That Smell Again: TikTok's New "Moxa" Craze, My Mom Has Been Doing It for Thirty Years

This afternoon I was scrolling TikTok and came across a blonde girl lifting her shirt for the camera. Next to her navel, little black cylinders were burning, smoke curling up. She called it "moxibustion" — an ancient therapy from China that was fixing her "cold uterus."

Tens of thousands of comments. "Three sessions and my period pain is really lighter." "What is this magic." "Please do a tutorial."

I stared at the screen for a long time. Not because I was surprised foreigners found moxibustion. It was the smell — as if it drifted out of the screen. Mugwort burning. A little acrid, a little warm, and somehow, after a while, comforting.

My mom has been doing this for thirty years.

One

When I was a kid, I hated that smell the most.

My mom's body runs cold. Every winter her hands and feet were like ice; a whole night under the blanket couldn't warm them. My grandmother mailed her bundles of dried mugwort from the countryside — yellow-green, dried through, crumbling into floss at a pinch. Every few days my mom would light a stick, and the curtains, the sofa, my schoolbag — everything in the room absorbed that smell.

I found it suffocating. When classmates came over, I'd open the windows for half an hour first, trying to air it all out before letting anyone in.

My mom never argued. She just did her moxibustion. Afterwards she would drink a cup of warm water and say to me: "You can't stand the smell because you're still young."

I remembered that line for years. Not because it held some great truth, but because of how calm she was when she said it — as if she knew that one day I would smell the goodness in it myself.

Two

The temperature dropped a few days ago. While putting away the electric fan, I suddenly wanted to smell mugwort.

When people are exhausted, they start missing specific, old things. Not big principles. A smell. A gesture. Someone who actually boiled the hot water behind the words "drink more water."

I video-called her and asked if she still had moxa sticks. She laughed the moment she heard: "You finally asked." Then she turned the camera to show me her cabinet — boxes of moxa sticks stacked neatly, and a copper moxibustion box I'd bought online at random. I never expected she was still using it.

She taught me through the screen. Zusanli is three cun below the knee. I couldn't find it by pressing, so she had me lay my hand on my knee to measure. "Start with Yongquan, the sole of your foot," she said. "You stay up late. The heat is all stuck in your upper body — bring it down."

Suddenly I realized: when my mom talks about this, her tone is exactly like those TikTok influencers — certain, warm, eager to share. Except her "school" came from my grandmother, and my grandmother from someone earlier. This lineage never broke. It just moved slowly, quietly, for two thousand years — and then one day it exploded on the other side of the planet.

Three

So what is moxibustion, really?

I looked it up properly later. Mugwort — the same plant someone was gathering in the Book of Songs, three thousand years ago. The leaves are dried and pounded into wool, shaped into cones, lit, and held about an inch above the skin, or over a slice of ginger, letting the warmth sink in.

The old Chinese word for it is jiu — the character has fire at its bottom. Acupuncture and moxibustion. Needles are metal, cool, precise. Moxa is herbal, warm, fuzzy. One thinks like Western medicine; the other thinks like an herbal soup.

Mencius has a line: "A seven-year illness needs mugwort aged three years." A chronic disease of seven years requires moxa that was stored for three. When I first read it, I froze. Isn't that exactly what those neatly stacked boxes in my mom's cabinet were? She wasn't hoarding. She was stocking medicine — the kind you have to prepare three years ahead, the kind that cannot be rushed.

The traditional explanation: moxibustion warms the channels and dispels cold. In plain words: the places in your body that are cold and blocked — you take a small, patient, gentle fire and slowly warm them open.

I won't claim it cures everything. But I've seen my mom after thirty years of it. She's almost sixty now. Her hands and feet are no longer cold in winter. Her color is better than most women her age. You can call that survivorship bias, say she just had a good constitution. I can't out-argue science. I've only ever seen my mother.

Four

What got me were the TikTok comments.

Someone wrote after a session: "I felt this warmth spreading inside me, like being hugged from within."

Like being hugged from within.

I read that line over and over. When the first moxa cone was lit, two thousand years ago, whoever invented it probably wanted exactly this — not to cure some great disease, but to let a person who had been cold for a long time feel warm again.

Chinese people have a stubborn faith in warmth. Ginger tea must be drunk hot. The room of a new mother must be kept from drafts. A stiff neck gets a hot-water bottle. Winter tonics are all about "warming." A doctor trained in the West might frown at all this. But the logic underneath is simple: many of the body's troubles come from being blocked, from not being warm enough. Warm it up, open it up, and many small complaints heal themselves.

Five

Of course, I have to be honest about a few things.

Moxibustion is not a cure-all, and careless use causes burns. On TikTok some people stick the burning cone directly on the skin — that's direct moxibustion, it scars. The ancients did it, but modern people don't need to be that harsh on themselves. Use a slice of ginger, or hold it an inch above the skin. Gently warm is enough.

Don't do it after drinking, when overly full, or sweating heavily. Pregnant women should never use it on the lower back or abdomen. My mom recites these rules faster than any manual.

And moxibustion works on "slow." It is three-year mugwort, not three-day mugwort. Expecting one session to fix ten years of period pain is being unfair to the mugwort — and to yourself.

Six

Before hanging up, my mom suddenly said: "I'll mail you a box."

I said no need, they sell it online. She said: "Theirs isn't aged. Mugwort over three years — the smoke is blue, the smell is fragrant. Fresh mugwort chokes." Then she really went to dig through the cabinet and pulled out a box wrapped in kraft paper, saying it was stored the year before, and this year it was just old enough.

On camera she held up that box like a treasure. On the kraft paper, her handwriting: the date.

Watching her, I thought — this website I run, these articles I write, about tradition, about Zen, about feng shui, about wellness... what am I actually doing?

Probably what my mom does. Taking old things, slow things, things that need three years of preparation — wrapping them up, and mailing them out. To people on the other side of the planet who just lit their first moxa stick.

They may not know what "warming the channels" means. But they know that warmth. And warmth needs no translation.

Three questions for you

1. In your memory, is there a smell you disliked as a child, then suddenly missed one day as an adult?
2. "A seven-year illness needs mugwort aged three years" — is there anything in your life you'd be willing to prepare three years ahead for?
3. When was the last time you were "hugged from within"?

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The wind is picking up outside. Autumn is really here. The moxa my mom mailed will arrive in about three days.

Tonight I'll start with Yongquan. No aged moxa at hand — the ordinary kind will do. Warm up first. The rest can wait.