Nora Franglen's Blog

Looking for different elements in people on TV or radio

2012-02-06T09:05:00.000Z

Because of all the problems this country is facing, I have been listening to a lot of radio and watching a lot of TV recently. To lighten my mood amongst all the gloom I have been amusing myself with trying to work out whether there is any correlation between a particular element and the kinds of work those I am listening to or watching do.

Foremost amongst the people I have looked at are journalists who report the news. You would imagine that a certain kind of journalist who becomes a newscaster is there to present the human face of the news, and would have some of the qualities of the two elements which like to communicate warmly, Fire and Earth. And I think most of them are. Things get a little bit more complicated when I looked at more investigative journalists, those that are required, not so much to relate to us as to dig down and ferret out the news. And here, as I would expect, it is Water above all, with Metal following behind, which dominate. With Wood it appears to be those journalists often more directly involved in action.

I’m afraid that the list is of people perhaps familiar only to a British audience, particularly to those tuned to the BBC, but all can be viewed on U-tube or video extracts, if you are interested enough to track them down. I have also added names of other famous people, such as sports people and politicians, to plump out the list a little.

So here goes with my list:
Wood: Kate Adie, a former war correspondent, Caroline Wyatt (a current BBC defence correspondent), Peter Snow, Michael Gove
Fire: Evan Davies, Andrew Marr, Bruce Forsyth, Chris Evans
Earth: David Dimbleby, Fiona Bruce, David Attenborough, Jon Snow, David Cameron
Metal: Frank Gardner (a BBC defence correspondent). There must be more, but I haven’t found anybody to add to the list yet.
Water: Robert Peston, John Humphrys, Jeremy Paxman, Gary Lineker, Arsène Wenger, Alex Ferguson, George Osborne, Ed Milliband

I find it interesting, and appropriate, that the Water element dominates the list, evidence of its ambition and desire to reach the top and stay there. Many of the heads of financial institutions who appear on TV regularly to defend the banks appear to be Water, too.

My mantra of the moment

2012-01-29T18:31:00.000Z

The secret to understanding another person’s guardian element lies hidden deep within ourselves. If we can interpret correctly how another person makes us feel, then we are on the way to understanding the dominant element which guides their life.

Filming a Traditional Diagnosis (TD)

2012-01-27T07:49:00.002Z

I decided that it was important for my Chinese students to observe me carrying out a TD at the start of a new patient’s treatment. I have always said – and I repeat here again for emphasis – that a diagnosis only forms the first loop in a never-ending chain which unwinds a little bit more each time we see a patient. One example of this is something which happened with a very longstanding patient of mine last week. He told me something about himself that gave me a totally different insight into who he was, jolting me out of the kind of complacency an association of more than 20 years can lull us into.

This new patient of mine is a young man who was very happy to consent to being filmed, and enjoyed the thought that the video was to be played to an audience of Chinese acupuncturists in China. On looking at it after the TD was completed, I thought that I had, overall, achieved what I had set out to do, which was to demonstrate the important components of a TD. I felt I had already started to establish a close relationship with this patient, had heard about the most significant aspects of his life in some depth, learnt the reasons why he felt he needed help from me, and started to piece together the different areas of his life to create some kind of a pattern explaining why he was as he is now.

I realised how much the years of my practice and the hundreds of patients I had seen in that time had contributed to honing my diagnostic skills by helping me focus on what was significant rather than, as students tend to do, getting bogged down in a lot of detail which proves later to be of little significance. This is where what I call a feel for the odd comes in, the sudden awareness of something the patient is saying or doing which jars. I am better at recognizing the hidden signals patients send out, pointing to often submerged areas of their lives which we need to explore because of their importance. This means that I am able to home in more quickly on something which needs following up, as I noticed I did with this patient, persisting in returning to it again and again until I found an explanation. I noted, too, those places where I had left some loose ends as something I needed to discuss with the patient next time.

The thing that I was constantly being told in China was people’s surprise at how much what they called “compassion” I showed the patients I treated there. This was merely a reflection of the importance we attach to developing a close relationship with our patients. This certainly always involves both compassion, and, just as importantly, and an essential ingredient of compassion, a sincere interest in every area of our patients’ lives.

