The Triple Warmer is the meridian that controls our fight, flight, or freeze response. Also called the three burners in Chinese medicine, this is our primal survival system, it fights off illness in our bodies and is also known as our flight or fight response. When it is activated, the body is on high alert.
Keeping the Triple Warmer balanced is especially important because many aspects of our modern way of life are registered as invaders by our Triple Warmer causing it to fight, eg. a traffic jam or an online game.
According to Donna Eden, Author of Energy Medicine, the Triple Warmer is meant to carry the energy of joy. However, it is so busy in its responsibilities to protect us in our hectic world, all its resources go keeping us safe. But TW cannot serve us optimally when it is so out of balance. No matter how stress-filled our lives, it does not serve us for TW to treat everything as a threat.
Having Triple Warmer active for much of the time creates problems by depleting our bodily resources as it pulls energy out of other meridians (except the heart), to keep the body safe.
You know your Triple Warmer is overloaded if you can’t ever relax, even after meditation, or if you generally feel anxious all the time.
We see Triple Warmer in its glory as a carrier of joy at the moment of birth. TW helps the mother contract and push, it helps the baby get into rhythm with the contractions, and it helps keep the baby from going into shock. At death, when TW finally stops trying to fight danger, it brings you totally into the present so you can let go and be without fear as you move to the other side.
Triple Warmer begins at the tip of the ring finger and passes between the knuckles of the ring and pinkie fingers. It then goes between the two bones of the arm and to the shoulder via the tip of the elbow and back of the upper arm. To calm or sedate this meridian, especially in time of overwhelm, panic and hyper-vigilance, we trace it backward (as shown).
If your body has the message that it is safe, TW will be able to express its joyful abilities. When stress comes along, TW will establish a habit of keeping the body “calm, cool, and collected” rather than going in a stress response. In the same way TW conscripts energies from all the other meridians and energy systems, it can send this calming message to them, as well.
