The lungs lie beneath: gentle pressure only, never hard or sharp.
厥陰俞 Jueyinshu
“Transport of Terminal Yin” · BL14
Foot Taiyang · 14 of 67 · back-shu of the pericardium
Where. Below the fourth bump under the neck bone (C7), two finger-widths to each side of the spine.
For. Palpitations; a tight chest; cough.
Press. Ask a partner to press gently with a thumb, about a minute each side.
Caution. The lungs lie beneath: gentle pressure only, never hard or sharp.
厥陰腧二穴，在第四顀下，兩傍相去各一寸五分按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
Where Jueyinshu Stands on the Upper Back
The dataset places Jueyinshu on the back, below the spinous process of the fourth thoracic vertebra, 1.5 cun lateral to the posterior midline. Unpacked for everyday hands: run a fingertip up the centre of the back and it climbs a seam of small, knuckle-like ridges — those are spinous processes, the rearward tips of the vertebrae stacked into the spinal column. Jueyinshu waits beside the fourth ridge of the chest series, set off to either side. A cun, as elsewhere on this site, is the traditional proportional unit of point location, taken from the person being examined rather than from a ruler; one and a half cun is customarily measured as the combined breadth of the index and middle fingers held together at their knuckles.
The neighbours make the address easier to trust. At the junction of neck and shoulders stands the most prominent bump of the upper spine, the seventh cervical vertebra, which glides visibly under the skin when the head turns or bows; the registry sets Dazhui (GV14) in the hollow directly beneath it. One ridge further down begins the twelve vertebrae of the chest, and counting from that first thoracic vertebra brings you to the fourth, flanked on both sides by Jueyinshu — a matched pair standing like gateposts either side of the midline. One level up, the catalogue places Feishu (BL13), the lung’s own gathering point; one level down lies Xinshu (BL15), the heart’s. Sandwiched between lung and heart stations, this address belongs to the wrap that guards the heart — and three adjacent levels make close company, so careless searching finds a neighbour while meaning Jueyinshu.
What lies beneath the skin deserves a respectful glance before any touching begins. Bands of muscle — the trapezius sweeping down from the shoulders, the rhomboids drawing each shoulder blade toward the spine — cover the rib cage here, and beyond them the lungs ride closer to the surface than most people imagine anywhere along the upper back. The recorded caution attached to this point says exactly that, and it colours everything a home practitioner does here: the territory is rich, the distance to anything delicate is short, and every sensible habit at Jueyinshu follows from staying close to the surface.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Sit upright on a firm chair and bow the head forward, letting the neck soften; the prominent knob at its base should stand out plainly, and turning the head side to side confirms it moves while the shoulders stay still. Rest a fingertip on that bump, then walk straight down the midline ridge by ridge, counting each chest vertebra as you pass: one, two, three, four. From the lower edge of the fourth, measure outward — press the index and middle fingers of your other hand together at the knuckles, lay them sideways against the spine, and the far edge marks the level of Jueyinshu. Search both sides; the point exists as a symmetrical pair.
A few quiet confirmations help before pressing starts. Compare sides with feather-light touch: many people notice a faint, dull awareness at the true spot and little sensation half a finger-width away. Check the horizontal distance too: the right address sits clearly off the midline, on the soft band of muscle that runs parallel to the spine — not in the narrow valley hugging the bone, nor drifted outward toward the shoulder blade. Breathe slowly and notice the area shift faintly under resting fingertips; even at this level of the back, the rib cage joins every breath.
Two classic mistakes account for most misses. The first is losing count somewhere between the second and third ridges, usually because the counting hand quietly strays off the midline — plant that fingertip in the central valley and let only the other hand step sideways. The second is stopping one ridge short or overshooting one long, landing instead on the lung station above or the heart station below; if the neighbourhood feels uncertain, return to the base of the neck and run the count again unhurried. The point has waited beside the fourth ridge through centuries of practice; it will wait out one more slow restart.
Reading the Name: Transport of Terminal Yin
The name arrives in three parts. Jueyin, terminal yin, is the closing stage of yin in classical six-channel teaching — the yin that gathers to its furthest and turns. The hand channel carrying that banner is the pericardium channel, so jueyin became a shorthand for the heart’s protective wrap. Shu names a relay or transport station: classical teaching assigned every organ a seat beside the spine where its activity gathers toward the back, and these offices are the back-shu points. Jueyinshu therefore reads as the place where the qi of the jueyin office — the pericardium — conveys toward the surface of the back.
The wrap imagery rewards a slower look. In classical anatomy the pericardium, xinbao, is the membrane enfolding the heart — less a labouring organ than a guardian’s mantle, yet granted full standing in the tradition: a rank among the organs, a channel of its own down the inner arm, and now its own seat beside the spine. Point names in this school compress location and duty into a few syllables — gates, valleys, courtyards, relays — and a transport point named for terminal yin tells you both where it stands and whose business it keeps: the guard house posted outside the sovereign’s chamber.
