神門 Shenmen
“Spirit Gate” · HT7
Hand Shaoyin · 7 of 9 · shu-stream, yuan-source
Where. On the wrist crease at the little-finger end, in the dip beside the tendon.
For. Poor sleep, a restless mind, forgetfulness.
Press. Two finger pads, slow circles, one minute each wrist.
神門者，土也。一名兌沖，一名中都，在掌後兌骨之端陷者中按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
配 · Pairs with
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
症 · Often paired with
Where Shenmen Sits at the Wrist
Turn your palm upward and the wrist offers its map freely: a crease runs across the front where hand meets forearm, and on its little-finger side the dataset places Shenmen — “at the ulnar end of the palmar wrist crease, in the depression on the radial side of the tendon of flexor carpi ulnaris.” That Latin anatomy name describes a familiar worker: the tendon that curls the wrist toward the little-finger side, standing up under the skin as a taut cord whenever you flex gently against it. Two directions nest here, and they reward being read twice. Ulnar end means the crease’s little-finger end; radial side means the hollow lies on the flank of the cord facing the middle of the wrist. A point can sit at one edge of things and still rest just inside its neighbour’s doorway.
Beneath the skin here lies quiet, intricate territory. The floor of the hollow is formed by the wrist joint and its enveloping tissues, and at the heel of the little-finger edge of the palm you can feel a small pea-shaped bone — anatomists call it the pisiform — beside which the tendon glides. Passing close to the hollow travel the ulnar artery and the ulnar nerve, slender companions bound for the little and ring fingers. Under very light touch some people notice a faint, rhythmic tickle there: that is the artery, not a warning. It is also the reason this spot asks for kindness rather than force — nerves dislike firm prodding, and a fizzing pins-and-needles feeling running into the little and ring fingers means pressure has landed on the bundle and should ease off toward the open hollow.
The wrist matters to the channel story too. Classical descriptions have the heart channel surfacing near the armpit and descending the inner arm along its little-finger border to finish at the little finger itself — nine points in all — and the wrist is where the tradition stationed the channel’s gateway. Shenmen holds two offices at once: it ranks among the five transport points of the heart channel, and it serves as the channel’s yuan-source point, the station classical theory reserves for the gathering of a channel’s original qi. Knowing those roles makes sense of much that follows.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Sit comfortably and rest the left hand palm-up on your lap or a table, fingers relaxed rather than spread. With the right thumb pad, trace the front crease of the left wrist out to its far little-finger end and pause there. Next, let the little-finger side show its architecture: make a soft fist or bow the wrist slightly toward the little finger, and watch the taut cord stand up along that side — the flexor tendon named in the location. Release all effort, then slide the thumb pad around onto the flank of that cord facing the middle of the wrist, holding crease level, until it settles into a small soft hollow. That dip, cradled between tendon and wrist bones, is Shenmen. Repeat the whole sequence on the other wrist so the two sides receive equal care.
A few quiet checks settle the placement before any pressing begins. Touch feather-light and compare the true spot with a point a little toward the centre of the wrist: many people notice a faint dull awareness, or an oddly clear sense of contact, at the hollow itself and almost nothing a short distance away. Keep the thumb still through one slow breath — a gentle pulse may announce the artery slipping past the tendon, and stillness lets it be felt without alarm. Then confirm the coordinates separately, every time: the spot must sit on the front crease itself, not part-way up the forearm, and on the little-finger half of the wrist, not at its centre. When both hold and the hollow feels soft underfoot, you have arrived.
Three slips explain most mis-finds. The first is drifting toward the centre line of the wrist, where the waiting points belong to a different channel entirely — if the thumb rests mid-wrist, walk it sideways toward the little finger until the cord appears. The second is landing on the tendon itself, which feels hard and stringy like a guitar string; the point lies beside it, never on it. The third is chasing the tendon upward past the crease into the forearm. The crease is the anchor: whenever the picture blurs, return to its little-finger end and begin again, slowly. None of these are failures of touch — the wrist is crowded country — and each corrects itself with patience.
Reading the Name: Spirit Gate
The name reads plainly once its two characters are met. 神 shén means spirit — the quickening presence that classical Chinese thought lodged in the heart, an organ tradition describes as housing the spirit rather than merely moving blood. 門 mén means gate or door. Together, Shenmen is the Spirit Gate: the doorway through which the heart’s shen passes nearest the surface, and therefore the place practice reached whenever the spirit wanted steadying. Among all the names on the heart channel, classical writers returned to this one most often, and it remains the point the tradition invokes when it speaks of quieting the mind.
