In pregnancy or with circulation problems, ask a practitioner first.
交信 Jiaoxin
“Crossing and Trust” · KI8
Foot Shaoyin · 8 of 27 · xi-cleft of the yin qiao vessel
Where. Three finger-widths above the inner ankle, just behind the inner edge of the shin bone.
For. Painful periods; belly ache; inner-knee pain.
Press. Lighter than most: fingertip touch, about a minute each leg.
Caution. In pregnancy or with circulation problems, ask a practitioner first.
交信，在足內踝上二寸，少陰前，太陰後，筋骨間按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
Where Jiaoxin Sits on the Inner Calf
The dataset places Jiaoxin on the inner aspect of the lower leg, two cun directly above Taixi (KI3), half a cun in front of Fuliu (KI7), behind the medial border of the tibia. Unpacked step by step: Taixi is the familiar ankle hollow found between the tip of the inner ankle bone and the Achilles tendon; measuring upward means toward the knee; and two cun brings you to the same height as Fuliu, which itself sits two cun above Taixi just in front of the Achilles tendon. Jiaoxin shares Fuliu’s height but shifts half a thumb-width forward — and forward here means toward the front of the body, which on the inner calf is the direction of the shinbone. A cun, as always in this system, is the traditional proportional unit taken from the person being examined, roughly a thumb-width, so exact distances flex a little from body to body.
Geographically, then, the point lives inside a narrow corridor: the strip of tissue running between the Achilles tendon behind and the shinbone in front. All three landmarks — tendon, point, bone edge — queue along one short line, which makes triangulation unusually easy once you have seen it. What lies beneath the skin deserves gentler handling than most limb points. The corridor is filled with the deep muscle layer of the calf, and through it travel the vessels and nerves that serve the foot; the tibia’s inner edge, meanwhile, is sharply defined under the fingertip. None of this argues against touching the area — it argues for feather-light exploration rather than determined digging, and for letting a dull, spreading awareness announce the point instead of forcing one.
Company along the channel helps confirm the address. Below sits Taixi at the ankle; level behind waits Fuliu; continuing up the same groove, the line passes Zhubin (KI9) near the lower border of the calf belly and arrives at Yingu (KI10) at the inner end of the knee crease. The kidney channel, as the site’s own meridian guide describes, climbs from the sole of the foot up the inner leg toward the chest, and this stretch of it runs a remarkably straight race behind the tibia. Knowing the neighbors turns a lonely guess into a cross-check: if the ankle hollow is beneath your starting finger and the groove has stayed under your hand throughout, you are on the right road, and a fixed distance of travel brings you home. Losing track mid-search simply means returning to the ankle hollow and starting again.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Sit on a firm chair and rest your right ankle across your left knee, or plant the foot flat with the knee falling open to the side — either way the inner leg should face you, relaxed. With the free hand, find the bony prominence of the inner ankle and slide into the hollow just behind its tip, in front of the strong cord of the Achilles tendon: that hollow is Taixi. Now walk two thumb-widths straight up the leg, toward the knee, keeping your fingertip in the soft groove between tendon and bone. At that height you can feel a springy strip of tissue just in front of the tendon cord — that neighborhood belongs to Fuliu. From it, glide forward half a thumb-width, toward the shin, until your pad comes to rest just behind the tibia’s crisp inner border. Press gently there and search for the spot that answers with quiet, spreading awareness: this is the location the dataset describes. Swap hands and repeat on the other leg.
A few small checks settle the placement. Flex and point your foot a few times: the tissue under a correctly placed fingertip firms and softens with the movement, confirming you sit on muscle rather than directly on bare bone. Compare sides — most people find a mirrored sensitivity on the other calf, though one side often speaks more clearly than the other. Take a slow breath while resting lightly on the spot and notice whether the faint, dull quality deepens; genuine point sensation tends to bloom gradually, where ordinary pressure simply feels like pressure. If everything stays flat and silent, move a finger-width in any direction and ask again, patiently. Point-hunting rewards ten minutes of curiosity far more than thirty seconds of force.
Three slips account for most misses. The first is landing too far forward, onto the bone itself, which answers with a sharp, unhelpful edge; ease backward into the groove. The second is drifting too far back, onto the Achilles tendon, which announces itself as a hard, cordlike ridge; glide forward again. The third is measuring from the wrong end — working down from the knee instead of up from the ankle — which lands somewhere else entirely on a long leg. When doubt wins, return to the ankle hollow, find Taixi once more, and measure the whole chain again slowly, one landmark at a time.
Reading the Name: Crossing and Trust
The two characters sketch the point’s character in miniature. Jiao 交 carries the sense of crossing, meeting, joining — and also of handing something over, the exchange made when two roads or two parties connect. Xin 信 means trust, faithfulness, sincerity, and by extension a message or the reliable delivery of one. Read together, Jiaoxin invites the image of a trustworthy crossing: a meeting place where things change hands dependably. Classical commentators have connected the crossing in the name to the point’s official role — Jiaoxin serves as the xi-cleft point of the yin qiao vessel, and the traditional reading is that the qi of that vessel gathers here, at a spot where its pathway keeps company with the kidney channel’s own course along the inner leg.
