陰郄 Yinxi
“Yin Cleft” · HT6
Hand Shaoyin · 6 of 9 · xi-cleft
Where. On the inner forearm, half a thumb-width above the wrist crease, beside the tendon in line with the little finger.
For. Palpitations with a start, night sweats.
Press. Two finger pads, slow circles, one minute each wrist.
陰郄二穴，在掌後動脈中，去腕五分按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
Where Yinxi Sits on the Inner Forearm
Turn your palm to the ceiling and the address nearly writes itself. On the front of the forearm, close to the wrist, a firm cord rises under the skin on the little-finger side whenever the fingers curl loosely inward — anatomy calls it the tendon of flexor carpi ulnaris, anchoring toward the small bone you can feel at the base of the heel of the hand. The dataset places Yinxi on that palm-facing surface, on the radial border of the tendon — its thumb-facing edge — half a cun above the wrist crease. A cun is the traditional measuring unit of Chinese point-location: proportional lengths taken from the person being examined rather than from a ruler, so a whole cun approximates the width of your own thumb joint, and half a cun is half of that.
Neighbours confirm the address. According to the same catalogue, Shenmen (HT7) rests at the ulnar end of the wrist crease, in the hollow on the thumb side of this very tendon, while Tongli (HT5) climbs one full cun above the crease along the same line. Yinxi therefore sits neatly midway: half a thumb-width up from the crease, and another half below Tongli. Walk the line once and the family relationship becomes tangible — crease, half-step, Yinxi, half-step, Tongli — three stations of one channel strung along a single groove, each holding its own office in classical teaching yet all sharing the same corridor beside the tendon.
The wider map explains why the points queue here. This repository’s meridian notes describe the heart channel as setting out at the armpit and running down the inner arm all the way to the little finger — nine points in total, belonging to fire, housing the shen, the spirit. Of the three yin pathways that descend the forearm’s palm side, the heart route keeps nearest the little-finger border, which is why its stations line up beside this particular tendon rather than somewhere nearer the thumb. Beneath the fingertips lies ordinary, forgiving territory — skin, fascia, tendon edge, and flexor muscle — with no deep hazard comparable to the chest wall points; even so, lightness remains the house rule wherever vessels or nerve threads pass near.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Sit upright on a firm chair with both feet down and shoulders released, and lay the left hand palm-up on your lap or a cushion. Make the landmark show itself: curl the fingers loosely and bend the wrist gently, and watch the cord rise on the little-finger side of the front of the wrist. Rest the pad of your right index finger against that cord and trace it upward from the wrist crease. At the crease itself, on the thumb side of the cord, you will find a soft hollow — the neighbourhood of Shenmen. From there, slide upward along the thumb-facing edge of the tendon for half a thumb-width, until your fingertip settles into a shallow groove where tendon edge meets softer muscle. That groove-level spot, half a step above the crease, is Yinxi. Swap hands and repeat, giving the other wrist the same unhurried attention.
A few quiet confirmations help before any pressing begins. Touch feather-light and compare wrists: many people notice a faint, dull awareness at the true point and little sensation a finger-width away. Let the wrist go completely loose — as the flexor muscles soften, the tendon slackens too, and the groove beside it usually opens a shade deeper and reads more easily. Rehearse the distance as well: the spot should sit far closer to the crease than to the middle of the forearm, a matter of half a thumb-width, no more. Some people also feel a soft, even pulse drifting under a resting pad; a vessel does travel near this line on its way into the hand, and the correct response is lighter pressure, never firmer.
Two classic misses account for most failed searches. The first is climbing too far — past the halfway mark toward the forearm’s middle, where the groove continues but the address has ended; if you have travelled a full thumb-width or more, come back down to the crease and begin again. The second is pressing on top of the cord itself rather than along its thumb-side border: the tendon feels hard and mute, while the true spot answers from the soft ground just beside it. A third, rarer slip is searching the back of the wrist — everything about this point lives on the palm-facing side. When in doubt, return to the crease, find the hollow, and measure up half a thumb-width a single time, slowly.
Reading the Name: The Yin Cleft
The two characters sketch the site in miniature. Yin 陰 means the shaded side — traditional body-topography assigns the yin, shadow-facing surfaces to the front and inner aspects of the limbs, so the forearm’s palm side qualifies, and the heart itself is counted among the yin organs. Xi 郄 means a crack, gap, or cleft — the seam where tissues part. Read together, Yinxi is the cleft of the yin side: the seam in the shaded territory where the heart channel’s course slips beside a tendon.
