Gua Sha With The Hayo’u Method
You may remember that I spoke about Katie Brindle and The Hayo’u Method in a previous post, speaking about rituals and breathing techniques that you can do to control stress and health issues. I went in depth about the illness I have been through since I was a baby and how we have been working together to undo all of the damage that’s been done. As I’m documenting the journey, the next thing I’ve been learning with Katie is how to do Gua Sha. What’s that? Let me tell you! Gua sha, translated from Chinese into English means to scrape the skin with a blunt object (Gua) to release blood circulation and redness (sha). It’s an ancient, traditional Chinese medical treatment in which the skin is scraped to release unhealthy elements from injured areas of your body and stimulates blood flow and healing. When you Google this, it does look incredibly scary at first due to how red your skin can go and the fact that some of the stagnant blood comes to the surface and lasts for a few days. I want to say before anyone runs away though, it does not hurt at all. It feels very similar to rubbing a rounded jam jar lid over your skin, so it’s more like a pressure and a massage than anything painful. The only time it can be sore is if you hit an area that’s tender to begin with (which you aren’t supposed to do) or if you get right on a bone, so I avoid those areas and concentrate on tissue. Katie has released two different Gua Sha…