Not on the belly in pregnancy.
關門 Guanmen
“Pass Gate” · ST22
Foot Yangming · 22 of 45
Where. On the belly, four finger-widths above the navel and three finger-widths out from the midline.
For. Bloating, belly ache, loose stools.
Press. Gentle flat-finger pressure, about a minute each side, not after a big meal.
Caution. Not on the belly in pregnancy.
關門，在梁門下，太乙上按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
Where Guanmen Stands on the Upper Abdomen
Guanmen occupies a quiet stretch of the upper abdominal wall. The licensed dataset places it three cun above the centre of the umbilicus and two cun lateral to the anterior midline — the vertical line running down the centre front of the trunk, through the navel itself. A cun is the traditional proportional measure of point location, taken from the person rather than from a ruler; the width of your own thumb at its base is the working approximation. Translated into landmarks: find the centre of the navel, walk straight up the abdomen about three thumb-widths, then step sideways two more. On most bodies that lands on the soft but resilient upper belly, over the firm strap of muscle running vertically beside the midline or just inside its border.
The row confirms the address. One cun higher on the same lateral line stands Liangmen (ST21), four cun above the navel; one cun lower sits Taiyi (ST23), two cun above it. This family marches up and down in a neat file parallel to the midline, each station a single thumb-width from its neighbours, so once one member is found the rest follow by counting. Classical teaching draws the stomach channel beginning beside the nose, sweeping across the face and down through throat and chest before crossing this stretch of abdomen on its way to the front of the thigh and the second toe — Guanmen stands among the stations of that long descent through digestive country.
What lies under the fingertips shapes how the point should be treated. Below the skin come layers of abdominal muscle and connective tissue, and beyond them the organs of digestion themselves — there is no ribcage here to interpose, as there is on the chest. Nothing about that argues against gentle surface contact for healthy adults; it simply defines the register. Fingertip work at this address stays in skin and superficial muscle, unhurried and light, and treats the deeper territory as somewhere visited by trained hands only. Both sides of the body carry the point symmetrically, so whichever side you search, the mirror spot waits quietly on the other.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Set up comfortably before searching: lie on your back with knees supported by a cushion so the abdominal wall goes soft, or sit well back in a chair with the belly released. Warm the hands first — chilled fingers meet guarded muscle. Rest the pads of the index and middle fingers just above the navel, find its centre, and walk straight up the midline three of your own thumb-widths, keeping the count honest by placing thumbs edge to edge. From that height, slide sideways two further thumb-widths, away from the midline. Let the fingertips settle where a gentle fullness meets them and simply breathe there for a few seconds before deciding anything.
A few quiet checks settle placement. Compare sides: the matching spot waits symmetrically on the far side of the midline, and most people notice a faint dull awareness at the true point while the skin half a width away stays silent. Watch the breath move the wall under still fingertips — the belly rises on inhalation and settles on exhalation, and the point rides along. Re-check the geometry too: the search lane runs parallel to the midline throughout, and the landing place should feel like part of the soft slope between navel and lower ribs without touching bone. Height comes from counted thumb-widths, never from guesswork.
Three slips account for most misses. The first is slanting: the upward count must stay vertical, because even a slight diagonal carries the finger off the true lane before the sideways step ever begins. The second is loose measuring — thumbs overlapping or gapped turn three counts into two-and-a-bit; edge-to-edge placement keeps the arithmetic honest. The third is hurrying onto the ribcage in eagerness to reach the upper belly; the point belongs to the soft wall below the costal margin, not to bone. When in doubt, return to the navel, breathe out slowly, and make the short journey once again.
Reading the Name: Pass Gate
The name is a small drama of architecture. Guan 關 means to close or shut — the character pictures a bolt slid across a pair of door leaves — and by extension names a pass, the fortified gate where a road threads through mountains. Men 門 means simply door or gate, drawn since antiquity as two hinged panels. Joined, Guanmen reads naturally as the pass gate, and quite literally as shutting the door. Pinyin renders it Guānmén: guan carried on a first tone, held flat and high; men on the second tone, rising like a question finding its answer. The hanzi pair 關門 remains one of the most legible names in the whole catalogue — anyone who has ever closed a door already understands it.