I will be interested to see what my Chinese students make of this video.

"Look up at the stars, not down at your feet"

2012-01-12T11:49:00.001Z

I love this quote from a speech by Stephen Hawking. I think we all spend too long looking down at our feet, whilst the stars and universe beyond are beckoning to us to look up.

A few simple tips to make a five element acupuncturist's life easier

2012-01-08T10:36:00.000Z

Don’t hurry! Don’t worry!

The first rule is to have compassion for your patient. Compassion means to “feel with”. The more you can feel what your patient is feeling, and therefore can understand them, the more quickly you will be able to discover which element is directing their life. Unless we allow our own hearts to resonate with our patient’s feelings, we will never understand which of the five elements guides their lives.
Do not be in a hurry to diagnose the right element! The elements will wait for you to find them, and show their faces more and more clearly with time. And all elements will enjoy the kind of focused attention they receive from simple command-point level treatments.
If you are not in a hurry, you can relax and learn to get to know your patient better. All of this will give you time to observe whether there has been any change from treatment, and show you whether or not you should continue treating that particular element.
Don’t think that your patient is necessarily expecting a quick fix. Patients appreciate the care and deep concern their practitioner shows them, and return again and again for that. This is usually unexpected and rare, compared with the impersonality of doctors’ surgeries and hospital waiting rooms. Patients are usually only too happy to give the practitioner all the time they need.
The most important aspect of any treatment is not the amount of time spent on the actual physical procedures, but the time it gives you to understand your patient, observe them and help them get used to you. Patients won’t be counting up how many points you needle, but they will be assessing how interested you are in them and how concerned you are about them.
Think of each treatment as asking a question of the elements. The practitioner’s task is to try to interpret the answers the elements give.
Do at least three treatments on any element you choose. If you are treating once a week, then this gives you at least 3 weeks in which to observe an element’s responses.
Don’t confuse the elements by changing from one element to another after only a short time or in the same treatment, if you are not sure which element you should be treating.
Don’t judge any change in your patient simply by using the criteria of changes to physical complaints. Get used to assessing change in the patient as a whole, particularly in the patient’s spirit and emotional balance. It is by getting better at noticing what can be even very small changes in a patient’s behaviour or physical appearance that we begin to see whether our treatment is directed at the right element.
If in doubt, simplify, and do the least number of points possible. Don’t judge the success of treatment by the number of points you needle. If you aren’t sure where you are going with your treatment, don’t add to your confusion by haphazardly piling point upon point. Try to clear your mind by just doing one pair of command points, preferably the source points. This helps you focus your attention directly and deeply upon an element. Then let the elements answer you.
Don’t spend too long trying to diagnose the major blocks (possession, husband/wife). They are much more difficult to diagnose than you may think. It doesn’t matter if you miss them to start with. They become more and more obvious the longer they remain untreated. An expert practitioner may see them straightaway; a less experienced practitioner will inevitably take longer to recognise them. There is a risk that a newly qualified practitioner will over-diagnose blocks because of the excitement of doing them!

"Living on the knife-edge of insecurity"

2012-01-05T17:38:00.000Z

I just sat down for a quiet moment, and casually picked up today’s Guardian. The actress Siân Phillips was being interviewed, and in answer to the question, “What’s the best advice anyone ever gave you”, she said:

“Saunders Lewis, the great Welsh poet, befriended me. When I went to London and gave up my life in Wales, he wrote me a letter that said, “You have to live on the knife-edge of insecurity.” And I thought: “OK, that’s what I’ll do.”

I love the phrase, “living on the knife-edge of insecurity”. It encapsulates what I see as the need willingly to accept the often frightening challenges life presents us with.

Why it is never wise to treat our friends

2012-01-05T15:05:00.000Z

I have recently been asked to treat two friends, one very close and the other more a friend of a friend. Both of them were reluctant to go to another acupuncturist, and both were in quite a lot of distress.

