Restless Leg Syndrome is a condition that many people experience. It can be a distracting sensation, which is often a desire to shake or move their legs, although there are other symptoms that are also part of this syndrome. Because of my posts on leg chakras, some readers have wondered if there is a connection between our vital energy (prana or chi) and restless leg syndrome. I have begun to wonder about it myself as a result of reading comments from readers.
While I cannot say for certain, what I can say is that there are a few coincidental elements that might connect the two. If there is, it will most likely be related to how blocked energy can be present in the legs. What I mean by this is that it has been known that for whatever reason, there appears to be a connection between past repressed emotion and certain places in the body that will seem to store that energy until it is released, which generates emotional relief for those who do this kind of work. I will say, however, that while I have myself experienced hundreds of these releases of stored emotional energy and understand the many ways that it can be released, I have not made a clear connection between that and RLS. What I do know is how much harder it is to release the blocked energy in the legs. I suspect that because of their distance from the core of the body that their energetic potential is different, perhaps less intense, and as a result, more difficult to bring changes in the same way that are seen in the core or torso region where the “larger” more powerful chakras as located.
The thing about the chakra system and the vital energy system in general is that it is not an entirely physical system. This energy system, while appearing a lot like nerve channels to those who can sense them, are not physical in the way that nerves or the vascular system is. It is one reason why modern science does not take the subject seriously despite the fact that the Chinese have carefully mapped out these energetic lines throughout the body with such specificity that their mapping has brought us the meridian system that is used for acupuncture and acupressure therapies that hospitals often use because they have found that they work for certain conditions. They don’t pretend to know why it works, only that it does and because this is minimally invasive, they use it. Additionally, in India, this same system was also mapped out and are instead called “nadi” instead of “meridian.” The nadi were known to house blocked or stored emotion and the ladder of yoga as it is referred to often details exercises intended to dislodge this blocked material from the nadi system. But it is the very same thing as the Chinese system, but with the addition of the chakras, which are described as being like wheels, and all sorts of illustrations have been made down through the centuries to help people to visualize them (like lotus or other flower forms for instance). While the Indian system does not appear to identify the points along the meridians that the Chinese use for needling in acupuncture in order to open up blocked energy pathways, neither does the Chinese system conceive or acknowledge a wheel-like vortex called a chakra either. I suspect that this is a cultural difference, and may also be attributed to what the adepts were doing, an outcome of their abilities and their focus when it came to subtle energy like prana or chi.
That said, being able to divest this energy that is stored from the body has as its end result in helping to release the stored burden upon the psyche or of the self. It is liberating to do this work, and it has the effect of shifting the physical chemistry in a long-term fashion of the body, which has positive effects on physical and mental health.
Consider if you have stored fear or anxiety, psychologists know that this stored or repressed memory has a recursive nature that can stay with a person their whole life if the issue isn’t dealt with. Every time that the person is triggered, so too is a burst of adrenaline or norepinephrine released, which puts the body into a pitched flight-like mode which most associate with fear. If allowed to be triggered often, the body wears under such a condition and disease of a degenerative nature could creep in if this trigger is, exercised often. The body does best in stasis or a balanced state.
What medical science has to say on the subject is best summed up by this article about a potential breakthrough in understanding the physiology of the condition which was published in November 2018 in Science Daily:
This new research indicates that the involuntary leg movements in RLS are caused by increased excitability of the nerve cells that supply the muscles in the leg, which results in an increased number of signals being sent between nerve cells.
Targeting the way messages are sent between nerve cells to reduce the number of messages to normal levels may help prevent the symptoms of RLS occurring. This could be achieved by new drugs that block the ion channels that are essential for the communication between nerve cells.
The research conducted by the University of Gottingen in conjunction with the University of Sydney and Vanderbilt University involved measuring the nerve excitability of motor nerve cells of patients suffering with RLS and healthy subjects.
The next step is to investigate the effect of different medications in patients and the effect on RLS.
SOURCE: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181114234848.htm
If RLS can be attributed to chi in the body, then a treatment will most often be more of a bandaid, a therapy that would likely never change the condition itself, but would bring relief through taking a chemical into the body that aids in the ionic actions that the quote describes. While it may be possible that vital force of chi/prana could have a role to play in stimulating RLS chemistry in the body, it could prove helpful to investigate alternative therapies before using chemistry.
So is there any relief produced using acupuncture or variants of it? It turns out that it has been used. The following article, while technical, provides the point locations used in a therapy and could be reproduced with a skilled acupuncture therapist. I will note that the article describes both acupuncture and what they call “acuinjection” of a synthetic dopamine-like compound (from the look of it) into the acupuncture point. Anyway, it may be worth reading to learn more about this technique. It can be found here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6028364/
In this article the result was that an extensive study did not return a conclusive result.
The following article is interesting for the method of massage that a Chinese practitioner can perform that is said to be helpful for RLS:
https://www.acufinder.com/Acupuncture+Information/Detail/Acupuncture+Helps+Restless+Legs+Syndrome
I hope that this helps those who have inquired about this topic. I had hoped to have had an opportunity to speak with a noted energy healer while on the Hawaiian islands in March, but we wound up not covering this topic before the trip ended. My hope is that I will be seeing this healer again but this time in California before too much longer and will see if I can make a video of the encounter. Since uncertainty with Covid continues, no specific date is set, but it has been a topic of our discussion but we were so busy that we had trouble fitting it in on our last meeting. Hopefully I will be able to put something up in the next few months.
~Parker
Waking The Infinite 