Stay off the groin crease and anywhere you feel a pulse.
箕門 Jimen
“Gate of the Winnowing Basket” · SP11
Foot Taiyin · 11 of 21
Where. On the inner thigh, two hand-widths above Xuehai (SP10), on the line toward the groin.
For. Aching groin, difficult urination, bedwetting.
Press. Light, with palm heel or finger pads on the muscle, one minute each leg.
Caution. Stay off the groin crease and anywhere you feel a pulse.
箕門，在魚腹上越兩筋間，動脈應手按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
Where Jimen Sits on the Inner Thigh
On the soft inner face of the thigh, roughly halfway between the inner knee and the groin, Jimen occupies the line the classical maps draw between two neighbours. Below it sits Xuehai (SP10), the Sea of Blood, just above the inner knee; above it waits Chongmen (SP12), set in the lateral groin. The dataset places the point six cun above Xuehai, along the line joining the two. Read as geography rather than arithmetic: begin just above the inner knee and travel up the thigh’s inner face toward the hip, and six cun lands you on the middle stretch of that face — clear of the knee region below, and deliberately short of the tender fold of the groin above.
A cun, as elsewhere on these pages, is the traditional proportional unit of point-location: lengths taken from the body being measured, not from a ruler. The most familiar working habit treats one thumb-width at the knuckle as about one cun, so six cun above Xuehai comes to roughly six thumb-widths climbed straight up the inner-thigh line. Because bodies differ, the same written distance settles higher or lower on different people; the landmark sequence matters more than any centimetre figure. The point belongs to the line itself — the maps describe it as lying on the connection between Xuehai and Chongmen — so keeping your search anchored to that invisible thread prevents most early confusion.
What lies beneath the fingertips here is honest, sturdy territory: the inner thigh is the home of the adductor group, the long straps of muscle that draw the legs toward one another with every step and stair of daily life. Press straight inward and the fingers meet thick, springy resistance rather than bone. Toward the top of the search line, though, the landscape changes: the groin crease conceals important vessels running close beneath the skin, and the record for the neighbouring point Chongmen itself notes a palpable arterial pulse nearby. Nothing about that asks for alarm — it simply fixes the etiquette of the search. Explore the firm muscle of the mid-thigh; leave the crease itself alone.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Sit upright on a firm chair, feet planted, so the thigh muscles can soften, and work on one side at a time — say the left. First find Xuehai. With the knee slightly bent, look to the inner-upper corner of the kneecap: the dataset describes Xuehai as sitting two cun above the medial end of the patellar base, on the visible bulge of muscle there. Settling a fingertip on that bulge gives you the bottom of your map. From Xuehai, glide upward along the inner face of the thigh, aiming loosely for the groin, and count off about six thumb-widths of travel. Somewhere on that middle stretch your fingertip rests on the line the dataset names. Repeat the whole search with hands swapped, giving the other side equal patience.
Before any deliberate pressure, run a few quiet confirmations. Press straight inward with the pad of one finger: healthy mid-thigh adductor muscle answers with a dense, springy give, quite different from the hard slab of the front-of-thigh quadriceps or the softer back of the thigh. Compare sides with feather-light touches; many people notice a faint, dull awareness at the true spot and little sensation a finger-width away. Check your territory twice over — if you have drifted onto the front of the thigh or slid up into the groin crease, you have left the address entirely.
Two slips account for most failed searches. The first is measuring from the wrong origin: the six cun runs upward from Xuehai, not from the rim of the kneecap, so skipping the first landmark shifts everything. The second is drift — forward onto the quadriceps, backward toward the sitting bones, or too eagerly upward into the crease. Neither mistake is serious; both are resolved by returning to Xuehai and climbing again, slowly, staying honest to the line between the two named neighbours.
Reading the Name: Gate of the Winnowing Basket
Ji 箕 is the winnowing basket — the wide, shallow tray, classically woven of bamboo, in which grain is tossed into the wind so husks and chaff drift away while the good weight falls back. It can also name the dustpan shape. Men 門 needs little translation: a gate, the pivot through which a household admits, releases, and guards. Joined, Jimen reads as the Gate of the Winnowing Basket, and the image has delighted commentators for centuries because the body itself supplies the illustration.