This has made me think carefully about what has always guided me in my decision to treat or not to treat a friend. Ideally, as we all know, we should not be treating family and friends because their very closeness means that we are not detached enough to see them clearly and to cope with finding out exactly what is wrong with them. We assume, usually very wrongly, that we really know all about them, and can therefore skip doing a proper diagnosis and move straight on to treatment. But my experiences in the past have put a lie to this, for I have often assumed somebody I know is of one element and decided quite some time later that they reveal another side to themselves and I have had to change my mind. This has happened with me with a very close relative and a very close friend, both of whom I had somehow put into an element box which, looking back, I suppose I felt was part of my comfort zone. When I later discovered how wrong I had been, I realised that I had almost deliberately been overlooking aspects of these two people which made me feel uneasy. Since learning these two difficult lessons, I have been very reluctant indeed to treat those close to me, unless there is absolutely no alternative (for example, if geographically there is no other practitioner near enough to treat them, or they are hospitalized and would simply go without treatment).

With family members, however unwise being their practitioner is, it is unlikely that my treating them is going to cause a change in our relationship. With friends, I have found, things are quite different, and my relationship to the friends I have had to treat in the past has always changed, and never for the better. Usually what has happened is that the friend now views me only as their therapist, and wishes me to continue in this role even when I am not treating (by talking over symptoms or the effects of treatment in a social context, for example). In a more extreme case, the friendship itself became endangered by the fact that a somewhat competitive friend did not like to feel that I was somehow gaining the upper hand, and persisted in claiming that treatment was making her feel worse. In the end, I lost her both as friend and patient, because we never rediscovered our easy relationship of before.

In the two examples that have come my way now, I have, with a sense of relief, passed both the friend and the friend of a friend on to a fellow practitioner, knowing that I was doing the right thing. This was not done without a slight tussle, because my first impulse is to offer help to anybody asking me for help, and it requires some strength of character for me to move aside.

Just a bowl of medicine soup?

2011-12-28T10:42:00.000Z

I am grateful to one of my Nanning students, Huang Jing, for the following, acute observation about the challenges facing those who work in busy acupuncture clinics where they are asked to treat many patients, and who want in some way to move on to treat with five element acupuncture. Her email has prompted me to think carefully how I can help my students over in China to make the transition to five element acupuncture without endangering their livelihoods.

“With Five Element Acupuncture I could only see 4 - 5 patients in any half-day, and with today’s demand on outpatient service, this is far too little, and I will never be able to treat all the patients… I need to see about 28 patients in half a day.”

And then she goes on to say, “However I see that in this way we are seeing a lot more patients, but we can only treat the very surface of their problems. We have not got the time to trace or to understand where their problems have actually come from. In the times we are living in now especially, people are carrying around huge emotional burdens, and their physical problems are often caused by these internal problems. We really ought to be giving our patients not just a bowl of medicine soup, but we should also find a way to give them some spiritual nourishment.”

It is quite understandable that practitioners who may work in a system based on the need to treat a lot of people as quickly as possible find it difficult to move to five element acupuncture, where we accentuate the need to develop a long-standing one-to-one relationship with our patients. These two approaches to practice, the one, the “bowl of medicine soup” approach, and the other the “spiritual nourishment” approach, appear to be irreconcilable, but I do not think they are. There are certainly ways of adapting what I do in my everyday London practice to what is needed in a busy outpatients’ clinic, as some of my fellow practitioners have proved when they worked in the stressful conditions in Sri Lanka after the floods treating as many patients as my Nanning student is asked to treat. It is now my task to work out the best way to help my students adapt their practice.

In this context, I find it interesting that my translation work on Elisabeth Rochat de la Vallée’s 101 Key Concepts of Chinese Medicine has strengthened my understanding that the “bowls of medicine soup” of the original pioneers of acupuncture, some 2000 years ago, contained as their most important ingredient that of “spiritual nourishment”. The two, the physical and the spiritual, were always regarded as an indissoluble whole. The sad thing is that this has got so thoroughly lost in modern TCM, and particularly in those places where living conditions demand a high turnover of patients. It is as though patients’ spirits have become irrelevant to the restoration of health. It is little wonder, then, that my Chinese students are amazed at the speed of improvement when using five element acupuncture as compared with their current acupuncture practices.

