This year, just for a change, I attended the ACEP conference in Santa Clara, California. It was a great experience, but what was most surprising was what it taught me about AcuGraph and the “energy” it measures. You might be surprised at what I learned.
I’ll cut to the chase and tell you up front, AcuGraph is measuring more than I thought it was. When people ask me what is being measured, I usually respond along the lines of, “skin resistance, which is a reflection of Qi in the meridian.” Fair enough–but there are far more profound things going on, as well.
Before we get into that, let me give you some background.
What is ACEP?
I’m glad you asked! It stands for Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology.
And what’s Energy Psychology? That’s an even better question! Here’s the definition, from their website:
Energy psychology (EP) is a collection of mind-body approaches for understanding and improving human functioning. EP focuses on the relationship between thoughts, emotions, sensations, and behaviors, and known bioenergy systems (such as meridians and the biofield).
Did you catch that? Meridians and the biofield. That certainly got my attention, so I went to the conference as a vendor, where I demonstrated AcuGraph, met some really wonderful people and learned a lot.
One of the most amazing things I saw happened quite by accident. Here’s the story:
Graphed a Different Way
I had just graphed myself with AcuGraph, when the vendor across the aisle took an interest, and then invited me to have a look at his testing equipment. The vendor was Gaetan Chevalier, PhD, of Psy-Tek Subtle Energy Laboratory, and he had brought an EPI-GDV system to advertise his lab’s testing services.
The EPI-GDV system uses a derivative of Kirlian photography, combined with Korean hand acupuncture mapping to analyze the human energy system simply by testing the finger tips.
The test only took a few minutes, and as Dr. Chevalier began to explain the results, I became quite amazed. Let me tell you why.
First, take a look at my graph:
What do you see?
Look at everything that isn’t green; I count five items:
- Low pericardium
- Low heart
- Split liver
- Excess kidney
- Excess gallbladder
Pretty simple so far, right?
A Deeper Look
So imagine my surprise when Dr. Chevalier began explaining his findings from my EPI-GDV exam. He started by telling me my liver and gallbladder were stressed and underperforming. Of course, I already knew that from AcuGraph. He also mentioned my kidneys and spleen, so I went back and looked at my AcuGraph report again. Yep, kidney is high and spleen is borderline. So far I felt pretty impressed that his equipment picked up the same things as AcuGraph. It even picked up my right lung deficiency, but reported the left as normal. Just like AcuGraph.
You can see his report below. (Look for major distances between the red and blue lines.) To make things easier, I’ve highlighted the most significant findings in yellow. (Click to enlarge.)
Once I realized his report matched my AcuGraph findings, I also noticed the added information that my urogenital system was imbalanced, which may have related to the kidney.
I also realized this report failed to pick up the heart and pericardium imbalances that showed on AcuGraph. So there’s some difference, I figured.
And hey, matching everything but heart and pericardium isn’t too bad, right?
The Rest of the Story
But then he showed me the rest of the report, which deals with the chakras. Because the chakras aren’t technically part of acupuncture, we may too readily dismiss them in the acupuncture world. To be honest, they rarely cross my mind.
But as you can see below, my second, third and fourth chakras had imbalances. The second chakra deals with the urogenital system (kidney), the third includes liver and gallbladder, and the fourth deals with heart and lungs–and shows the highest imbalance.
So as it turns out, I had judged this assessment too hastily. It HAD actually picked up the heart/pericardium issue that AcuGraph had shown. But it picked it up on the chakra level!
This all got me thinking. Meridian imbalances, have physical, psychological, even spiritual aspects. The EPI-GDV system, which costs many times more than AcuGraph, separates the physical and psychological, while AcuGraph includes them both in the graph. And that precipitated my AH HA! moment.
The Take-home Point
I hadn’t realized AcuGraph picked up the psychological and spiritual aspects of the meridians so effectively. This was one of the most important take-home points for me. The meridians are sensitive to many influences, and imbalances come from many sources. When you see an imbalance in AcuGraph, particularly one that doesn’t make sense, ask yourself if you might be seeing a psychological or spiritual influence affecting the meridian.