The xi-cleft category deserves a word, because it does real work in the name story. In traditional teaching, every channel and several of the extraordinary vessels keep one such point: a place where their qi is said to gather and pool most deeply, like water collecting in a narrow bend. Classical practice associated these gathering places with matters that arrive suddenly or press urgently, and reached for them accordingly within its own framework of care. The yin qiao vessel, one of the eight extraordinary vessels of classical physiology, is described climbing from the ankle region up the inner leg toward the trunk — the very territory this point oversees as its cleft. Whether one takes the physiology literally or reads it as poetry, the internal logic hangs together: the name names the job.
Pinyin renders the name Jiāoxìn, and the tones are worth getting right. Jiao carries the first tone — high, level, held steady, like a clear sustained note; xin falls with the fourth tone, firm and decisive, a spoken full stop. The hanzi pair 交信 uses only a handful of strokes each and rewards a glance: crossing plus trust. Like so many points named for landscape and architecture — gates, valleys, streams, crossings — the metaphor quietly instructs: stand where the paths meet, be patient, let the exchange happen. It is a fitting temperament for a point approached, in this guide at least, with nothing more than a resting fingertip.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The recorded indication list is long and strikingly varied: irregular menstruation, dysmenorrhea — painful periods — uterine bleeding, abdominal pain, diarrhea, difficult urination, edema, swelling and pain of the testes, hernia, and pain of the inner knee, thigh, or popliteal region behind the knee. The opening cluster stands out: three entries concerning women’s cycles, gathered on a point halfway up a calf. In the traditional reading this is no accident, and the rest of the list arranges itself around two themes — the pelvic basin and water — that the classical system associated with this stretch of the kidney channel and with the vessel whose cleft point it hosts.
Why would a leg point enter discussions of menstrual health at all? The classical answer runs through the yin qiao vessel. Traditional texts describe it rising from the ankle region along the inner leg toward the trunk and the pelvic basin, and its xi-cleft — the deep-pool gathering place discussed above — was understood to sit exactly here. Within that framework, disturbances of the cycle belonged to the territory the vessel traversed, so its cleft point appeared in classical discussions of irregular menstruation, painful periods, and uterine bleeding. The water-themed entries follow the kidney channel’s own associations: in five-phase thinking the kidney belongs to water and governs fluid transformations, which is why difficult urination and edema appear alongside. Abdominal pain and diarrhea were read through the channel’s climb toward the abdomen, and the remaining entries — testicular swelling, hernia, and pain along the inner knee, thigh, and popliteal hollow — map neatly onto discomfort arising anywhere along the route the channel travels.
It bears repeating plainly: these are the traditional uses recorded in a licensed dataset and described by classical literature, offered here for cultural and historical understanding. They are not claims that pressing this point treats any condition, and nothing in this guide replaces assessment by a qualified clinician. Where modern research has touched self-applied pressure at all, reviews suggest any effects are modest and heavily context-dependent, and evidence tied to any single point remains thin. Menstrual health especially deserves that candor: cycles respond to sleep, stress, nutrition, and underlying medical factors that no pressure routine addresses. Hold the tradition lightly, hold the safety rules firmly, and bring anything persistent to a professional.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
With the point located by the walkthrough above, settle in: seated, the leg supported, the calf free of tight clothing. Curl your index and middle fingers together and rest the pads — never the tips — on the spot behind the tibia’s inner border. Begin with simple contact for a few slow breaths, then add small, unhurried circles, letting the skin glide over the tissue beneath. Aim for the pleasant register of dull warmth or faint, spreading soreness; the moment anything sharp appears, lighten or reposition. 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. Finish by swapping hands and giving the other calf the same measured attention, keeping the sessions symmetrical.
Two adjustments set this point apart from friendlier limb locations. First, use less force than instinct suggests: the corridor behind the tibia carries vessels and nerves bound for the foot, and they ask for courtesy, not compression — think of the difference between leaning on a door and leaning on a bookshelf of glassware. Second, favor patience over depth; because the point hides in a groove between two confident structures, beginners tend to push harder hoping to find something, when what actually helps is slowing down until the dull, blooming quality surfaces. Warm your hands first if they run cold, choose a quiet corner over a screen, and consider anchoring the practice to an existing habit — morning coffee, an evening wind-down — since regularity, not intensity, is what self-care traditions actually reward.
Treat those few minutes as a small ceremony of attention rather than a treatment session. Across weeks you might notice the area feeling less guarded, a pleasant heaviness lingering after you finish, or simply the rare satisfaction of having spent ninety seconds looking after your own legs. 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 the practice never promised. When curiosity pulls that way, return to gentleness, or set the practice down for the day and let the calf rest.