Pinyin renders the name Juéyīnshū: a rising second tone on jue, level first tones on yin and shu. The hanzi 厥陰俞 set the abstract banner beside practical characters — dictionaries give jue the senses of fainting and extremity, yin the shaded side of a hill, shu the act of conveying onward. Read as one sentence, the name says: here the terminal-yin office delivers its charge to the back. The dataset’s category line records the same furniture plainly — back-shu of the pericardium — a doctrinal title carried wherever the tradition went, not a modern claim.
Traditional Indications, Explained
Read as a record rather than a prescription, the dataset’s actions are: cardiac pain, palpitations, chest oppression, cough, vomiting, and neurasthenia. Each has a traditional reading. Cardiac pain in the old records usually names dull, blocked, oppressive sensation gathered around the heart region — the classic vocabulary of stuck qi and constrained movement — not the crushing or tearing chest emergencies, which belonged then, as now, to urgent care. Palpitations mean the heart felt racing, thumping, or skipping beats, understood classically as the mind-spirit restless in its residence. Chest oppression is the familiar heaviness, the sense of a weight parked on the sternum, filed under the same roof.
Cough enters through the channel door: the site’s meridian notes describe the bladder channel setting out at the inner corner of the eye, crossing the head, and running down the back in two parallel lines to the little toe — the longest of the classical pathways — and its spine-flanking stretch passes precisely where Jueyinshu lives, so surface complaints arriving along the route were discussed here. Vomiting looks the odd entry until the old habit of grouping returns to view: back-shu files tended to collect whatever a troubled office sent outward, and counterflow nausea often travelled with chest and epigastric unease in those records. Neurasthenia is a dated label — the exhausted, sleepless, frayed-nerves picture another century filed away — and it joins palpitations in the spirit-settling portfolio classical practice kept for this address.
It bears repeating plainly: these are the traditional uses recorded in the licensed dataset, offered for cultural and historical understanding. They are not statements that pressing this point treats any condition, and nothing here replaces assessment by a qualified clinician. Where modern research touches acupressure at all, reviews suggest effects are modest and heavily context-dependent, and evidence specific to any single point remains thin. Hold the tradition lightly and the safety rules firmly — doubly so at an address whose historic portfolio reaches toward the chest and the heart.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
With the point located by the walkthrough above, settle the practice. Sitting astride a chair and leaning forward over its back, or lying face down for a few minutes, exposes the mid-back and lets the shoulder muscles slacken; a partner makes reaching easier, though self-applied hands work too by wrapping the opposite arm across the chest. Rest the pads of the index and middle fingers — never the tips — on the spot beside the spine. Begin with contact alone for several slow breaths, then add small circles, letting the skin travel with the fingers rather than dragging across it. Pressure should read as pleasant dullness or spreading warmth. A common home rhythm is one to three minutes per side, once or twice daily, matched to easy exhales; finish with the other side so the pair stays symmetrical.
Quality matters here more than almost anywhere, because the ground is bony and shallow, and because the subject — the chest and its comfort — invites overreach. Warm the hands first; chilled muscle guards. Choose a quiet moment over a fidgety one, and let the practice double as a pause for anyone whose days pile tension between the shoulder blades: a minute of attention exactly where the stiffness collects. People who keep such habits usually anchor them to something existing — after the morning wash, before closing the laptop — because consistency, not intensity, is what self-care traditions actually ask for.
Treat those few minutes as attendance rather than achievement. Perhaps the area feels less guarded afterwards; perhaps breathing drops a little more freely; perhaps nothing changes except that you spent ninety seconds noticing your own back. Every one of those outcomes fits the honest scope of self-acupressure. What does not fit is escalation — heavier thumbs, longer sessions, pressure driven inward toward the ribs to force a result. At Jueyinshu that temptation meets a plain refusal, because the anatomy beneath leaves no second chances. And where the heart is concerned, escalation wears a second face: talking yourself into believing a pressing routine can stand in for a symptom properly checked. When curiosity pulls toward force, or worry murmurs that the clinic can wait, answer both the same way — gently, and at the clinic — and then stop for the day.
Cautions and Safe Practice
This point earns its caution early and plainly. The dataset’s warning reads: do not needle deeply; over-deep insertion may injure the lung. The reason is geography, not fussiness. The lungs flank the spine much further down the back than intuition expects, and at the fourth thoracic level only muscle and membrane separate a deep instrument travelling forward from lung territory. Professional training manages that proximity with precise technique; home self-care manages it far more simply — by never leaving the surface at all. Fingertip pressure held in skin and superficial muscle engages none of the depth the warning addresses.
For self-care the practical rules follow. Keep contact light and strictly superficial; use finger pads only, and leave elbows, knuckles, and tools out of it entirely. Skip the point completely during a feverish illness, during acute coughing or any breathing difficulty, and over broken or irritated skin; after any recent back or chest injury or surgery, wait until a clinician clears ordinary activity before resuming. Sharp, electric, or radiating sensation means stopping at once and not retrying that day. Pregnant readers, and anyone living with a heart or lung condition, should consult a qualified practitioner before adding any new point practice — a general rule across this site, worth double weight where the historic work centres on the heart.