Now, I realize I’ve shared some concepts here that are a little “outside the box,” so let me summarize:
AcuGraph shows meridian imbalances that may come from a variety of sources, including the following:
- Physical
- Mental
- Emotional
- Spiritual
- Psyche/energetic
There’s a wealth of information in that AcuGraph report, so don’t ever confine yourself to the view that a particular imbalance MUST have only one sort of cause. When you think about the totality of the human being, many more possibilities exist. AcuGraph is your key to discovering them.
My thanks to Dr. Gaetan Chevalier for his very impressive testing and explanations. The EPI-GDV system is advanced, detailed and impressive in its testing. It has given me a new appreciation for AcuGraph.
It sounds very interesting!! A little complicated for me when you talk about chakras and spiritual issues. I would love to learn more about that. However, I do relate acugraph to some emotional issues from 5 elements theory, as Steve Roseman mentions above. For instance, when a pt. has Lu, Ht & Pc. imbalances, I always ask about emotional issues such as sadness, worrying, problems with family, friends or co-workers, and most of the time they do. Also, if I see Lv & Gb imbalances, I ask about anger and frustration, and problems with making decisions. Sp. problems sometimes reveal a Type A personality where the person is a workaholic and may drive himself/herself to exhaustion. Ki & Bl sometimes do relate to anxiety and other deep emotional problems: Trauma, PTSD, etc. So, yes, AcuGraph is very valuable for analysing physical as well as emotional imbalances, as I see it. Working with the emotional side of the graph takes a lot of time because one has to do some counselling and have some skills to do that. What I usually do, is just make the person be aware of their emotional problems and how they change as we progress with their acupuncture treatments. When you talk about spiritual issues, I’m lost. What does the EP devise measure?
Very interesting!!, It could be very useful to integrate this chakra energy level in the Acugraph software. Do you think this is possible ??
I work a lot with esotheric acupuncture (learned it from Mikio Sankey) a system wich combines the TCM system with the chakra system. It would be very usefull to have a system that could show people what the effect is on their energy system.
You can check out the system that produced this assessment at http://gdvusa.org. I’m not sure I can define exactly what it’s measuring, but it appears to get a picture of the energetic state of the patient, both with and without psychological influences included. It’s fascinating!
I’ve been doing a lot of personal research lately related to the chakra systems. I am fascinated at how well AcuGraph actually correlates to the chakra imbalances. I talked a little about this at our AcuGrowth Symposium 2018.
I’m sure I’ll be writing more about this in the future, but here’s what I found in a nutshell…. If I graph the patient, then check for general chakra imbalances, then treat the patient (especially the divergent treatment with a focus on the extraordinary vessel portion of that treatment), the chakras come into balance. The correlation that I am finding is that AcuGraph readings and the suggested treatment can indeed balance Chakras. (The thing I want to do next is graph the patient, treat ONLY via Chakra balancing, and then correlate future regraphs to show that Chakra balancing alone also balances the meridians. I believe the graph will change in the positive, but I have not yet “officially” tried.)
I would love to correlate the EP device with the findings that I am recognizing.
It’s fascinating to see multiple modalities of treatment which correlate to the acupuncture channels. We are blessed with a way to measure acupuncture channels.
“Mens sana in corpore sano” translate “healthy mind in a healthy body” One can’t do without the other just like Yin and Yang Of course your spirit, soul, emotional and mind state will be reflected in the state of your physical body and vice versa. So Acuraph tests and and results will reflect not only your physical and emotional state but also your spirit and soul. So Acugraph it’s is an amazing tool if you look at it from all aspects of a human: body, mind and soul!!!!
One of my colleague doctors had come in with a GDV unit sometime back and we did attempt t correlate his findings wth that of AcuGraph. He had felt that AcuGraph was more repeatable compared to the GDV, but there was a good correlation with his findings too. Though the chakra imbalance does not correlate with TCM, we can make come inferences when we take symptomatology too..!!