Practiced by ancient Mongolian warriors who believed it would increase success in battle, Chua K’a is a self-massage technique that’s used today to improve cellular memory and increase success in whatever personal battles one encounters.
Defined as the physical remembrance of happenings that weren’t cleared on the mental and emotional levels, cellular memory can manifest in the form of past injuries, but usually, it’s just a dull persistent ache that’s felt once in a while.
During massage, some people can sometimes become emotional because massage can activate and erase cellular memory. Some therapists trained in chua k’a massage have had clients who have suddenly reacted emotionally because the emotion they are now expressing had been locked up for a long time.
The therapist usually does not know what the experience of the client is (and neither does the client), but, it is not important for either of them to know. More often than not, after the emotional release of the client, his body experiences increased range of motion or movement in the part of the body the therapist had been working on that activated the emotion.
Some clients may not experience results immediately following treatment but they start to experience a greater range of motion later on in their lives. What this means is that a freeing up of cellular memory is usually followed by a new response to an experience that has already frequently happened in the current life of a person.
To provide one simple example, if a person played soccer once as a kid and was struck in the face with the ball, but haven’t been able to express the pain that he or she felt at the time (because of embarrassment?), the person will bring with him/her that cellular memory in his/her subconscious until it is expressed. If that person goes to a chua k’a practitioner and begins crying when his/her face is massaged, the next time he/she is invited asked to play soccer, that person might agree to play even though, before the experience of emotional release, he/she had previously refused to participate for many years.
The Mongols practiced Chua K’a (also called “bone cleansing”) because they believed that if they were still energetically holding on to past experiences and issues, when faced with the challenge of a new battle, those experiences would restrain their performance as a warrior psychically, mentally, physically, and emotionally.
The Healing Practice of Chua K’a
Practicing Chua K’a can take at least an hour of your time. The Mongols would require several hours ‘cleansing’ every bone in their body, but today, therapists usually begin with the feet (since there are 26 bones in each foot, this may take a bit of time,) working their way up the client’s head.
You can enjoy Chua K’a as a special ritual. You can light a few candles and take a salt bath, and then drop small amounts of essential aromatherapy oils into a burner and then put on a CD on a player and play some sounds of nature or some soothing music. For even more energetic healing support, some people will place crystals around themselves.
Breathe deeply and relax for five minutes. This is a good time to ground your energy if you know how to do that. But if you don’t know, as much as you can, become conscious of the energy field surrounding you. Try to visualize a bubble of colored or white surrounding you ten feet in all directions, and there is a single cord that connects you to the earth’s center coming out of the base of your spine, and one other cord rising from the top of your head connecting you to the infinite cosmos.
Now lightly place your hand on the bone you’ve selected for treatment. Let your hand stay there for a while and become conscious of the various levels there, both the bone and soft tissue.
Put on pressure there gradually. Visualize your hand literally sinking into your flesh, through the strata of fascia. If you perform this slowly and adequately, you will eventually imagine feeling your hand sinking into your body and that you begin to feel your hand touching the hard surface of your bone.
At this stage a little bit of creativity is required. When you get to the part in the Chua K’a ritual when you are ‘touching’ bone, visualize a white light emanating from the tips of your fingers. Consider this as energy being extracted up from the earth and extracted down through the cosmos via the cords that you imagined earlier. Now imagine a white light surrounding a part of your bone (or the whole bone) and with this light, all debris around the bone is washed away. Imagine the debris falling off into the ground gently to be neutralized. Through this light, send love to that part of your body.
Jamie Catlett is a licensed and board certified acupuncturist in Jacksonville, FL and the founder of Jacksonville Acupuncture Clinic.