Here it is useful to look at what we do at our first treatment, during which we always drain Aggressive Energy. This is a quick and effective way of drawing out any negative energy which may be polluting the elements, and is probably worth 10 treatments from other forms of acupuncture, where this sapping away at the elements’ strength remains undetected and untreated. And the same, if not more so, can be said of those important blocks to treatment, husband-wife and possession. From that point of view, I see five element acupuncture as providing a surprising short-cut to a return to health which it is not always recognised as offering.

At the start of practice, as with every other kind of acupuncture, a fledgling practitioner will obviously require time to develop the skill to give effective treatment, and in five element acupuncture you can’t look up a formula of points which TCM likes to do. But you can certainly get quicker and quicker at doing an AE drain, and the nature of this treatment (needles in the back for some period of time) gives the practitioner more time to talk to the patient. So in that way, when I was in Nanning, and was asked to treat many patients in a way very unlike that of the leisurely time I grant myself for my initial diagnosis with my London patients, I learnt very quickly to move on to the AE drain after perhaps only 10 minutes or so. Here my knowledge of the elements came to my aid, because I would try to focus my questioning on those areas which I thought would probably be the most important for that particular patient. And I was surprised at how easy it was to home in on certain areas of emotional distress very quickly, all the more so because the patients were only too keen to accompany me into areas of their life which nobody had shown any interest in exploring with them before.

Of course I have many years of experience at diagnosing the elements to draw upon, but I was delighted to see how quickly my students homed in on the different elements and with what surprising accuracy. Here their deep-seated knowledge of the elements, so engrained in them since childhood, comes to their aid, and, coupled with their keenness to learn, makes my task all the easier. The question now is how to guide them to make the transition from a formulaic approach to treatment to the more individually-focused five element treatments, whilst dispelling some of their natural fear at having to learn such a different approach.

I am formed from an exploding star

2011-12-15T20:36:00.000Z

Amidst all the gloom in today’s world, I came across this heartening bit of news in the Guardian today that made me smile. It was in an article entitled: “In the beginning ...Supernova produces life’s elements”, about the explosion of a star far out in space.

“Understanding how these giant explosions create and mix materials is important because supernovae are where we get most of the elements that make up the Earth and even our own bodies. For instance, these supernovae are a major source of iron in the universe. So we are all made of bits of exploding stars,“ said Mark Sullivan of Oxford University.

I like the thought that I am made of a bit of an exploding star.

Nanning photo

2011-12-15T20:20:00.002Z

Since getting back from China, I have been trying to work out a way of downloading the photo of the group of 50 or so who came to listen to my talks for 10 days in Nanning. I hope I have now managed to do this.

I am sitting next to Liu Lihong, with his wife on my left side, and next to her Wendy Kiely, who acted as my helper throughout. To the right of Liu Lihong is Mei Long who introduced him to five element acupuncture, translated my Handbook of Five Element Practice and acted as my translator.

Developing a format for five element distance-learning for my Chinese students

2011-12-12T09:12:00.000Z

It is fascinating working out a distance-learning schedule for my Chinese students, because they start from a totally different position from European students. First of all, they already have a much deeper understanding of the elements as though these are etched into their bones and in their heart. They are companions with which they have grown up, not the rather strange aspects of life which European students have gradually to be introduced to. And then the students are very well-trained, drilled almost, in their point location and practical techniques, such as needling. So I found that I started at a higher level in terms of their practical skills.

On the other hand, they are at a much lower level in terms of much that we take for granted here in five element practice in the West, and that is in relation to a practitioner’s approach to their patients. The one thing I was constantly surprised at was to hear Liu Lihong emphasizing throughout my days of teaching in Nanning what he called my compassion to the many patients I was asked to treat. When I looked at what I was doing, I realised that what, to me, is the most fundamental aspect of my practice, my warm relationship to my patients and the importance I place on establishing this from my first contact with them, was a completely new area of practice to those observing me in China. This is, after all, the essence of what we, as five element acupuncturists, are trying to do, which is to develop such a close relationship with our patients that they feel secure enough in our presence gradually to lay aside their masks and allow their elements to reveal themselves in their true colours.