Classical commentators describe the picture: a person seated on the ground with the legs stretched wide apart outlines, with the two thighs, something very like an open winnowing basket — and the point sits at the gate of that basket, on the soft inner sweep where its two walls converge. A second, complementary reading comes from the channel map: here the spleen channel makes its final climb through the limb — SP10 above the knee, SP11 on the mid-thigh, SP12 at the groin, SP13 and its companions already on the lower belly — so the gate also marks the doorway through which the channel leaves the leg for the trunk.
Pinyin renders the name Jīmén. Ji is spoken on the first tone — held high and level, like a steady note — while men rides the second tone, rising through its syllable like a question gathering confidence. The hanzi reward a second glance: ji wears the bamboo radical overhead, announcing its woven origins, while men is one of the oldest pictures in the script, two door-leaves hanging in a frame. Like the gates, courtyards, and storehouses scattered along the channels, the metaphor does real work: a gate is where movement pauses, is sorted, and passes on.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The recorded indications read: swelling and pain of the groin, difficult urination, enuresis, impotence, orchitis, and eczema of the scrotum. Unpacked gently, they sketch the concerns classical practice brought to this stretch of the channel. Swelling and pain of the groin describes ache and puffiness where thigh meets trunk. Difficult urination gathers hesitancy, straining, and the feeling that water will not move freely. Enuresis is involuntary passing of urine, including night-time wetting. Impotence, orchitis — inflammation within the testicle — and eczema of the scrotum collect male reproductive and skin complaints under the vocabulary of their era. These are the dataset’s own headings, restated with traditional-use framing: they tell us what classical practice reached for, not what pressing the point achieves.
The traditional logic behind such a portfolio follows two threads. First, water: in the traditional frame the spleen system oversees transformation and transportation, including the movement of fluids, and complaints of pooling or obstructed water sat naturally within its reach. Second, the gate: a point named for a doorway, stationed where the channel crosses from leg to trunk beside the body’s lower passages, was an obvious gathering place for disorders of those passages. Classical texts describe reasoning of exactly this shape — imagery, channel course, and organ duty folded together — rather than anything resembling a modern trial.
It bears saying plainly what this list is and is not. These intimate conditions deserve assessment by a qualified clinician, and several — sudden groin or testicular pain, inability to pass urine — belong among the situations where prompt medical care outranks any self-care routine. The traditional record documents how earlier generations organised such problems, offered here for cultural understanding. Where modern research touches self-applied pressure at all, reviews suggest effects are modest and context-dependent, and evidence for any single point remains thin.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
Settle somewhere private and comfortable: reclining with a pillow under the knees, or seated cross-legged on a bed, either lets the inner thigh relax enough to be worked kindly. Warm your hands first. Using the heel of the palm or the padded flats of two or three fingertips, rest on the located spot and begin with contact alone, then small, slow circles that carry the skin over the muscle beneath. Aim for a pleasant, spreading heaviness — warmth arriving, tension thinning — never sharpness. A comfortable home rhythm is one to three minutes per side, once or twice daily, matched to long, unhurried exhales. Finish by resting a flat palm over the area for a few breaths, then repeat symmetrically on the other side.
The inner thigh rewards breadth and patience over force. These muscles work constantly — every step, every stair, every hour seated with legs crossed — and they release to broad, warm, unhurried touch far more readily than to pointed digging. Choose a quiet corner rather than a screen, and let the session double as a pause: feel the breath move while the hand stays kind. People who keep the habit usually attach it to something already in the day — after a shower, before sleep — because regularity, not intensity, is what self-care traditions actually ask. Treat it as tending a hard-working muscle, not treating a condition, and the practice stays honest and sustainable.
Held that way, a few minutes at Jimen become a small ceremony of attention: noticing a neglected patch of the body, thanking muscles that rarely get thanked, letting the day’s bracing loosen. Perhaps the thigh feels less tight afterward; perhaps breathing feels easier while you press; perhaps nothing measurable changes except that you spent three minutes inside your own care. All of that sits squarely within what self-acupressure honestly offers. What sits outside it is escalation — pressing harder or longer to force a result. When curiosity leans that way, return to gentleness, or close the session for today.
Cautions and Safe Practice
The licensed record for Jimen carries no specific caution entry, and this page repeats that fact plainly rather than inventing drama. Still, the universal rules hold everywhere, and the local geography deserves ordinary respect. The upper end of the search line climbs toward the groin crease, where vessels run close beneath the skin — the record for the neighbouring point Chongmen itself notes a palpable arterial pulse in that neighbourhood. The etiquette follows from the map: keep every touch light, keep it on the muscle bulk of the mid-thigh, and leave the crease and anything that pulses to trained hands.
