I came to Dr Zhao Ming Shao with neck pain.
Dr Shao trained at the Beijing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, healed himself through Qigong after a severe spinal injury at fifteen, went on to win the national Wushu championship back to back, and eventually brought his practice to Melbourne, where he has spent thirty years treating conditions that other practitioners refer on.

He is a specialist in navel acupuncture – a powerful and dangerous practice, depending on what you know about the navel and what happens when you put a needle there.

I did not know any of this when I arrived.

I just knew my neck hurt.

Navel Accupuncture

I had done acupuncture before – so I was very confused when Dr Shao took a small battery torch and probed around my belly button. Many needles went in – but only in my navel. Not in my arms legs or head – my belly button.

The needles went in at Shenque, the point TCM calls CV8, the exact centre of the umbilicus. I had no particular expectations. I had experienced ordinary acupuncture before, the twist, the flow along a path that felt already there, the slow settling of something that had been held.

This was not the same feeling.

What happened, with the needles still in, was that a sadness lifted in me. Not gradually. Not over days or weeks in the way antidepressants are supposed to work. It lifted like something physical had been released, a weight I had carried so long I had stopped noticing it as weight, and in its place came an uncontrollable laughter that I cannot describe in any register that does not sound clinical or diminished.

I laughed out loud on the table.

The neck pain was gone by the end of the session.
The sadness has never returned. Not once. Other members of my family have used pharmaceuticals to deal with this. I have tried these medications once – but whatever Dr Shao released at the root that day has not closed again.

The Secret Door That Must Not Be Opened Lightly

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shenque is called the Door of the Spirit. It is the only point on the body where needling is absolutely contraindicated in classical TCM. The oldest texts describe the consequences of careless needling there in terms that read less like clinical caution and more like a warning about disturbing something foundational. The Systematic Classic of Acupuncture and Moxibustion, compiled in the third century, states plainly that needling Shenque causes fatal ulceration. Modern texts maintain the prohibition without always explaining it.
What the prohibition encodes, I believe, is a recognition that this point is not like other points.
Shenque connects, directly or indirectly, with all eight of the extraordinary meridians, and through them with all twelve of the principal meridians. It is the only point in the body with this property. Every channel in the meridian system traces back to or through the navel. A perturbation at Shenque does not stay local. It propagates through everything.
The specialists who work there, and Dr Shao is among them, are not simply more skilled at ordinary acupuncture. They are working with a different understanding of what the navel is and what it connects to. The prohibition exists not because the point is fragile but because it is too powerful to approach carelessly. You do not reach into the origin of the river without knowing where every tributary runs.

The root of life

The biology is more remarkable than the prohibition suggests.
The umbilicus sits at the T10 dermatome, the most convergent spinal level in the body, richly innervated by the tenth and eleventh branches of the thoracic nerves. These are myelinated somatic fibres, the accumulated condition pathway rather than the fast signal route. Directly beneath them lies the enteric nervous system, entirely unmyelinated, the gut world that processes without knowing.
The navel is the meeting point of the myelinated somatic body and the unmyelinated visceral world. In Myelin Mind terms, that is not simply a chiasmic node. It is the original chiasm. The first encounter between the organism and the world happened here. The umbilical cord was the only interface that existed before birth. Everything the accumulated myelinated condition would become passed through this point first.
But there is something in the biology of Shenque that goes beyond historical significance.
Research into the tissue of the CV8 acupoint has found something that does not exist at non-acupoint sites in the same form. The somatic stem cells at the navel show significantly greater proliferation activity than those found anywhere else on the body’s surface. And when induced, they differentiate into neural stem cell-like cells, confirmed by nestin expression, the marker of cells capable of becoming neurons, oligodendrocytes, or Schwann cells.
The navel does not just remember where myelination began. It may retain the biological capacity to begin it again.
This is hypothesis, offered carefully. But it is hypothesis that the existing evidence does not contradict, and that the Myelin Mind framework makes structurally necessary. If the navel is the origin point of the accumulated myelinated condition, the wellspring of the chiasmic rhizome, then it would make biological sense for it to retain something of the generative capacity it held at the beginning. The body does not tend to abandon its most foundational resources entirely.

Depression

In the western treatment of depression, drugs like SSRIs are prescribed that help partially and variably, in the way that adjusting a signal helps when the problem is not the signal but the condition the signal is meeting.
Depression, in Myelin Mind terms, is not a chemical imbalance in the sense that phrase is usually meant. It is a chiasmic failure. The accumulated myelinated condition has become so compacted, so rigid around its own sedimented weight, that incoming signals can no longer complete their encounters. The river is not stopped. It is choked. The water still moves but can find no course, and the organism experiences that as the particular darkness of a world that has lost its resonance.
SSRIs modulate serotonin at the synaptic level. They adjust the incoming signal. For many people this is enough to allow some chiasmic encounters to complete, and the relief is real. But the riverbed remains as it was. The debris that caused the choking is still there. Which is why the drugs must be taken continuously, why stopping them often returns the condition, and why they work better for some people than others depending on how thoroughly the accumulated condition has compacted around the blockage.
What Dr Shao reached was not the signal. He reached the riverbed at its origin. At the point where all eight extraordinary meridians converge, where the accumulated myelinated condition of a life first began to accumulate, where the somatic stem cells that can generate new neural tissue still quietly reside.
When that point released, the entire system released with it. Every chiasmic node in the myelinated rhizome suddenly completed encounters that had been blocked, some of them perhaps for years. The joy was not psychological. It was structural. The river finding its course all at once.

The Price

Opening the secret door is forbidden in TCM. It has enormous curative power but it also comes with significant risks, and unexpected profound outcomes.

For me it was tinnitus.

In Myelin Mind terms this is not difficult to understand, though it was not easy to experience.
The auditory chiasmic nodes, like all chiasmic nodes in the myelinated rhizome, had been operating within the constraints of a compacted accumulated condition. When the root released and chiasmic flow restored throughout the system, those nodes received more flow than they had known. In some of them, the flow arrived without a matching incoming signal. The accumulated condition began generating experience from its own resources, the way my visual cortex had generated confabulation after my stroke, filling the gap where the signal was absent with what the accumulated condition knew how to produce.
The river was unblocked. The water found its own course, including into channels that had no corresponding source to meet it.
I accepted this. I still accept it. The depression that carried me for years has not returned. The neck pain is gone. What I carry now in the auditory field has is a price I would pay again.
Not a bad payoff.

Dr Shao

Dr Shao is also a champion of wushu and Tai Chi

Dr Shao did not explain any of this to me in terms of myelinated rhizomes or chiasmic nodes or somatic stem cell differentiation.

He just knew where to put the needle and how to turn it, because his lineage carries five thousand years of practitioners who mapped the myelinated rhizome of the body from the outside, using the felt responses of their patients as their instrument of confirmation.
When the flow moved, the needle had found the chiasm. When I laughed uncontrollably on the table, something had released at the root.
What the Myelin Mind can offer is not a correction of this ancient knowledge. It is rather a language for what he already does, built from the same evidence his tradition has always pointed toward, and now confirmed by a stain that reveals the myelinated rhizome only when you know to look for it, and by stem cells at the origin point that have not forgotten what they were there to begin.

The Secret Door of the Spirit is not a metaphor. It is the biological address in the body of the origin of everything the accumulated condition has become.


Dr Shao holds the secrets to open it.

Jack Parry is a philosopher, polyglot and biomedical animator at Swinburne University of Technology. He is the author of The Myelin Mind: The Genesis of Meaning.

Further Reading