So one of the first lessons I will be thinking about is to encourage the students to use even such basic skills as pulse-taking as a first step to developing the proper physical contact with their patients without which no subsequent treatment will be successful. This is why I don’t agree with taking pulses with only one hand. We need both our hands to enfold the patient’s hand in a warm, loving clasp. And as we feel each pulse, we should remember JR’s lovely phrase as he told us how we should take pulses: “As you feel each pulse, you are asking, “Small Intestine, how are you today? Heart, how are you today?” If you say this to yourself, there is no way your pulse-taking can become the automatic snatching at the mere beat of a pulse which a Western pulse diagnosis has sadly turned into.

My first lesson is already winging its way to China by email. It is on the Wood element, and how the students can find ways of observing its manifestations through looking at examples of some of the patients treated in front of the class when I was there, and adding to these some famous examples of Chinese people from the web. I have also asked them to learn the points not only according to their Chinese names, which gives each name an individual importance, but more in terms of their relationship one to another along a meridian. The point numbers we use, such as Stomach 1 – 45, draw the points together and attach them more closely to the line of the meridians they lie upon, something TCM is not so concerned with.

I have also decided, to my profound delight, to use the Roman numerals for the officials, I for Heart to XII for Spleen, which were embedded in Leamington’s teaching when I was a student there, and have so unhappily and so unnecessarily been discarded for the TCM approach which likes to start instead at the Lung. (If you look at the texts upon which the original teachings coming to this country in the 1950s were based, you will see that the Heart always appears first.) Maybe the reason the Heart has been demoted to a subsidiary position in this way reflects the lack of heart in TCM practice, something which is reflected in Liu Lihong’s desire to instil more heart in his students’ practice by inviting me, a Fire person (and Inner Fire as well!) to warm up the teaching for his students. He told his class several times that “we need more Fire here”.

So Heart once again takes what I consider to be its proper place as the head, the emperor, of all the elements. Luckily the Chinese students told me that they are already familiar with Roman numerals, unlike many of my former students, which makes their task easier.

So on to Lesson 2, the Fire element, and a discussion of the importance of touch.

A simple guide to five element treatments

2011-12-03T09:29:00.000Z

It is with the encouragement of my good friend, Peter Eckman, the author of In the Footsteps of the Yellow Emperor (still in my view the best, if not the only, history of acupuncture’s migration from East to West), that I have started to think about writing a book about the first few treatments any five element acupuncturist should be considering for a new patient. I was at first a bit reluctant to do so, because it seemed to me to be a little superfluous. Surely, I thought to myself, everybody who practises five element acupuncture knows that we always start as simply as possible, directing all our attention at the element we have chosen, the one I call the Guardian Element, to see whether it responds to this focused attention. But to my surprise and dismay, though this may have been true of all who learnt in the good old days when JR held sway at his college in Leamington, it now most certainly is not, as I experience each time I teach a class of newly qualified acupuncturists.

I see instead people who are often confused, as we certainly were not, as to where to direct their attention. So many of them, to my despair, have been seduced into thinking that they somehow need to add to this pure approach all sorts of other things which have infiltrated into the teaching of five element acupuncture, the most harmful of all, in my opinion, being the, to me, odd idea that into the five element mix must be thrown a goodly dab of TCM to leaven it, with its quite different approach to the elements. So both the elements in the patient and the practitioners themselves doing this have become muddled as to where exactly the focus of their treatment should lie, with the resultant confusion which I witness when these practitioners ask me for help.

So whereas years ago there was no need for such a book, so firmly entrenched in all us five element acupuncturists was a simple, focused approach to the first stages of treatment, now there appears to be a great need for somebody to disentangle what has become a confused area of practice, and lay down again the beautifully simple principle which guides each day of my practice: “Just treat the element, and let the element tell you by its response whether you are focusing your treatment upon the right segment of the five element circle”.

So I am starting today, amongst all the other projects I am working on (a reprint of my Keepers of the Soul before the copies run out, my translation of Elisabeth Rochat de la Vallée’s 101 Concepts of Chinese Medicine, and my latest project, drawing up a distance-learning schedule for my Chinese students), to write down in a clear, not to be misunderstood way, for each element, the simple first steps every five element acupuncturist should take when treating a new patient. It pleases me, of course, that this will also be perfect for my teaching in China.

Where do we go from here?

2011-11-25T07:58:00.000Z

There were so many people asking where they could learn more about five element acupuncture in China that I must now think carefully what will be the best way to go forward from here, and build upon this exciting new ground.