That gap carries an official title. Classical teaching gives each of the twelve regular channels one such cleft point, set below the elbow or knee, and describes these sites as places where the channel’s qi and blood gather closely and sink deeper before moving on. Because the gatherings were imagined as concentrated, tradition treated cleft points as stations for urgent moments rather than slow maintenance — the classical habit was to reach for a cleft when trouble arrived suddenly. The heart channel’s element, fire, lends its own texture to the picture: fire flares quickly, and its cleft was read in kind. These are traditional frames for understanding the body, recorded here for context rather than asserted as findings.
Pinyin renders the name Yīnxì — yin held high and level on the first tone, xi dropping through the falling fourth tone. The second character is a genuine rarity in everyday print: dictionaries record more than one reading for it, and in point names it takes the reading xi. The hanzi pair 陰郄 rewards a moment’s study precisely because it is short enough to memorise at a glance. Like many channel points named for landscape and architecture — gates, valleys, courtyards, clefts — the metaphor does real work: it says the tradition saw a seam here, a place of convergence tucked into a narrow space, and expected anyone who came looking to arrive with precision rather than force.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The recorded indications read: cardiac pain, palpitations with fright, night sweats with tidal fever, vomiting blood, and nosebleed. Framed as tradition rather than promise, the cardiac pain of the old records usually meant dull, oppressive sensations around the lower sternum and heart region, understood as qi and blood failing to move freely there — while sudden, crushing pain has always belonged to urgent medical care, and still does today. Palpitations with fright describes a heartbeat felt racing or thumping with a startled, anxious quality attached; the tradition ties this to the heart’s custody of the shen, the spirit — a role the channel notes themselves record.
Night sweats with tidal fever paints its own scene: sleep drenched in perspiration, and waves of heat rising in the afternoon or evening like a tide keeping schedule. Classical pattern-language read such pictures as fire stirring where moistening yin had thinned, and the heart’s own fire element kept the image close to home. Vomiting blood and nosebleed extend the same logic in the traditional view — the cleft office was associated with abrupt, blood-marked episodes — and so the old portfolios grouped them here. It bears repeating plainly: these are historic entries from a licensed dataset and classical literature, offered for cultural understanding. Any actual bleeding symptom today — vomited blood, recurrent nosebleeds, blood in a cough — is a signal to see a clinician promptly, not an invitation to a pressure routine.
And the usual honesty applies to the whole list. Modern research on individual points remains thin, and where reviews touch self-applied pressure at all, they suggest effects are modest and depend heavily on context; nothing in the record licenses promises. Hold the tradition lightly, hold the safety rules firmly, and let the old indications feed curiosity rather than substitute for care.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
With the point located by the walkthrough above, settle into position: seated, palm-up hand resting on a cushion or the thigh, wrist loose. Curl your index and middle fingers together and rest the pads — not the tips — in the groove beside the tendon. Begin with contact alone for a few breaths, then add small, slow circles, letting the skin glide over the tissue beneath rather than grinding against the tendon. Pressure should register as pleasant dullness or mild warmth, never sharpness. A common home rhythm is one to three minutes per side, once or twice daily, matched where possible to slow exhales so each circle rides the breath out. Swap hands and repeat on the other side, keeping the two sessions symmetrical.
Quality matters more than duration. Light, patient, regularly repeated contact fits the wellness register this page practises; hard jabbing teaches the body nothing and risks bruising a narrow groove. If your hands are cold, warm them first, because chilled muscle guards. Choose a quiet corner over a screen, since the practice doubles as a pause for the breath: inhale through the nose, feel the pace of the day slow under still fingertips, lean in gently on the long exhale. People who keep a routine often anchor it to an existing habit — morning washing, an evening wind-down — because consistency, not intensity, is what self-care traditions actually ask for.
Treat the exercise as a small ceremony of attention rather than a treatment session. Notice what changes across weeks: perhaps the wrist feels less guarded, perhaps the heartbeat settles while you rest there, perhaps nothing shifts except that you spend a minute or two each day attending to yourself. Every one of those outcomes fits the honest scope of self-acupressure. What does not fit is escalation — pressing harder, longer, or deeper to force a result. When curiosity pulls that way, return to gentleness or simply stop for the day.
Cautions and Safe Practice
This point arrives with an unusually clean slate, and honesty requires saying so plainly: the licensed dataset records no specific caution for Yinxi, and the editorial contract obliges this page to echo that emptiness exactly rather than invent warnings. An empty caution record is not, however, an invitation to force — it is the baseline every point shares, and the general rules still govern. The territory here is forgiving compared with the chest wall: tendon, muscle, and fascia lie close beneath the skin, with no cavity behind them. Even so, vessels and nerve threads travel near this line, which is one more reason the practice stays light and strictly on the surface.
