I’ve been dealing with back pain for years, so I’m always researching different treatments that might help me live with it. One night, in a particularly deep internet rabbit hole, I found a picture of Gwyneth Paltrow at a film premiere with circular marks on her body. It looked like she was turning into a leopard or something. But apparently, the marks were really from cupping, a Chinese technique for drawing pain and tension from the body.

On my next visit to my acupuncturist—Gianna Norini, at Whole Body Health and Wellness in Chicago—I noticed a set of glass cups in her room. So, I asked her if we could try it. And we did! Here’s how my first foray into cupping went.

At first, it’s sort of like a massage.

Because Gianna was working on my back, I undressed from the waist up, and laid down on an ergonomic table. She cleansed my back with rubbing alcohol before massaging in some amazing-smelling lavender oil, which she said would help the cups move better.

Then, it’s sort of like a sorcery class.

In order for the cups to adhere to my body, Gianna had to create vacuums inside them. So she grabbed a piece of cotton with metal tongs, lit the cotton on fire, and waved it inside a cup. She then placed the cup upside-down on my back, where it created an airtight seal against my skin.

At first, she put one small cup on either side of my spine, alternately sliding each one up and down my back to get my circulation going. Whichever one she moved felt like someone was pulling on my skin, and the stationary one felt like the push of a massage.

“It’s the same end results [as a massage],” Gianna said. “You’re going to bring in blood flow, you’re gonna break up adhesions in the muscle…From an Eastern standpoint, you’re also going to release chi and blood that has been trapped in the system.”

I asked Gianna why some people chose cupping over a massage. “Sometimes, like on a shoulder, it’s nice to create a vacuum and create that space for blood to come in. The shoulder is pretty poorly enervated,” she said. Long-standing trigger points are often poorly enervated, too.

Before long, I felt like I was in a sci-fi movie.

After Gianna slid the two small cups around for a few minutes, she left them to sit on my shoulders, and fired up two medium and two large cups. She placed them on my mid and lower back, respectively, and said they’d need to sit for 10 minutes. (The size of the cup, she explained, just corresponds to the size of the body area. Large cups don’t create any more “pull” than small ones.)

When I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, it looked like I had light bulbs growing out of my back. And you could see the skin being sucked up into the cups! It definitely looked a lot weirder than a massage. It didn’t feel that weird, though. I noticed the pressure in my shoulders, but I could hardly feel the cups on my lower back.

Afterward, I looked like a Lego.

Once the 10 minutes were up, Gianna popped off each cup by pressing down on the skin next to it. I now had six raised circles on my back in varying shades of red. The two on my lower back weren’t so bad, but the two on my shoulders were practically purple.

She explained that the Chinese call the red markings sha, which refers to a release of stagnation—the darker the mark, the more stagnant the blood and energy was in that area. Gianna chalked my purple shoulders up to the poor enervation she mentioned earlier, as well as everyday tension from hunching over a desk and carrying heavy purses.

She assured me that the indentations from the cups’ rims would go away quickly, and that the redness should fade within the week. “As juvenile as this is going to sound, these are essentially just like hickeys,” Gianna said.

Her only post-treatment advice? Stay away from cold. “Cold and dampness is often what causes tension, so you want to avoid A/C and bundle up against cold weather.”