There is already a small band of about 15 students in Nanning who will form the nucleus of a five element school in the future, and we must concentrate on helping them learn more. The challenging part will be to work out a programme of teaching which takes account of the different levels of expertise of this group. How much they will learn and how quickly they will feel confident enough to incorporate five element acupuncture into their practice will depend to a great extent upon how well I structure the different levels of teaching required.

A lot of hard work lies ahead but it represents an exciting new challenge for me.

A refreshingly new acupuncture landscape

2011-11-20T10:24:00.000Z

There was something very stimulating about moving from what I have come to regard as the somewhat weary world of acupuncture in the UK to a refreshingly new acupuncture landscape in China. The wonder of this whole experience was that I was speaking to people to whom the world of the elements is a familiar place, unlike those first embarking on acupuncture in the West, and who therefore had such a quick understanding of the principles of five element acupuncture, and only needed to be given a few signposts to guide them.

The most concentrated teaching was in Nanning, in Guanxi province in the south, where I taught at a newly opened centre for traditional medicine, the Tong You Sanhe, founded by Liu Lihong at whose invitation I was in China. On most days the group consisted of up to 50 people, of whom about 15 are serious students of five element acupuncture.

Then after 9 long days of teaching, which included the treatment of many people, both privately and in front of the class, we had 2 days’ relaxing time travelling to the Guilin mountains and up the Li River to Yangshou. I was very moved to see at last the very mountains whose photo I had chosen as the front cover of my Handbook many years before. Again something coming full circle.

Then on up north to Beijing and to a large traditional medicine conference at which I spoke to the 500 or so participants, each of whom, flatteringly, was holding a copy of the Mandarin version of my Handbook which they had been given in their conference bags. After the seminar, much signing of books and much taking of photos.

The response wherever I taught was overwhelming, with people asking again and again, “Where can we learn five element acupuncture?” Where indeed! It has proved difficult enough in this country over the years to find good five element teaching, and over there it will be even more difficult. But being such an enterprising nation, I have no doubt that they will find a way. And I like to think that I will continue to be there to accompany those amongst them who wish to set their feet ever more firmly on the five element path.

My first blog about my visit to China (written on the Great Wall on Sunday 13th November before leaving for home)

2011-11-16T17:57:00.000Z

What can I say? I’m sitting on the Great Wall in China trying to catch my breath, both physically, because of the steep steps leading to it, and emotionally, because of all that has gone on since our arrival two weeks ago. I am also trying to fit what we did into bite-sized packets of information, and then into words suitable for my blog.

All I can now say is that it has been in every way a totally moving, instructive, warm and overwhelmingly fruitful experience, with ramifications for five element acupuncture which spread out to the furthest corners of China, to which the 500 or so seminar participants who came to Beijing to listen to me are now returning, with new thoughts about what is, to them, an utterly new approach to acupuncture to mull over.

More, much more, when I have had time to collect my thoughts, after my return to London the day after tomorrow.

Finally off to China!

2011-10-25T15:42:00.002+01:00

This is my last blog before I am off to China, and then there will be a silence from me for three weeks into which will pour all the impressions awaiting me there – impressions not only of the vast country and its people, but of what I foresee as being an awesome moment, as I touch the spirit of the place from whose roots what I do sprung more than two thousand years ago.

I like to see myself and all those practising five element acupuncture each as a tiny bud upon one of the branches of the might tree of acupuncture. I know that my own bud will be nourished by visiting its ancient homeland, and I hope in turn that my visit will add a little bit more nourishment to its roots.

I am busily rehearsing the few lines of greeting in Mandarin with which I hope to start my seminars both in Nanning and in Beijing, but I am not holding myself to saying them if my courage fails me at the last moment and I find myself reverting to the safety of English!

I look forward to reporting back in future blogs on my return.

The dangers facing traditional Chinese medicine

2011-10-19T07:30:00.003+01:00

I am preparing what I want to say about five element acupuncture on my visit to China, and am finding the process surprisingly challenging. After years of talking about my love for what I do, how exactly do I want to convey this love to a new audience, and an audience, above all, whose understanding of the elements is so very deep-rooted that I hesitate to think that I have anything new to add to what they already know?