Why gate imagery on the belly? Traditional teaching imagined the digestive tract as a sequence of named gates and passes — stations that receive, hold, and release in their proper season — and commentators placed Guanmen amid the upper reaches of that passage, level with the stretch where the channel crosses from chest-country into the belly proper. Read this way, the name describes an office rather than an anatomy lesson: a checkpoint regulating what moves onward. The recorded indications then follow almost poetically. When the gate jams, the region above fills (distension); the traffic below grows unruly (rumbling, loose stools); and appetite — the gatekeeper’s own welcome — fades.
Guan is a favourite character of point-naming, and the wider map proves it. Neiguan, the Inner Pass, watches from the inner forearm; Waiguan, the Outer Pass, answers it from the outer side; and this channel keeps its own Xiaguan, the Lower Pass, down at the jaw. Each guards a threshold of one kind or another, which is exactly how the tradition thought of points — as functionaries of passage. A name like Guanmen therefore doubles as a job description. It tells the reader what generations of practitioners listened for at this station: movement, timing, and the sound of a gate swinging freely.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The recorded indications read: abdominal distension and pain, borborygmus, diarrhoea, and anorexia. Framed as tradition rather than promise, the list opens with distension — the old records’ word for a belly that feels swollen tight, full, or oppressed, understood as qi stalling in the middle region instead of moving freely through. The pain paired with it belongs to the same family: usually a dull, blocked, or colicky discomfort rather than sudden severe agony, which classical physicians, like modern ones, set apart as something requiring urgent measures of its own.
Borborygmus is the record’s dignified word for a familiar embarrassment: the audible gurgling and rumbling of intestines at work. Tradition heard those sounds as water and food churning where smooth transit had faltered — turbulence before a gate that opens irregularly. Diarrhoea and anorexia complete the picture, and classical reasoning binds them together: the stomach was said to govern reception, the willingness to take food in, while its partner organ managed transport onward. When the middle region’s gate worked sluggishly, reception dimmed — hence poor appetite — and what did pass through arrived loose and hurried. One disorder of passage, in this reading, wearing four faces.
All of this is the traditional record speaking, preserved for cultural and historical understanding. These are frameworks classical practice used to organise observation, not claims that pressing the point relieves disease; nothing here replaces assessment by a qualified clinician. Where modern research touches self-applied pressure at all, reviews suggest effects are modest and context-dependent, and evidence attached to any single point remains thin. And the oldest distinction in the records still governs: symptoms that are severe, persistent, or frightening belong promptly with professional care, never with a longer pressing session.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
With the point located, settle into the practice itself. Lying down suits this address best: knees supported, hands warm, shoulders heavy. Rest the pads of two or three fingers on the spot and give yourself several breaths of plain contact before adding anything. Then begin small slow circles, letting the skin travel gently over the tissue beneath — the motion belongs to the fingertip, not to pressure driving inward. Sensation should read as pleasant warmth or a mild spreading dullness, never soreness. One to three unhurried minutes per side is plenty, and many people match the circles to the exhale so each revolution rides the breath out. Finish one side completely, then repeat on the other, keeping the sessions symmetrical.
Timing and manners matter more than force here. Leave a comfortable interval after a large meal — practising on an uncomfortably full stomach serves nobody — and set the session aside entirely during any acute digestive upset that demands rest or medical attention. Use finger pads only: no knuckles, elbows, or devices, no kneading the belly like dough, and no holding the breath, since breath-holding tenses exactly the wall you mean to reassure. Readers who keep a routine tend to anchor it after breakfast or before the evening wind-down, and consistency across weeks is what self-care traditions actually reward. Intensity was never the currency here.
Keep the honest scope in view. This is a few minutes of kind attention to your own middle, a ceremony of care rather than a treatment course. Across a fortnight of gentle practice you may notice the area feels less guarded, that mealtimes feel calmer, or nothing measurable at all — every one of those outcomes fits what self-acupressure genuinely offers. What does not fit is escalation: pressing harder, longer, or deeper to compel a result. The name advises the opposite posture. A gate responds to patience and regular passage, not to someone leaning on it — and so, the tradition suggests, does the belly.
Cautions and Safe Practice
Guanmen arrives with an empty caution shelf: the licensed dataset records no contraindications for it, unlike points high on the chest or at the front of the neck whose warnings fill whole entries. Geography explains the difference — this is soft abdominal wall, far from lungs and great vessels, over tissue that yields kindly to light touch. But an empty caution field is a statement about the record, not an invitation to force. The organs of digestion lie deeper than any self-care contact needs to reach, and the rules that keep surface practice safe are the same everywhere: gentleness, brevity, and immediate obedience to discomfort.