For fingertip acupressure the practical rules follow from that picture. Keep pressure light, using finger pads — never elbows, knuckles, or tools. Skip the point during a feverish illness, over broken or irritated skin, and around any wrist injury, swelling, or recent surgery until ordinary activity is cleared. Sharp, electric, or radiating sensation means stop at once and do not try again that day. Pregnant readers, and anyone living with a heart condition or a bleeding tendency, should consult a qualified practitioner before adding any new point practice — not because this point carries a recorded danger, but because individual circumstances deserve individual advice.
And the wider rule stands over everything: this page is educational, and acupressure is self-care, not diagnosis or therapy. Seek prompt medical care — not a pressure routine — for chest pain, breathlessness, fainting spells, palpitations that persist or worsen, or any bleeding symptom. Persistent complaints belong with a licensed practitioner, Western or East Asian medical as suits the complaint. The cleft imagery is elegant, but the surest gift Yinxi offers most people is a calmer acquaintance with their own wrist, treated kindly.
Half a thumb-width above the wrist crease, beside the taut tendon on the little-finger edge of the inner forearm, lies Yinxi — the Yin Cleft. Classical practice gave it the heart channel’s cleft office, reached for when the heartbeat raced with fright or nights ran hot with sweat. This guide shows how to find it by touch and press it gently, safely, within honest limits.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Yinxi without knowing anything about cun?
- Use the crease and the tendon as the whole map. Turn the palm up, find the cord that rises on the little-finger side of the front wrist, and locate the soft hollow at the crease on the cord’s thumb side — Shenmen’s neighbourhood. From there, walk your fingertip up along the tendon’s thumb-facing edge for half a thumb-width. The shallow groove where you settle is the location the dataset describes. The half-cun measurement simply encodes that same half thumb-width in proportional language.
- Is pressing Yinxi myself actually safe?
- Gentle fingertip pressure held on the surface is generally reasonable self-care for healthy adults, and the licensed dataset records no specific caution for this point. The structures beneath are tendon and muscle, far shallower than any delicate territory. The usual stop signals still apply in full: sharp pain, radiating sensation, numbness, or discomfort that worsens all mean finish immediately, and fever, broken skin, or an injured wrist mean skip the session.
- What did classical practice use Yinxi for?
- The traditional record lists cardiac pain, palpitations with fright, night sweats with tidal fever, vomiting blood, and nosebleed. Classical teaching describes it as the heart channel’s cleft point, where qi and blood were thought to gather deeply — a station associated with sudden, acute episodes in the traditional frame. Those are documented frameworks for understanding the body, offered for context — not evidence-backed treatment claims.
- Why would a wrist point appear in old records about night sweats or nosebleeds?
- Because channel thinking connects rather than localises. The tradition read points through the route they sit on and the organ system they serve, so the heart channel’s stations were drawn into stories about the heart, its fire, and the blood — wherever the symptoms showed. Cleft points in particular were linked with abrupt episodes in classical physiology. It is a window into a different way of mapping the body; it is not a reason to press a wrist instead of seeing a clinician about bleeding or a racing heart.
- How is Yinxi different from nearby Shenmen or Tongli?
- Same corridor, different heights and offices. Shenmen sits at the wrist crease itself, Tongli a full cun above it, and Yinxi halfway between — half a cun up. Classical teaching assigned each a distinct role: Shenmen as the channel’s gate of source qi, Tongli as its connecting link, Yinxi as its cleft. Each has its own page rendered from the registry, and a practitioner can help you weigh which suits your situation; for home self-care, the locating rhythm you learn at one transfers directly to its neighbours.
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, xi-cleft theory, and channel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for HT6 Yinxi — location, point class, actions, and the empty 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/ht6/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/ht6/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/ht6/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "HT6",
"name": {
"en": "Yinxi",
"gloss": "Yin Cleft",
"zh-Hant": "陰郄",
"zh-Hans": "阴郄"
},
"channel": {
"id": "HT",
"order": 6,
"of": 9
},
"location": {
"text": "On the inner forearm, half a thumb-width above the wrist crease, beside the tendon in line with the little finger."
},
"for": [
"palpitations with a start",
"night sweats"
],
"press": {
"text": "Two finger pads, slow circles, one minute each wrist.",
"seconds": 60
},
"cautions": [],
"source": "Tongren Shuxue Zhenjiu Tujing, book 5",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/ht6",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}