If God Wanted You to Have Holes in Your Ears, He Would Have Put Them There
When I was a young child, my sister wanted to get her ears pierced, but my mom wouldn’t let her. She said that “If God wanted you to have holes in your ears, he would have put them there”. That phrase stuck with me for years to come. I could never understand why she thought this way, as a lot of the people I knew had their ears pierced. It remained a mystery for a few decades.
Dr. John R. Christopher, an herbalist and naturopath doctor, was an early idol of mine. He was well known for the herbal lectures he gave in various cities. When he was doing house calls, before leaving home for the day, he would joke with his wife, telling her he’d call her later when he got to jail. In 1953, after tiring of being arrested multiple times for “curing” people, he founded “The School of Natural Healing” to teach people how to take charge of their own health. David Christopher became the director of the school in 1979, taking over for his father. In 1983, at 73 years of age, Dr. Christoper passed away from a severe head injury and became known as an herbal legend. He was one of several herbalists responsible for bringing herbal medicine back to the people. You can find several of his teachings at herballegacy.com.
Dr. Christopher praised a technique known as reflexology, as an important part of healing. Your body is like a map, and each part can reflect the conditions of organs and other body parts. The reflexologist uses different massage techniques to work the reflex points in the feet. They also sometimes work with the reflex points on the hands and ears. Reflexology helps increase circulation to the organs and other affected areas of the body. After one, or several treatments, along with other recommendations and depending on the severity of the condition, blockages begin to release, so that the organ can come back into balance.
During my training in natural healing, I learned that reflexology can balance the whole body. A few years later, I learned that ear piercings could affect internal organs negatively by impeding the flow of energy. The organ that is affected depends on where the piercing is located.
Reflexologists work on the whole feet, to bring flow and balance to the complete body, often taking extra time for specific reflex points tender to pressure, or where known issues need to be addressed. It can also work as an assessment tool to identify areas of the body that are out of balance.
Reflexology has been around for 5000 years or longer and dates back to techniques practiced in China, India, and Egypt. In the late 1500’s reflexology was brought to Europe and in the early 1900’s William H. Fitzgerald, MD, known as the father of reflexology, brought it to the United States.
It was Eunice Ingham who introduced the everyday citizen to reflexology in her book “Stories the Feet Can Tell Thru Reflexology – Stories the Feet Have Told Thru Reflexology” published in 1938 and revised several times since. Eunice’s method of reflexology called “The Ingham method”, is still being practiced today. In 1957, Dr. Paul Nogier mapped out the parts of the body in the ear and developed a reflexology chart for the ear.
In North America, ear reflexology isn’t as popular as foot reflexology, but can be just as effective. If you do an image search on the internet for ‘reflexology charts,’ you can find several examples of how the map reflects the different parts of the body.
Well, there we have it. Part of the mystery of my mother’s belief about ear piercings was solved. A piercing can impede the flow of vital energy to the organ that is reflected in the reflex point on the map. The part of the mystery that remains, however, is, how could my mother have known this back in the late 1970’s, and never mention it to us? She never even talked about massage, and I had not heard of reflexology until I was in my early 30’s.
My mom always came up with weird beliefs. I often wondered why she believed things I had thought were pure nonsense. As the years passed, it was revealed to me that these weird beliefs were accurate, even if she didn’t seem to know why it was so. I now believe that she was very intuitive and could sense things that other people couldn’t. Sometimes I wish she was still around so I could ask her how she knew this or that.