Acupuncture Beyond Metaphor: The Body Does Not Need a Story to Be Real it needs Body Phenomenology based on the Meditative Mind

For more than two thousand years, acupuncture has been wrapped in symbols, metaphors, and cosmological allegories. Qi flowing like rivers, meridians mapped like sacred cartography, wind-damp invading the channels: all poetic, all beautiful, and all historically necessary.

But today, these metaphors are no longer gateways.
They are veils!

Instead of helping people enter the body, they keep them one step removed.
Instead of deepening direct experience, they interfere with it.

A needle goes in, and instead of feeling the wave of sensation,
the shift in breath, the change in the nervous system,
the modern patient is told:

“Ah, that is your Liver meridian cleansing wind.”

Meaning is provided before experience, so experience never has a chance to speak for itself.

But the body does not speak in metaphors.
It speaks in pulsation, warmth, tingling, release, vibration, stillness, coherence. These are the elements we worked out in the Yoga of the Inner Body and the Yoga’s of the inner light and the inner sound.

https://philpapers.org/rec/KEPTYO

And acupuncture is one of the most immediate ways we can meet ourselves, directly, without concept,
a somatic dialogue between nervous system, fascia, limbic tone, and awareness.

But only if we let go of the ancient filters.

We no longer need cosmology to justify sensation.
We no longer need symbolic organs to justify healing.
And we no longer need metaphysics to validate embodiment.

A new acupuncture can only emerge when grounded in interoception, neuroregulation, and the felt sense of being alive inside a body.

The needles have always pointed inward.
It is time we follow them. And drop useless old concept which filter the experience of the acupuncturist and the one who is needled.

Time to drop the ancient metaphors. There are no meridians. Acupuncture is no science. There are no 5 elements. There are no branches and roots. All nonsense.
Dear to enter into experience. It is about time. Drop your stories about the function of the Zang Fu. All retarded stories from the days no-one had a clue of how the body functions.

Into the body as it exists, here, now: not as it was explained two millennia ago.

Shunyam Adhibhu, MD, PhD, neurophenomenologist and acupuncturist….for the new era…