And the wider rule stands over everything: this page is educational, and acupressure is self-care, not diagnosis or therapy. Prompt medical care — not a longer pressing session — is the right response to chest pain or pressure, breathlessness, fainting or near-fainting, palpitations that persist or arrive with dizziness, coughing blood, a fever that will not settle, a cough lasting past a few weeks, or any symptom that frightens you. Anyone ever told that their palpitations or chest discomfort need investigating should treat that advice as the standing rule it is. Persistent symptoms belong with a licensed practitioner, Western or East Asian medical as the complaint suggests. The transport seat of terminal yin has carried its quiet image across centuries; for most people its safest gift is a calmer, better-known back, handled gently and honestly.
Jueyinshu, the transport seat of terminal yin, stands on the upper back beside the spine, below the fourth thoracic vertebra. Classical practice appointed it the back-gathering window of the pericardium and reached for it in palpitations, chest oppression, and the cardiac pain of the old records. This guide walks through finding it and pressing it gently.
Cautions from the classical sources
- Keep insertion shallow; going too deep can puncture the lung.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Jueyinshu without counting vertebrae?
- Lean on the moving landmark and the good neighbours. Bow the head, find the single most prominent bump where neck meets shoulders, drop one ridge to begin the chest series, then walk down three more — the fourth takes the point, a joined hand’s breadth to either side. Feishu above and Xinshu below bracket the address, so if your search lands on one of those recorded spots you know exactly which way to slide. For surface-level self-care, landing within a finger-width of the spot changes nothing that matters — gentleness, not precision, carries the practice.
- Is pressing Jueyinshu myself actually safe?
- Gentle fingertip pressure held on the surface is generally reasonable self-care for healthy adults, because it works in skin and superficial muscle, far short of the structures the recorded warning protects. The caution concerns deep professional techniques that could reach lung tissue — a category home acupressure never approaches. Honour the stop signals regardless: sharp pain, electric or radiating sensation, or discomfort that builds all mean finishing immediately.
- What did classical practice use Jueyinshu for?
- The traditional record lists cardiac pain, palpitations, chest oppression, cough, vomiting, and neurasthenia. Classical teaching additionally appointed it the back-shu of the pericardium, the heart’s protective wrap, which is why heart-and-chest entries anchor its historic portfolio. These are traditional frameworks documented for cultural context, not evidence-backed treatment claims.
- Why does the pericardium get its own back point?
- Because the tradition gave the wrap full membership. Classical anatomy treats the pericardium as the membrane guarding the heart, grants it a rank among the organs and a channel of its own down the arm, and seats it beside the spine like every other organ. Naming the seat for the terminal-yin phase — the banner the pericardium channel carries — ties the address back to that channel’s line of doctrine. None of it describes modern anatomy; it is the tradition’s own filing system, useful chiefly for understanding how its records were written.
- Can acupressure at Jueyinshu replace seeing a doctor about palpitations or chest discomfort?
- No — least of all here. Self-acupressure is a comfort practice, not a diagnostic instrument, and symptoms touching the chest carry the sharpest red flags on this site: pain or pressure, breathlessness, fainting, palpitations that persist or worsen, coughing blood, or a cough past a few weeks all need professional assessment promptly. Think of daily self-care and clinical medicine as different floors of one building: routine maintenance downstairs, the consulting room upstairs. Visiting one floor never abolishes the other.
Sources
- 01WHO Standard Acupuncture Point Locations in the Western Pacific Region (2008), World Health Organization — nomenclature conventions.
- 02A Manual of Acupuncture, Peter Deadman, Mazin Al-Khafaji and Kevin Baker — point-name tradition, influential-point theory, and channel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for BL14 Jueyinshu — location, point class, actions, and caution record.
Last reviewed
牌記This leaf, for machines
Old books ended with a colophon saying who printed them. Every leaf here carries the same facts as structured data for agents and search, with no layout in the way.
- GET /en/points/bl14/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/bl14/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/bl14/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "BL14",
"name": {
"en": "Jueyinshu",
"gloss": "Transport of Terminal Yin",
"zh-Hant": "厥陰俞",
"zh-Hans": "厥阴俞"
},
"channel": {
"id": "BL",
"order": 14,
"of": 67
},
"location": {
"text": "Below the fourth bump under the neck bone (C7), two finger-widths to each side of the spine."
},
"for": [
"palpitations",
"a tight chest",
"cough"
],
"press": {
"text": "Ask a partner to press gently with a thumb, about a minute each side.",
"seconds": 60,
"sides": "both"
},
"cautions": [
"The lungs lie beneath: gentle pressure only, never hard or sharp."
],
"source": "Tongren Shuxue Zhenjiu Tujing, book 4",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/bl14",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}