Understanding the True Essence of Facial Gua sha: A Journey Towards Inner and Outer Beauty

Clive
Oct 17, 2020
4 min read

Updated: Jun 20, 2023

Clive Witham, a licensed acupuncturist and health promotion specialist, practicing Facial Gua sha

Breaking Past the Facade of Commercialized Beauty

Facial Gua sha isn't about beauty, it's about life.

Many people see Facial Gua sha through the lense of commercialized beauty.

This is our warped modern ideas of the beautification of perfection whereby immaculate, smooth skin is seen as a goal to strive for. You're supposed to hide that which is imperfect and delay that which may show your life experience.

Reaching Your Potential with Facial Gua sha

But if you break past the facade and look at what Facial Gua sha really does and, of course, should do, you see how it is all about reaching your potential.

🌷 We are the flowers that you see in the garden. If you put us in good soil, we grow. We drink the morning dew and raindrops from the sky. We absorb the heat of the day and rest under the stars. And when the time is right, that plain bud sitting on our stems transforms into a cascade of colors as our flower blooms and shines, glistening in the sun. 💐 It's when the plant reaches its full potential and when it is at its most beautiful.

This is Facial Gua sha.

It's not about perfection.

It's about helping someone reach their potential both on the inside and outside.

It's about bringing the radiance and vibrancy that exists in all of us out onto the skin for us all to see and appreciate.

The Real Meaning of Beauty

Anything less than this is both to misunderstand what you are doing and to fail to see the real meaning of beauty. 👈

Video Transcript

Questioning the Purpose of Facial Gua sha

Let me question you about facial Gua sha!

Why are you doing it? What are you doing? And what do you want out of it? Do you want to get rid of all of those beautiful lines you have on your body? Do you want to conform to the standard 21st century idea about beauty - which is superficial - which is based on the manipulation of photographs, of images, of ideas - and the change of the essential nature of what beauty is.

The Inherent Potential Within Us

So I think the ancient Chinese had a fantastic idea of what beauty was and if we can apply that to facial Gua sha, then we're not just doing a basic treatment - you're actually making changes in the ecological environment of the face.

Which essentially, inside, looks a bit like this. So we're all born with an inherent potential. Now that potential is the same as the plants around me here. They begin life as a seed and over time with the correct environmental conditions - if there's enough rain, if there's enough sun, if there's enough shade, then they'll grow and then they grow tall and at the right time they'll flower. Now that flower is the end result of the beauty that lies deep within the plant.

The Emanation of Inner Vitality

So the face is an emanation of what's going on inside your body - so if the metaphorical soil where you're sitting in, is not good if the sun and the shade and the rain is not good in your life, then your face is going to reflect that and if the vessel system which is coming up through the rest of your body to your face, isn't what it should be, your face is not going to show it. So there's all kinds of systems that are going to come up to your face.

And we can talk on a muscular level and we can talk on a vascular level and we can talk on the skin level. And each of these must be at their optimum in order for beauty to come out. Now the idea of beauty isn't this perfection that you find in a lot of the photographs that are purported to show beauty. Beauty is when the inside can be seen on the outside. Just think about when a woman becomes pregnant and there's a certain time when people can kind of look at their face and they seem a lot more vibrant than they might have done before. Now that is the example of what we're talking about beauty. Beauty is the inner vitality which is coming out onto your face. So how do you get the inner vitality which is inside your body to come out into your face? So you've got to treat the whole body and the face. You've got to understand what's happening and how the beauty can come into your facial area.

Achieving Inner Radiance with Gua Sha

So Gua sha is one of the things which is going to bring this inner radiance out into your face and provide the space for beauty to come out. So scraping anywhere well that's going to help a little bit but you've got to scrape according to the principles of the natural world and if you don't do that, you can't elicit the natural radiance which is inside your body out towards your face and the flower and the blossom can't come out perfectly.

The Principles of Ecological Gua Sha

So these ideas are part of ecological Gua sha which is part of ecological medicine - which is applying the patterns of the natural world onto the body and the face. So these ideas are not invented - they come from the ancient Chinese and coming from ancient Chinese medicine -

but a lot of it is diluted and forgotten so what we're trying to do with ecological Gua sha is bring all that stuff back and I think this is the perfect time to bring it back!

Check out the video:

PART 1: