Constitutional Facial Acupuncture

Mary Elizabeth Wakefield

• Publisher: Churchill Livingstone
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780702054358
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Medicina alternativa y complementaria

We are re-defining the face of ageing on a daily basis, with the Baby Boom generation in the vanguard, followed by younger generations who are similarly intrigued by non-invasive natural solutions that are integrative rather than purely cosmetic.

Constitutional Facial Acupuncture has begun to make an impact on popular culture and outmoded perceptions about the nature of authentic beauty and the ageing process.

Acupuncturists who practice in this field are increasingly expected to have specialized training and knowledge, outside the customary parameters of the more traditional approaches.

This book introduces a complete Constitutional Facial Acupuncture protocol that is comprehensive, effective and clearly organized, with illustrative color photographs and facial needling diagrams. Its strong constitutional components are unique, adhere to the principles of Chinese medicine, and are rooted in the three levels of treatment – Jing, Ying and Wei.

• A new and detailed Constitutional Facial Acupuncture protocol highlights acu-muscle points, Shen imbalances, lines and wrinkles, needling technique, relevant points and their locations.
• A comprehensive constitutional treatment approach
• A customized, modular topical herbal protocol that is enriched with the use of essential oils and natural cleansers, creams, etc.
• Practical step-by-step instructions on how to integrate the needling protocols with the topical herbs, jade rollers, gem eye discs, etc.
• A complete Constitutional Facial Acupuncture needling protocol for 12 problematic areas of the facial landscape, i.e., droopy eyelids, sagging neck, crow's feet, sunken cheeks, etc.
• Contraindications, benefits, and personal advice drawn from the author's 30+ years of experience
• An essential text for students or practitioners of facial acupuncture, and also for those readers who are interested in the field of "healthy aging"

Chapter 1

The Mythic Quest for Beauty

From Venus to Kuan Yin

“The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything to be yourself.”

— Lao Tzu

What is beauty, and what does it mean to be called beautiful? The word beauty comes from the Latin bellus which means ‘pretty,’ and is related to the Latin bonus, which translates as ‘good,’ implying that there is goodness in beauty, which can be defined as “the aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit.”¹

Therefore, what we regard as beautiful must be cherished; it must please us both esthetically and viscerally, and it must manifest those perfections of harmony that we associate with the divine, a source of ultimate good.

This notion of beauty as embodying goodness implies that naturalness and unselfconsciousness is sufficient to itself. Alex Kuczynski, author of the book Beauty Junkies, cites the 16^th century Book of the Courtier, written by Baldassare Castiglione, in which he opines that for a beautiful woman to seek approval for her beauty renders her less beautiful:

“Her manners need to be simple, with natural gestures and an unawareness of others watching her.”²

To what degree did the demure deportment of those noble ladies diverge from the narcissism of the icons of today's celebrity culture, with its emphasis on vanity and perfection at all cost, facilitated by today's beautification rituals of cosmetic surgery, Botox and cosmetic fillers?

“At age fifty, every man has the face he deserves …”³

— George Orwell

These surgical and pharmaceutical treatments, in addressing the symptoms of aging, casually eliminate individual character in favor of an idealized template of commercialized beauty. This secularization of beauty takes no account of its spiritual dimension, an aspect that embraces both physical aging and the soul's journey through life.

In other words, to erase the lines and change the contour of our faces is a way of obliterating our personal history. But, if we acquiesce to arbitrary standards of physical desirability, we are forced to disconnect from our genetic ancestry and withhold our accumulated wisdom from future generations whom it could benefit.

Antecedents: Beauty in Ancient Greece and Elsewhere

Throughout history, different cultures have adhered to their own particular ideas about the qualities that separate what is beautiful from what is not. In ancient Greece, the chorus of Muses chanted, “Only that which is beautiful is loved.” When a question about the nature of beauty was proposed to Apollo's oracle at Delphi, the Pythian priestess responded, “The Most Beautiful is the Most Just.”⁴ Beauty was not merely associated with physical appeal.

In book 3 of the Iliad, the tale of the war between the Trojans and the Mycenaean Greeks, the famed Greek poet Homer views Helen of Troy, the unwitting catalyst for that epic conflict, as innocent of any suffering she might have caused others because of her indescribable physical beauty:

“…There's nothing shameful about the fact that Trojans and well-armed Achaeans have endured great suffering a long time over such a woman—just like a goddess, immortal, awe-inspiring. She's beautiful.”⁵

Following the fall of Troy, Menelaus is about to exact his revenge upon the faithless Helen, but is unmanned when he once again witnesses her beauty, and he drops his sword.

