizes the act of spiritually guided life energy. 

…a spiritual wireless charger for your soul

When you’re feeling emotionally down or when your energies are negative or low, Reiki can help you refuel. 

By “laying on hands,” a Reiki master guides pranic energies towards you, where your body takes them in, sorts them out, and deposits them throughout your chakra, where they are needed most. 

In this way, the technique works like a spiritual wireless charger for your soul.

Reiki can help take away the negative energies and the blockages that are within you so that your body can go back to doing what it does best with its own natural healing processes, on a cellular level. 

Much like finding those good vibrations with sound healing, the Reiki healing technique works as a wonderful add-on to further improve the flow of pranic energies in the body, with results benefiting both your physical and spiritual levels.  

*Disclaimer: Energy healing releases any energy blockages or improves pranic energy which allows regeneration of tissues at a cellular level and stimulates innate healing mechanisms of the body. It does not attempt to diagnose, treat, or cure illness.

What Is Sound Healing?

A selection of some of the traditional tools, or instruments, used in sound healing.

New Age or Age Old?

You may have just heard of this new form of healing therapy, and the truth is sound healing is a concept nearly as old as human civilization itself.

For example, with the ancient Greeks, it is well documented how they used sound healing, much like we do today. 

 

From ancient war drums to modern smooth jazz, evidence of how sound can affect our moods and health can be found throughout history and all human cultures. 

So how does sound healing work to help you turn negative feelings and stress into positive emotions and energy? 

Sound is Vibration

 

 

– Eva Jankowski, Emotional Wellness and Empowerment Coach at Inprana

 

*Disclaimer: Energy healing releases any energy blockages or improves pranic energy which allows regeneration of tissues at a cellular level and stimulates innate healing mechanisms of the body. It does not attempt to diagnose, treat, or cure illness.

What Is Energy Healing?

Finding balance for our energies, bodies and souls is the core intent of Energy Healing.

Energy Healing is the study and treatment of one’s energies, the state they are in, and what can be done to naturally heal the body’s use of energy with a wide variety of therapies and techniques.

In ancient times, we referred to these energies as a meridian system, or perhaps the more known concept of the seven chakras.

The seven chakras simply help us conceptualize and understand how energies work within ourselves. They also help us understand how energies affect our wellbeing from the crown (higher consciousness) to the roots (your more primal emotions rooted in the earth).

In more recent years, scientists have discovered that energy is everything and that there are very tangible and observable conversions and effects on our bodies.

With our mental health, we look to optimize our internal energy to best commit it toward healthy and progressive actions in our lives.

…energy healing is really about prioritizing mental health related to our physical wellbeing…

When something inhibits this energy, it can inhibit our physical actions, degrade our daily happiness and essentially leave us feeling fatigued and stuck emotionally.

Energy healing as a practice has dealt with this balance of mental and physical energies since ancient times. In recent times, scientists have confirmed and even invented a medical term to describe this condition as a state of mental depression.

As we learn and discover more truths about the reality of mental health, we seem to be pointed back to our ancient understanding of these emotions, as they connect to the rest of our bodies and the natural world around us.

We can see that energy healing is really about prioritizing mental health related to our physical wellbeing and beyond. In its origins, it is concerned with finding the right internal balance for every part of the body to achieve an ultimate state of wellbeing. Paired with our modern knowledge, it is an even more effective guiding principle for analyzing, rationalizing, and achieving a state of wellbeing in the body.

If you’d like to learn more about Energy Healing, or our Virtual Energy Healing service, and the different ways it relates to the services that we offer at Inprana, please let us know. We’d love to tell you more and help you achieve your ultimate state of wellbeing.

– Dr. Rogini Thirukkumaran D.C., BSc. – Shakti Chiro

Your Holistic Chiropractor, Energy Healer, and Founder of Inprana Integrative Healing

*Disclaimer: Energy healing releases any energy blockages or improves pranic energy which allows regeneration of tissues at a cellular level and stimulates innate healing mechanisms of the body. It does not attempt to diagnose, treat, or cure illness.