REN-5 Shimen - Stone Gate

Stone Gate is a main center of energy and the first gate where energy tends to get blocked. 'Stone' refers to the cinnabar stone, and it can also refer to barrenness. It moves Qi powerfully when there's something like a stone in the lower body and something stuck in the rest of the person's life, 'marbleized in stone'; it moves things so powerfully. It is like an Associated Effect Point (AEP) for the Three Heater and good for stabilizing it. Like a sepulchre, it is the stone rolled away and new life coming forth; it holds a person's foundation and their sense of life's meaning. It is a cold, solid, very heavy block of stone that needs keeping warm and flexible. At the level of the navel Yin and Yang must balance, so many points here are pivotal, and the Cinnabar Field is where that balance begins.

Location: On the front midline, 2 ACI below the umbilicus.
Needle depth: 7-8 fen
Moxa: 7-15 cones

• When energy, vitality and warmth are all lacking, with weakness and fatigue
• When the person is lifeless and inert
• When someone needs movement in their life and movement inside themselves
• When something is stuck, as if set in stone, in the person's life
• When a person is overburdened by the amount of giving, with not enough energy left, and needs to learn to nourish and take care of themselves
• When a person lacks the strength to get past the stuckness; it touches the passion that the gate of vitality generates and overcomes a lack of desire
• When things have been shut down for a while and a slightly larger opening needs to be made
• When things get stuck, cold, empty and negative, with no passion or pleasure
• When balance can't be found through the command points

• REN-4 First Gate with REN-5: when eight or nine treatments have still brought no energy

• Alarm (Front Mu) point serving the lower burner and the Three Heater
• Use lots of moxa for lifelessness and inertia, especially with a cold lower body
• At times put on the forbidden list because of its big effect on the womb
• Good for holding a good pulse
• Daoist alchemists prized cinnabar above every other mineral. They saw in it an almost perfect balance of Yin and Yang that could feed the Source Qi, and believed that, properly prepared, it could confer immortality; it also stood for the open awareness reached in meditation
• In old times this point was needled or warmed only with great care, or not at all, for fear that scattering the Source Qi here could cause sterility, impotence, frigidity or a shortened life