And then today, to help me in my search for the right words, I came across a fascinating video of a Chinese master of traditional medicine discussing the problems he sees confronting it today, and this gave me the lead I needed. He talked about the “standardization process” to which it is being subjected in China, and which, he says, is leading to a “thinning out of the depth of Chinese medicine.” The evocative phrase “thinning out” resonated with me, and goes right to the heart of what I think is happening not only in China but throughout the world; it has undergone a process of etiolation. This is a lovely word I have often longed to use, and which leapt to my mind as such words do as I write. The dictionary defines it as “making plants pale by excluding light” and “giving a sickly hue”. I think this is a vivid and true description of how I view the dangers facing traditional Chinese medicine everywhere, including in its birth-place, China, and which threaten to drain it of much of its vitality.

So off I fly next week to add what I hope is my own little bit of bright colour and light to what is taught over there!

Some beautiful quotations to share

2011-10-11T16:59:00.000+01:00

I love coming across quotations which illuminate my world for me, and make me see things quite differently. I give you some that I have come across recently, and have been carrying around with me in my diary (yes, I still use a hand-written diary!). I glance at them now and again, and receive each time a renewal of that initial feeling of shock at words so simple and pure, and yet which say so much. Each of us will read some significance in them which is personal to us alone and to nobody else, such is the universal meaning hidden within them.

The first is by W B Yeats, and was sent to me by a friend of mine, both of us well beyond the 50 years of the poem, but the poem spoke to both of us nonetheless:

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
                                                        W. B.Yeats

The next two quotations are by that strange and idiosyncratic writer, Mervyn Peake, taken from the wall of an exhibition on his writings and drawings at the British Library:

“Neither be afraid of the unorthodox subject nor in finding delight in the contemplation of commonplace things. Anything, seen without prejudice, is enormous.”

"…. When every heartbeat hammers out the proof
That life itself is miracle enough.”
                                                        Mervyn Peake

And finally, in my eyes the purest of all these quotations, this time by an American poet, Samuel Mensashe, whose obituary I read on 22 August 2011, and about whom I knew absolutely nothing until then, but whose works I am now trying, with some difficulty, to track down:

Rue
For what I did
And did not do
And do without
In my old age
Rue, not rage
Against that night
We go into,
Sets me straight
On what to do
Before I die –
Sit in the shade,
Look at the sky

Cargo
Old wounds leave good hollows
Where one who goes can hold
Himself in ghostly embraces
Of former powers and graces
Whose domain no strife mars -
I am made whole by my scars
For whatever now displaces
Follows all that once was
And without loss stows
Me into my own spaces
                                                       Samuel Mensashe

I think his phrase, I am made whole by my scars, is one we can take into the practice room with us, both as applied to ourselves, for surely we hope that we are whole when we practise, and eventually, too, we hope as applied to our patients. The healing, the “making whole” of their scars, will, we hope, apply to their physical scars, of course, but more profoundly still to their emotional scars, which should ultimately form the focus of our work at its deepest level.

Regaining control in the practice room: how the elements cast their magic upon patient and practitioner

2011-10-09T16:39:00.000+01:00

This is a follow-up to my blog of September 13th on losing control in the practice room.

I am delighted to be able to say that this patient’s next treatment not only restored my faith in my own ability to maintain control, but also, and, far more importantly, showed me once again how the elements cast their magic not only upon our patients as they start to heal them, but also upon us as practitioners, as they remind us of their ability to transform.

My patient appeared at the door of my practice room as, in my eyes, quite another person. He greeted me less nervously, and with a warm smile that had not been there last time. He was much less nervous of the needles, chatted about his week’s work very easily, and interestingly did not, as he had done last time, demand a time for his next appointment. Instead, he apologized that his work-schedule was making it difficult for me to fit him into the times I normally see patients. The relationship between us had relaxed markedly. I can only attribute this to the transformative effect, on my patient, of strengthening his Water element and thus reducing his fear, and, on me, of helping me understand that the somewhat threatening interplay between us at his first treatment was caused by his fear and by my not responding appropriately to this fear.

And so I continue to learn.

