Fire Cupping

This isn't torture or magic or performance art. This is a little glass globe fixed to my arm with the power of suction. This is ancient medicine, as old as the instinct to suck your finger after you've knocked it against something. No pain is involved. In fact, it feels good, the way stretching feels good.

I wouldn't have thought this odd, sometimes brutal looking technique would appeal to me. The tissue pulls up into the cup and can turn pink, red, dark purple. Sometimes this coloring stays as a mark on the skin where matter once trapped in the tissues is drawn to the surface. Not a painful bruise, just a mark.

I wouldn't have thought that I'd want to fuss with the accoutrements of this technique. Cups, cotton, forceps, alcohol, water, oil. Oh, and fire. A big wad of fire to create the vacuum inside the cup.

But I love cupping. I love how it feels as a practitioner. I've spent my whole career pressing down into muscles. This lets me lift. And as a recipient of cupping I also feel lifted, as if all the stuck layers were slowly peeling apart, the detritus of my tissue finally tossed to the curb.

Now the hard part: Convincing my clients to let me use this technique on them. Medieval torture comes to their minds or they look longingly, beyond the row of cups, toward the dark, polished stones heating to a perfectly toasty temperature in their crockpot. I don't want to resort to telling them cupping helps the appearance of cellulite. While that might be alluring for certain clientele, I refuse to be the woman who sticks glass cups to people's butts.