There are many factors that affect our health: physical, environmental, social, emotional. To fully understand and heal a condition, we must untangle and address all of these factors. For example, even if a case of back pain was caused by an overt injury, there may be an emotion or a pain memory that, left unaddressed, prevents the original injury from healing. 

The power of German auricular medicine is its ability to address all aspects of the mind, body, and spirit. To explore this idea further, we must revisit the concept of focus activity. A “focus” is a stubborn and hidden blockage to healing, caused by either a body/brain memory of a particular stress or trauma or from a physical or emotional wound that is concealed within the body. The body becomes consumed with healing these blockages and can’t attend to healing other day-to-day issues.

Once we have identified the focus point (we do this by scanning the ears with particular tools, until we feel a change in the pulse) we must dig deeper, to see if there is an emotional component to the blockage that is preventing the focus from healing. We can scan for emotional points or we can look for past traumas. You can look back to the June/July 2020 edition of the Red Clover Clinic Newsletter, where I discussed treating traumas of the soul.

Many emotions are mapped out on the ear. There is an interesting correlation in auricular medicine between organs and emotions that often relates to Chinese medicine theory. In Chinese medicine, the heart is associated with joy, the liver with anger, the spleen with worry, the kidney with fear, and the lung with sadness and grief. On the ear, for example, the anger and rage points relate to the sympathetic chain (the nervous system connection to the organs) of the liver and gallbladder. Another interesting example is that the bullying and violence point is the same point as the pancreas.

In cases where the organ point relates to an emotion, it is important to distinguish if there is an actual organ problem, or if it is purely emotional. Not every physical issue has an associated emotion, and not every emotional blockage is associated with a physical issue; however, the connection comes up frequently. We must remember that traumatic experience exists on a spectrum. The extent of the trauma is dependent on the perception of the threat by the individual, as well as the individual’s stability and constitutional strength.

All of us have a mind, body, and a spirit/soul, and to heal and maintain health, we must address all of these aspects of ourselves. By treating only the physical aspect of back pain, the condition may remain more chronic. If we treat the emotion underlying the pain along with the back pain itself, and any other blockages that may prevent healing, we have the hope of actually healing the condition more successfully.