One of a practitioner’s greatest qualities must be curiosity

2011-09-29T10:46:00.000+01:00

I was reminded yesterday of one of the most important qualities a good five element practitioner needs to possess, and if they do not already possess it, needs to cultivate as thoroughly as possible, and that is curiosity, pure and simple – curiosity, put baldly, about what makes us ourselves and those around us tick.

The particular incident from yesterday’s practice which made me think about this came about when I was called in by another practitioner to look at a patient of hers, “whom,” as she put it, “I can’t quite get a handle on”. She felt that the patient was holding her at arms’ length all the time, and wondered if she was not treating the right element, which she had, in my opinion, rightly, diagnosed as Fire. I could feel that though the patient was friendly, pleasant and smiling all the time, she was indeed keeping the deep part of herself firmly locked away from us.

Why was this? And what had happened that had made her so defensive? There was something here to explore, and our diagnosis of her element helped me find a way in. Fire wants above all to relate. It needs relationships, particularly sexual relationships, in the way that Earth needs to be nourished and Metal craves self-respect. She had not been in a long-term relationship for many years, because “I always choose the wrong person”. I decided to address this issue head-on and asked, “Did any relationship you have had in the past end by breaking your heart?”, and was not surprised to hear that, yes , one had. Her first really deep relationship had lasted 3 years and should have ended in marriage if she had not discovered very close to the wedding day that he was a serial philanderer. Living as she did in a very small, tightly-knit community, she was then forced to be a witness to his marrying a friend of hers with whom he now has several children.

It was interesting to watch the change in this patient as she talked about all this. There was obviously relief at being able to tell us her story, and a great deal of sadness as she did so, but also, after a lovely further treatment on Fire, starting with Ki 24, Spirit Burial Ground to resuscitate her damaged spirit, a kind of transformation within her as her Fire element started to heal itself at a deep level and no longer needed to throw up such a defensive screen around to protect her.

This was a lovely treatment with a lovely result, and a lesson to us all to persist in our questioning until we get to the core of a patient’s troubles. And I only really managed to reach this core when my persistent but gentle questioning at last got through her defences and made her feel safe enough to say what in effect she had held back from saying for years. Interestingly, patients themselves are often unaware, as this patient was, of the long-term effects of something that happened years ago upon the present state of their health. This patient’s ostensible reason for coming for treatment was not the hurt this failed relationship had inflicted upon her, but a physical complaint, persistent head-aches. It was only my questioning that gradually revealed to her the true depth of the pain this first love of her life had inflicted upon her.

Here the element we choose will guide us in the type of questioning we need to pursue. If she had been Metal, for example, I would perhaps not have focused so much on relationships but upon the areas of her life which had brought her the greatest sense of self-fulfilment. It is not enough, then, simply to say that the patient is Fire or Metal. We have to know exactly what kind of things have happened to force that Fire or Metal so far out of shape that it can no longer function properly. And we are only able to find this out by by being really curious to know what has gone on in our patient’s life and by not being afraid to tackle deep areas of hurt. I sometimes feel I go “where angels fear to tread”, but that angels are there to beckon me in.

Losing control in the practice room

2011-09-13T19:10:00.001+01:00

I am still surprised at how easily I can allow myself to be controlled by a patient even after all these years of practice. This may come from my desire to please others (my Fire wanting everybody around them to be happy), which which can lead me too quickly to do something which I don’t really want to do and which I eventually realise is not right for me to do. My Small Intestine is also always only too ready to think that the other person may be right in what they are demanding of me, and it is only after some thought that I may decide that this is not so, by which time I may well have agreed to something I eventually come to regret.

In the practice situation this may reveal itself as not being quick enough to realise that in some way I am being manipulated by a patient, something as practitioners we all know can happen when patients, who may feel uneasy about coming for treatment, try to wrench control back into their own hands. This may appear as something apparently insignificant as a patient making an extreme fuss about the heat of a tiny moxa cone or being determined not to accept a practitioner's time constraints.

This is what happened today. A new patient, very uneasy indeed from the moment he walked in the door, managed to get me to make the next appointment on a day which I had crossed out in my diary with the words, “Keep day free” written in big letters across it. It was only after he had gone that I realised what had happened, as I tried to analyse the great feeling of disempowerment which his treatment had left me with. