One of my first childhood memories is watching my grandma cupping my grandpa to get rid of a cold. Everything seemed so natural and everybody knew this simple technique. Later on, I remember my grandma improvising a steam bath to help me with the same cold invasion. All that steam got rid of the cold pathogen and next morning I was feeling great.

Just so you can get a better picture, my grandma had only 4 classes and no other education! Not sure when and how we messed up so many good things; nowadays we get so much education but have no clue about taking care of our bodies…

Not trying to point fingers here. I was one of those people who totally forgot about their body for a long time!

Why would you want to try cupping?

I guess everybody saw the picture of the Olympic swimmer with cupping signs on his back. It made cupping trendy and now everybody started asking about the method.

It’s a very old, simple, and non-invasive technique that helps with blood and Qi stagnation. Most practitioners use cupping when dealing with pain, external cold invasions, and as a deep tissue massage.

Depending on diagnoses (deficiency or excess), the practitioner decides on how strong he/she wants to do the cupping. I personally love it when it acts like a deep tissue massage and releases all the stagnation from my tissues.

Blood stasis showing up after performing moving cupping

If the body deals with stasis, cups will leave a darker mark on the skin. If the patient is very deficient, cups will almost leave no mark. I never imagined it’s possible to do cupping and have no marks after it until I tried it on my mother. Two years ago after a surgery she lost a lot of blood, but I never thought she’d still be so deficient. I did cupping on her for about 10 days, and every time there was almost no mark on the skin. If you get a patient like that in the future, think Deficiency!

I use cupping on my body at least twice per week to help with Qi and blood stasis. Being the woman that I am, of course I even tried it on my cellulite and to my surprise it worked! It is painful, but skin looks so much better after treatment. From a western medical point of view, cupping targets a better lymph circulation and when lymph does its job, everything else works better in the body. 

If you love massages but never tried cupping, give it a try! It takes less time, it usually costs less, and the results are beyond expectations.