Cautions and Safe Practice
Jiaoxin arrives with a notably quiet safety file: the licensed dataset records no specific caution entry for this point, and this module’s echo of the catalogue reflects that — an empty list, faithfully reproduced. Quiet is not the same as careless, though. The groove this point occupies conducts vessels and nerves toward the foot, and the tibial edge beside it is unforgiving under misplaced force. Professional texts discuss this region in the vocabulary of trained technique, which lies wholly outside this page’s scope; at home, the entire risk conversation collapses into one sentence — stay light, stay superficial, and let the fingertips do no more than rest and circle.
For everyday self-care, the practical rules are few and easy to keep. Stop at once on any sharp, electric, or radiating sensation, and do not retry that day. Skip the point during a feverish illness, over broken, irritated, or swollen skin, and over any area of known vein trouble until a clinician has looked at it. Never press while holding your breath, never work through pain, and never substitute tools — massage gadgets, knuckles, elbows — for patient finger pads. Pregnant readers should consult a qualified practitioner before adding any new point practice to their routine, and anyone managing a chronic condition, particularly one affecting circulation or clotting, does well to ask their clinician the same question first. These are the standing courtesies of self-care generally, applied with a little extra attention because of where this point lives.
And the wider rule stands over everything: this page is educational, and acupressure is self-care — not diagnosis, not therapy. Seek prompt medical assessment, rather than a longer pressure routine, for severe or worsening pelvic pain, unusually heavy bleeding, bleeding between periods or after menopause, any possibility of pregnancy, or digestive and urinary changes that persist beyond a couple of weeks. Persistent symptoms belong with a licensed practitioner, whether in conventional medicine or East Asian medicine as suits the complaint. The old image of a trustworthy crossing is charming, but its best modern translation is simple: know your own body reliably enough to recognise when it needs someone better qualified than a fingertip.
Jiaoxin, Crossing Trust, rests high on the inner calf, level with its neighbor Fuliu yet a half thumb-width closer to the shinbone. Classical practice reached for it in discussions of irregular menstruation, painful periods, and uterine bleeding. This guide walks you to the spot by touch and shows how to press it gently at home.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Jiaoxin if the cun system confuses me?
- Use the ankle as your whole map. Find the hollow behind the tip of the inner ankle bone — Taixi — then walk two thumb-widths straight up the groove toward the knee, staying between the Achilles tendon and the bone. At that height, glide forward another half thumb-width toward the shin and settle just behind the tibia’s inner border. That chain of landmarks is the cun measurement translated into steps your hands already know.
- Is pressing Jiaoxin myself actually safe?
- Gentle fingertip pressure held on the surface is reasonable self-care for healthy adults, and the licensed records note no specific caution entry for this point. The local anatomy asks for a lighter hand than average, since vessels and nerves travel through the same groove, so keep pressure superficial and pleasant. Sharp, electric, or radiating sensation means stop immediately and try again another day, if at all.
- What did classical practice use Jiaoxin for?
- The traditional record lists irregular menstruation, painful periods, uterine bleeding, abdominal pain, diarrhea, difficult urination, edema, swelling and pain of the testes, hernia, and pain of the inner knee, thigh, or popliteal region. Classical texts describe it as the xi-cleft of the yin qiao vessel, a gathering pool of that vessel’s qi — the framework behind its historic association with pelvic and water-related complaints. Those are traditional lenses for understanding the body, offered for context, not evidence-backed treatment claims.
- Why does a point linked to period health live on the calf?
- Because in classical cartography the territory matters more than the distance. The yin qiao vessel is traditionally drawn ascending from the ankle along the inner leg toward the trunk and pelvic basin, and the kidney channel climbs the same inner corridor on its way up the body. A cleft point of that vessel therefore sat, in the traditional imagination, at a listening post for everything the pathway passed — including the pelvic organs. It is anatomical reasoning from a pre-modern map: internally consistent, historically fascinating, and not a claim about physical cause and effect.
- Can pressing Jiaoxin regulate my menstrual cycle?
- No honest source promises that. Cycles are steered by sleep, stress, nutrition, hormones, and sometimes underlying medical conditions — factors no pressure routine reaches. Treat gentle acupressure as a comfort ritual that may help you slow down and pay attention to your body, and treat anything unusual — sudden irregularity, heavy bleeding, bleeding between periods, severe pain — as information for a clinician, not a problem for a fingertip. Think of daily self-care downstairs and clinical medicine upstairs: different floors, neither a substitute for 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, xi-cleft theory, and extraordinary-vessel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for KI8 Jiaoxin — location, point class, actions, and indication 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/ki8/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/ki8/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/ki8/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "KI8",
"name": {
"en": "Jiaoxin",
"gloss": "Crossing and Trust",
"zh-Hant": "交信",
"zh-Hans": "交信"
},
"channel": {
"id": "KI",
"order": 8,
"of": 27
},
"location": {
"text": "Three finger-widths above the inner ankle, just behind the inner edge of the shin bone."
},
"for": [
"painful periods",
"belly ache",
"inner-knee pain"
],
"press": {
"text": "Lighter than most: fingertip touch, about a minute each leg.",
"seconds": 60,
"sides": "both"
},
"cautions": [
"In pregnancy or with circulation problems, ask a practitioner first."
],
"source": "Zhenjiu Jiayi Jing, book 3",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/ki8",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}