Practical rules for home practice: use finger pads or palm heel, never elbows, knuckles, or tools; skip the area over broken, irritated, or infected skin; set the practice aside entirely during feverish illness; and wait until a clinician has cleared ordinary activity after any recent thigh or groin injury or surgery. Stop at once on sharp, electric, or radiating sensation, and do not retry that day. Pregnant readers should consult a qualified practitioner before adding any new point practice, and anyone managing kidney, bladder, or prostate conditions should treat this page as background reading rather than guidance.
And the wider rule stands over everything. Seek prompt medical care — not a pressure routine — for difficulty passing urine, blood in the urine, sudden or severe groin or testicular pain, swelling accompanied by fever, a child whose bedwetting persists past the age when assessment is advised, or any symptom that lasts beyond a couple of weeks or frightens you. Persistent complaints belong with a licensed practitioner, Western or East Asian medical as suits the matter. This page is educational only. The winnowing basket is a lovely image; the safest harvest it offers most readers is a calmer, better-known pair of inner thighs.
Jimen, the Gate of the Winnowing Basket, lies midway up the soft inner face of the thigh, where the spleen channel climbs from the inner knee toward the groin. Classical practice reached for it in groin swelling and pain, difficult urination, and other complaints of the lower passages. This guide covers finding it by touch, reading its name, and pressing it gently at home.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Jimen without knowing anything about cun?
- Use the knee as your whole map. Bend it slightly, settle a finger on the muscle bulge about two thumb-widths above the inner-upper corner of the kneecap — that is Xuehai — then walk up the inner face of the thigh about six thumb-widths, aiming loosely for the groin. The middle stretch of that climb, on the soft inner face and answering your finger with firm springy muscle, is the place. Cun measurements simply encode the same landmark walk in proportional language.
- Is pressing Jimen myself actually safe?
- Gentle fingertip pressure held on the muscle of the mid inner thigh is generally reasonable self-care for healthy adults, and the licensed record lists no specific caution for this point. Two boundaries keep it that way: stay on the mid-thigh muscle rather than the groin crease, where vessels run near the surface, and keep pressure at pleasant-dull level rather than anything sharp. Sharp, electric, or radiating sensation means finish immediately and try again another day.
- What did classical practice use Jimen for?
- The traditional record lists swelling and pain of the groin, difficult urination, enuresis, impotence, orchitis, and eczema of the scrotum. Classical reasoning tied the choice to water movement, to the gate imagery carried in the name, and to the channel’s crossing from leg to trunk at this level. Those are traditional frameworks for understanding the body, documented for cultural context — not evidence-backed treatment claims.
- Why is a thigh point linked with urinary complaints?
- Through the channel map and the name together. Classical theory draws the spleen channel ascending the inner leg toward the trunk, and this stretch is its last passage through the limb, beside the body’s lower openings; a point styled a gate there was read as a handle on the passages themselves. Layer on the traditional teaching that the spleen system transports fluids, and the old portfolio looks coherent inside its own era’s logic — an explanation of tradition, not a claim of effect.
- Can acupressure at Jimen replace seeing a doctor about urinary trouble?
- No. Difficulty or pain when passing urine, blood in the urine, sudden groin or testicular pain, and persistent changes all need professional assessment promptly, whatever else you choose to do at home. Self-acupressure belongs to comfort and daily maintenance; diagnosis and treatment live elsewhere entirely. Hold both in their proper places and neither displaces 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, winnowing-basket imagery, and channel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for SP11 Jimen — location, 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/sp11/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/sp11/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/sp11/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "SP11",
"name": {
"en": "Jimen",
"gloss": "Gate of the Winnowing Basket",
"zh-Hant": "箕門",
"zh-Hans": "箕门"
},
"channel": {
"id": "SP",
"order": 11,
"of": 21
},
"location": {
"text": "On the inner thigh, two hand-widths above Xuehai (SP10), on the line toward the groin."
},
"for": [
"aching groin",
"difficult urination",
"bedwetting"
],
"press": {
"text": "Light, with palm heel or finger pads on the muscle, one minute each leg.",
"seconds": 60,
"sides": "both"
},
"cautions": [
"Stay off the groin crease and anywhere you feel a pulse."
],
"source": "Zhenjiu Jiayi Jing, book 3",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/sp11",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}