The gate imagery has a technical backbone. Every channel owns a yuan-source point — the old books describe it as where the channel’s original qi gathers and lingers closest to the surface, like a courtyard just inside a gate — and Shenmen fills that office for the heart channel. It is also the channel’s shu-stream point among the five transport points, the set the classics mapped onto flowing water: a well where qi first emerges, then a spring, a stream, a river, and at last a sea near the elbow and knee. Five-phase tables pair the stream points of the yin channels with earth — and earth is precisely what fire engenders, so classical readers saw the heart’s fire settling into solid ground at this spot. These are the bookkeeping schemes of traditional medicine, recorded here as context rather than claim.
Pinyin renders the name Shénmén, and the tones are worth checking against a dictionary rather than guessing: shen carries a second tone — the rising contour marked by an acute accent — and men carries a second tone as well, so the whole name rises twice, like a hopeful question asked at a door. The hanzi 神門 are among the simplest on any channel, easy to pick out at a glance in Chinese writing about sleep or the mind. And like the gates, courtyards, ravines, and seas scattered along the other channels, the metaphor does real work: it marks a place the tradition treats as an opening between depth and surface, not just another landmark.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The licensed record lists eight indications for HT7: cardiac pain, irritability, palpitations with fright, poor memory, insomnia, mania and epilepsy, high blood pressure, and chest and hypochondriac pain. Read as tradition rather than promise, the heart-and-chest cluster comes first. Cardiac pain in classical records usually denotes a deep, blocked sensation behind the breastbone, understood as qi and blood failing to move freely — a category quite distinct from sudden, crushing chest pain, which has belonged to urgent medical care in every era. Chest and hypochondriac pain extends the same idiom outward: the hypochondrium means the flanks of the trunk below the ribs, where classical practice read constraint and stuckness along the routes the channels travel.
The larger share of the list belongs to the spirit. Irrritability — a restless, easily provoked state the old texts linked to disturbance stirring the heart — stands beside palpitations with fright: a thudding, startled awareness of one’s own heartbeat. Poor memory and insomnia carry the same concern further inward, for the tradition treats remembering and sleeping as affairs of a settled shen. Mania and epilepsy strike modern ears strangely, yet classical formularies genuinely grouped grave disturbances of consciousness and conduct under these headings, ever approached alongside many other measures — and nothing in such lists suggests self-care could stand in for that seriousness. One idea runs beneath them all: when the spirit grew unquiet, hands went to the gate.
High blood pressure closes the record and reads plainly as a later entry in an older ledger — the vocabulary is modern even where the point is ancient, and the licensed dataset preserves such layering honestly. As with every indication on this page, the frame stays traditional-use: these are the troubles classical practice once brought to Shenmen, set down for cultural and historical understanding. They are not statements that pressing the point treats disease, and where modern research has touched self-applied pressure at all, reviews suggest effects are modest and context-dependent, with evidence for any single point remaining thin. Hold the tradition lightly, and hold the safety rules firmly.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
With the hollow found by the walkthrough above, settle in: seated, shoulders heavy, palm up and supported so the wrist can soften. Rest the pads of the index and middle fingers — never a fingertip, knuckle, elbow, or tool — over the spot. Begin with contact alone through a few slow breaths, then add small, unhurried circles, letting the skin glide over the tissue beneath rather than grinding against it. Aim for pleasant dullness or mild warmth; anything sharp means lift off and resettle more lightly. A common home rhythm is one to three minutes per side, once or twice daily, matched where possible to long exhales so each circle rides the breath out — then swap hands and give the other wrist its turn.
At every step, quality outweighs duration. Light, patient, regularly repeated touch is the whole craft of self-acupressure; force teaches the body nothing and risks unsettling the nerve bundle nearby. Warm cold hands before starting, because chilled tissue guards itself. Choose a quiet corner rather than a screen, since the practice doubles as a pause for the mind: eyes softened, breath slowed, attention resting on the small patch of wrist beneath the fingers. Many people find evening suits this particular point best — not because outcomes are promised, but because the gesture of winding down belongs naturally to the hour when the day’s gate closes. Others anchor the habit after morning washing; consistency matters more than clock time.
Treat the minutes as a ceremony of attention rather than a treatment session. Across the weeks, notice what genuinely changes: perhaps the wrist feels less guarded, perhaps the breath slows more readily while you press, perhaps nothing shifts except that you spent a few unhurried minutes attending to yourself. Every one of those outcomes fits the honest scope of self-care, and none calls for escalation. If curiosity starts pushing toward harder, longer, deeper pressing to force a result, take that push as today’s signal to stop — gentleness is not the timid version of this practice but its entire substance.