Translated into household rules: finger pads only, pressure at the level of pleasant dullness, and nothing at all over broken or irritated skin, rashes, scars, hernias, or any lump you cannot account for. Skip the practice entirely during feverish illness or acute bouts of vomiting or diarrhoea, and after recent abdominal surgery until a clinician clears ordinary activity. Pregnant readers should not begin abdominal point work without guidance from a qualified practitioner — the general pregnancy caution carries extra weight when the point itself sits on the belly. Sharp, electric, or radiating sensation means stop at once and leave the point alone for the day.
Above the specifics stands the universal rule: this page is educational, acupressure is self-care, and neither diagnoses nor treats anything. Because the traditional indications concern the abdomen, the red flags deserve saying concretely: belly pain that is severe, worsening, or accompanied by fever; blood in the stool or vomit; diarrhoea lasting beyond a couple of days; vomiting that will not settle; unexplained weight loss — each calls for prompt medical assessment rather than longer pressing. Persistent symptoms belong with a licensed practitioner, medical or East Asian medical as suits the complaint. Meet the pass gate lightly, and meet anything that will not settle professionally.
Guanmen — the Pass Gate — stands on the upper abdomen, three cun above the navel and two lateral to the midline, where the stomach channel makes its long descent toward the second toe. Classical practice reached for it when the belly felt bloated and full, rumbled audibly, or loosened the stools. This guide walks through finding it by touch and pressing it gently.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Guanmen without knowing anything about cun?
- Let the navel be the entire map. Lie back, find its centre, and walk straight up the abdomen three of your own thumb-widths, keeping the thumbs edge to edge as you count. Then step sideways two more thumb-widths, away from the midline, and let the fingertips settle on the soft upper wall. Cun measurements write the same landmark walk in proportional language; your thumb is the only ruler required.
- Is pressing Guanmen myself actually safe?
- For healthy adults, light fingertip contact at this site is among the gentler forms of self-acupressure: the licensed records carry no caution entry for the point, and the layers engaged are skin and superficial abdominal muscle. Respect the ordinary disciplines anyway — nothing on an uncomfortably full stomach, over broken skin, or during acute illness, none during pregnancy without practitioner guidance, and an immediate stop on sharp or radiating sensation.
- What did classical practice use Guanmen for?
- The traditional record lists abdominal distension and pain, borborygmus — the rumbling of active intestines — diarrhoea, and poor appetite. Classical reasoning filed these together as disorders of passage in the middle region, fitting neatly with a name that pictures a gate. Those are traditional frameworks for understanding the body, documented for context — not evidence-backed treatment claims.
- Why does the stomach channel run across the belly at all?
- Classical channel theory draws the stomach pathway starting beside the nose, descending past the throat and chest, then crossing the abdomen on its way down the front of the leg to end at the second toe. The abdominal stations line the exact road where the tradition located digestion itself, which is why so many carry digestive portfolios. Guanmen stands in the upper stretch of that file, three cun above the navel.
- My belly has been bloated and unsettled for days — should I press Guanmen?
- Sort out whether the story needs a clinician first. Bloating accompanied by severe or worsening pain, fever, vomiting, blood, or lasting beyond a few days deserves prompt assessment, and self-pressure should wait until that happens. If ordinary overfullness and sluggish comfort is the whole story, gentle practice may sit alongside good habits as a comfort measure — a way of paying attention, not a remedy — and anything that persists still belongs with a licensed practitioner.
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 and channel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for ST22 Guanmen — location and action 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/st22/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/st22/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/st22/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "ST22",
"name": {
"en": "Guanmen",
"gloss": "Pass Gate",
"zh-Hant": "關門",
"zh-Hans": "关门"
},
"channel": {
"id": "ST",
"order": 22,
"of": 45
},
"location": {
"text": "On the belly, four finger-widths above the navel and three finger-widths out from the midline."
},
"for": [
"bloating",
"belly ache",
"loose stools"
],
"press": {
"text": "Gentle flat-finger pressure, about a minute each side, not after a big meal.",
"seconds": 60,
"sides": "both"
},
"cautions": [
"Not on the belly in pregnancy."
],
"source": "Zhenjiu Jiayi Jing, book 3",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/st22",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}