SP-21 Dabao - Great Enveloping

Great Enveloping is the junction point of all junction points. It brings balance and harmony among all the Officials, connects all the meridians and opens up every junction point in the entire body. It is the Big Home: we create a space for each other in our lives in the way the uterus gives the baby a home. Bao means to wrap or embrace, and this point helps the person feel held and enveloped. Like the Mother who harmonizes the whole household, it makes sure love is flowing and helps everyone interact. Held between Heart and Lungs above and Liver and Kidneys below, it can bring richness to every cell. It is a great big hug, enveloping like a mother picking you up: a sigh of relief at suddenly being home and safe and centered, every need met. Being deprived of the mother creates continual worry and need, and outside sympathy will never be enough; it has to come from within. The character pictures a fetus held in the womb; its collaterals branch around the whole torso, wrapping the person in a motherly embrace of unconditional nourishment. In Daoism, embracing the one means returning to the womb by patterning oneself on the primal Dao, and the sage attends to the belly rather than the eyes, receiving the mother's unconditional nourishment through a spiritual umbilical cord.

• Worsley calls Great Enveloping the junction point above every other junction point. Needled with that intention, he says, it encourages flow through every junction point linking the paired meridians, so that no single point better embodies the Spleen's work of promoting movement in body, mind and spirit.

Location: On the chest in the 6th intercostal space, on the line running down from the middle of the armpit (mid-axillary line).
Needle depth: 3 fen
Moxa: 3-7 cones

• When the person is 90 percent cured but still not right
• When there is disorder, fracturedness or lack of contact
• For depression with an oppressive feeling in the chest and around the Heart
• When the Officials are out of harmony with each other
• When the person longs to be cared for yet struggles to take the care into their heart: much crying, emotional loss of control, obsession
• When a person feels the great Mother neither holds nor supports them, saying they are all alone with nobody to help. It lets them know they are held now and will be held all the way through
• For someone cut off from every other source of nourishment
• When the person rejects everything, or is demanding, angry, cajoling, cutting, or fearfully grasping

• Exit point of the Spleen; use on the Spleen to Heart (SP-21 to HT-1) Entry-Exit block
• Otherwise use only on an Earth Causative Factor (CF)
• With the Entry-Exit block, the person may feel the heart is never satisfied, however much nourishment comes
• Spleen to Heart block: the practitioner may feel a pull on the heartstrings and a wish to look after the person. Eating disorders may be the Heart crying out for love, and an imbalanced relationship with the mother in early years often contributes to this block