In the classic myth of the Judgment of Paris, Aphrodite persuaded the young Trojan prince, Paris, who was judging a heavenly beauty contest, to award the prize of kalliste (most beautiful) to her, passing over her Olympian rivals Athena and Hera. She promised him that, if he awarded her the victory, Helen, the “most beautiful woman in the world,” would be his bride. Although Helen was, in fact, the bride of the influential Spartan, Menelaus, Paris, while visiting Sparta under the guise of a diplomatic mission, connived to abduct Helen under cover of darkness, taking her back to Troy. Menelaus, seeking revenge, quickly assembled a huge fleet in retaliation. With favorable winds, they sailed across the Aegean Sea in short order, laying siege to Troy. The long and bitter conflict eventually led to the complete destruction of the Trojan civilization.

Philosophers Weigh In …

The pursuit of beauty is not motivated solely by a romantic or erotic impulse. Great philosophers through the ages have sought to explain the allure of the beautiful in a variety of ways. Like many in the ancient world, Pythagoras and his followers sought the eternal truth of beauty in the celestial symmetries of the heavens, the home of the gods. They established principles of the orderly proportions of musical tone and the Apollonian purity of numerical archetypes so that this celestial perfection could be experienced by human beings here on Earth.

The Classical Greek idea of the Golden Mean, which was derived from the study and replication of the proportions of natural objects, such as the nautilus shell, flowers, and the human body, became an organizing principle in architecture, sculpture, and all areas of art.

Heraclitus, another pre-Socratic philosopher, believed that the elements existed in a state of dynamic balance, and that this perpetual tension created harmony and equilibrium, a philosophy echoed in the Yin and Yang theory of Chinese medicine, in which these seeming polarities support, oppose, overact and become each other.

The revered Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote about the musical intervals as the sound of universal harmony between Yin and Yang. Harmony between apparent dualities can be a hallmark of beauty, and equilibrium between contradictory poles of energy is indispensable to the creation of great art, whether it be music, poetry, architecture, literature, or dance.

For example, in the Italian singing style called bel canto, or beautiful singing, the concept of chiaroscuro is paramount. This merging of light (chiaro) and darkness (scuro) refers to the harmonious blending of the Yin and Yang dimensions of an individual voice. A perfectly balanced voice, united in these polarities, flows through the entire vocal range in an effortless dance of unfettered expression and supreme lyricism. The result is a vocal expression that can only be termed beautiful.

The Emanation of Spirit

From the Western perspective, modern words for beauty come from two principal streams: the Latin adjective bellus in the Romance languages – Italian, Spanish, French, English – and Teutonic words resembling the modern German word schönheit, found in Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish usage. Schönheit descends from Old German skôni, which means ‘gleaming’ or ‘bright.’⁶

This equating of beauty with luminescence suggests that the concept could be associated with celestial radiance. Of all the natural phenomena that ancient humans could have observed, only heavenly bodies appear to emit their own light. Chief among these is the Sun, which, as the ultimate source of all life on Earth, was invariably worshipped for its spiritual essence.

In contrast to ‘beauty,’ the less common English word ‘pulchritude’ stems from the Latin adjective ‘pulcher.’ While ‘pulcher’ was later supplanted by ‘bellus,’ scholar Dr. Pierre Monteil wrote in his book Beau et Laid en Latin (“Beautiful and Ugly in Latin”), reviewed online in the American Journal of Philology, that based on its usage through the centuries, ‘pulcher’ appears to have referred to a type of beauty that transcends physical form.⁷ Hence it might be more properly applied to an ethereal expression of the soul, that is anything but superficial.

The Dictates of Fashion: Personal Taste and Commercial Profitability

Throughout the centuries, feminine loveliness has invariably been a slave to the dictates of fashion. Culture produces a vision of beauty according to social conventions of each era, the individual predilections of a certain artist or poet, or religious dogma. In his book, The History of Beauty, Italian author and semioticist Umberto Eco recounts how standards of beauty have changed through the ages; he documents quite vividly how, as the centuries have passed, the definition of beauty, especially for women, takes on different meanings, connotations and qualities, because of social standards and spiritual underpinnings.

For example, one of the stylistic fingerprints of the 16^th century Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, was a depiction of woman as slightly plump, zaftig, even voluptuous, certainly if compared to contemporary models. Rubens' conception of these lush, rosy-cheeked, d...