ST-12 Quepen - Broken Bowl

Broken Bowl is for when the container is shattered: loss is felt; everything runs out and nothing remains. They have been broken as a child, like a broken bowl, and you are mending the bowl. Five deep pathways meet here, making it a powerful, unifying and enriching point when a person cannot hold on to nourishment, and by sending Qi downward it also calms the mind. It is about containment. Just as a broken bowl cannot hold food, many people cannot take in nourishment as it comes, spilling out neediness, worry and poor boundaries around meeting their own and others' needs. This point gives the ability to contain and receive nourishment and transforms hurt, irreparable places.

Location: In the middle of the supraclavicular fossa, on the paramedian nipple line, 4 ACI from the midline.
Needle depth: 3 fen
Moxa: 3 cones

• When the container is shattered, everything runs out and nothing is there
• When someone was broken as a child, for example by abusive parents, including emotional abuse
• When women are going through menopause, abortion or miscarriage
• When letting go is more than the mind can cope with and it no longer knows how to live
• When a person is unable to process nourishment and hold on to it, or feels life's harvest always slipping away
• When there is a constant feeling of deprivation even though there is enough
• When someone is chronically depleted and dispirited and treatment results do not hold
• When a profound sense of loss has left the person unable to receive or find nourishment; it helps them release what is unneeded rather than mourn it, a time for change
• For deep, shattered depression with sinking Qi, when the person cannot imagine putting things back together and cannot even begin to ask for what they need
• When there has been an absence of mothering
• When nothing taken in stays, however much it is, and the person no longer knows how to give
• For depression with a deep sense of forlornness, loss and spiritual loss
• For an Earth CF after a traumatic event or change of life

• Crossing point of five meridians: Stomach, Gall Bladder, Three Heater, Small Intestine and Large Intestine
• A powerful point
• Can give big pulse changes