Let me explain in terms of Ecology in Motion™ which is the Gua sha I do based on the ancient Chinese understanding of the body and it’s relationship to the natural world. Why? Because when dealing with complicated things going on inside the body, it’s a good idea to approach it with a set of principles so that we don’t get lost in the detail and terminology. There really are too many people using meaningless terms or terms they don’t quite understand to justify just about anything with Gua sha so let’s go for simple clarity.

There are certain functions in the body that were seen by the ancient Chinese as synonymous with how farmers irrigate their land. So let’s take their analogy and let’s imagine this situation of facial swelling or swollen legs as a farmer standing in his flooded field. The stream which is normally meandering happily at the edge of his land has become overrun with water and flooded the surrounding area including his field. So there’s the farmer knee-deep in water, scratching his head as to what to do.

So when you see your face puffy and then you think about treating it to reduce the facial swelling, are you going to just drain the field of the flood water and just treat the swollen part of the face? If so, what about the place where the river burst it’s banks upstream? That’s where the water is coming from. And what about the excess water in the river which caused the river to burst its banks in the first place? Should we do something about that?

Let’s take a look at some of the causes of facial swelling in the terms of these questions. If you’ve drunk too much alcohol, there’s obviously something happening in your liver as it works overtime to process it. This is the upriver cause of the facial swelling. If it’s connected to the food you’ve eaten or your general diet then it’s your digestive system and chiefly your stomach which might be behind the facial swelling. If you have allergies or an allergic reaction, then, and this might sound a bit strange, it’s your lungs. And if it were due to something like hypothyroidism, then your kidneys. So the flood is coming from somewhere. It did just magically appear.

The field has drainage ditches dug at the sides and at strategic places so that excess water can be drained from the land and so it can remain moist and fertile and that water can then be used elsewhere or return to the river circulation system. So of course you can use this drainage system. So the farmer gets his tools and machinery out and drains the field.

Well you generally avoid any swelling or bloating with a Gua sha tool. Instead you work around it at the edges. If we keep Gua sha in its natural context, then we don’t concern ourselves with the lymphatic system and we’re not too worried about manually moving the liquid with the tool. This may sound strange to some people but the lymphatic system isn’t a separate system in traditional Chinese medicine - it’s already built in to others. Certainly in Western medicine it’s closely related to the cardiovascular system and it helps maintain the balance of fluid in the body by draining excess fluid from tissues and returning it to the blood system. But with Gua sha both blood and lymph circulatory systems are simultaneously stimulated to work more efficiently. So what you’re doing instead of actually manually moving the fluid, is increasing micro-circulation around the swelling so that the liquid is reabsorbed and processed. So if I’m the farmer, I’m not sweeping the water, I’m digging a channel nearby so the water can seep out naturally.

But then I’m going to jump in my tractor and I’m going to motor my way to the where I think the flood waters came over river bank or where I think the river has been blocked and I’m going to see if there’s any sign of the problem. If there is, then I’m going to get my tools out and patch it up. So what this means for Gua sha is to look for any surface tension along muscle-sinew structures. So if you have facial swelling because of your diet, then I’m going to check the stomach channel which include most of the main muscles down the front of your body. If I find tension, then I use Gua sha. And so in this way I might be able to help to both reduce and prevent the facial swelling.

If I were treating swelling in other parts of the body, then the approach would be the same. There’s a whole subculture about losing weight with Gua sha which is often about removing excess retention of liquid especially in the legs and there’s the idea of manually scraping out the liquid. The same farmer analogy can apply here. If you want to lose weight, maximize the field, irrigation and the river and then look upstream for what might be the origins and in this case invariably it’s going to be diet and lifestyle. And this is an important idea to grasp. If there are problems here and you don’t attend to them, the rest is an uphill struggle. So if my diet was terrible and I didn’t take exercise and I led a stressful life, it would be no surprise that the effects of Gua sha treatment on the retention of liquid and accumulation of fat might be limited and it keeps repeating itself.

So I encourage you to use Gua sha to help remove facial swelling as its one of the best treatments out there but use the body’s natural intelligence to your full advantage while you do it.