Cautions and Safe Practice
Shenmen arrives with an unusually clean file: the catalogue entry records no cautions at all, and the reason is honest geography. The front of the wrist is tendons, bone, and passages for vessels and nerve — no lung beneath, no organ anywhere near reach of surface pressure, unlike the chest points that command such respect elsewhere in this library. But an empty caution column is not an invitation to force. The ulnar nerve runs right beside this hollow, and firm or prolonged prodding earns exactly the complaint it deserves; hence the standing rules of light touch, short sessions, and immediate relocation if tingling spreads into the little and ring fingers.
The practical rules follow from the terrain. Stay strictly on the surface with finger pads only; skip the point over broken, irritated, or healing skin, and leave it alone while a sprained or inflamed wrist settles. Sharp, electric, or radiating sensation means stop at once and not try again today. Pregnant readers should consult a qualified practitioner before adding any new point practice, and the same counsel goes to anyone living with a diagnosed heart-rhythm condition, taking heart medications, or managing seizures — territories the traditional indications themselves border. Persistent symptoms of any kind belong with a licensed practitioner, not with a longer pressing session.
Above everything stands the shared disclaimer this site prints on every page: the content is educational, acupressure is self-care rather than diagnosis or therapy, and nothing here replaces professional assessment. Seek prompt medical help — not a pressure routine — for chest pain, breathlessness, fainting, palpitations that refuse to settle, thoughts of harming yourself, or any symptom that frightens you; and remember that stubborn sleeplessness or low mood deserves a clinician’s attention just as much as a lingering cough does. The Spirit Gate imagery is lovely, but the safest gift this small hollow offers most people is a few quiet minutes of kindly contact with their own body.
At the little-finger end of the wrist’s front crease, tucked beside the taut cord of a flexor tendon, lies Shenmen — the Spirit Gate. Classical practice called it the doorway where the heart channel’s original qi passes nearest the surface, reaching for it when sleep fled or the mind would not settle. This guide walks you through finding it by touch and pressing it gently and safely.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Shenmen without knowing anatomy terms?
- Use the crease and one tendon as the whole map. Trace the front wrist crease to its little-finger end, then make a soft fist and watch the taut cord stand up on that side of the wrist. Relax, slide your finger onto the cord’s middle-of-the-wrist flank at crease level, and rest where the skin dips into a soft hollow. Those two landmarks — the end of the crease and the flank of the cord — pin the point down as surely as any Latin vocabulary.
- Is pressing Shenmen myself safe?
- Gentle fingertip contact held at the surface is reasonable self-care for healthy adults, and the licensed record notes no cautions for this point. The artery and nerve nearby prefer kindness to force: keep pressure light, shorten sessions if the area grows sore, and move off at once if tingling runs into the little and ring fingers. The stop signals matter more than technique — sharp pain, electric sensation, or spreading numbness all mean finish for the day.
- What did classical practice use Shenmen for?
- The traditional portfolio centres on the spirit: insomnia, poor memory, irritability, palpitations with fright, and grave disturbances such as mania and epilepsy, together with cardiac pain, chest and hypochondriac pain, and the later-added high blood pressure. Classical texts describe the point as the heart channel’s yuan-source station, where original qi gathers near the surface. These are traditional frameworks documented for context — not evidence-backed treatment claims.
- Why call a point a gate?
- Classical teaching pictures each channel’s original qi travelling like water, and casts the yuan-source point as the courtyard where that flow lingers closest to the surface — a threshold between depth and skin, hence gate. The image also explains the point’s historic role: when tradition spoke of a spirit needing steadying, the gate was the natural door to knock upon. It is an elegant, coherent way of organising experience, not a claim about body mechanisms.
- Can acupressure here replace help for poor sleep or anxious moods?
- No. Self-acupressure is a comfort practice, not diagnosis or therapy, and persistent sleeplessness, anxiety, or low mood deserves professional assessment — especially once daily life is affected. Picture the two as neighbours rather than rivals: a nightly minute of quiet self-contact can sit alongside whatever care a clinician recommends, and neither cancels the other. If symptoms escalate or frightening thoughts appear, seek medical help promptly instead of pressing harder.
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, yuan-source theory, and channel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for HT7 Shenmen — 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/ht7/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/ht7/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/ht7/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "HT7",
"name": {
"en": "Shenmen",
"gloss": "Spirit Gate",
"zh-Hant": "神門",
"zh-Hans": "神门"
},
"channel": {
"id": "HT",
"order": 7,
"of": 9
},
"location": {
"text": "On the wrist crease at the little-finger end, in the dip beside the tendon."
},
"for": [
"poor sleep",
"a restless mind",
"forgetfulness"
],
"press": {
"text": "Two finger pads, slow circles, one minute each wrist.",
"seconds": 60
},
"cautions": [],
"source": "Zhenjiu Jiayi Jing, book 3",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/ht7",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}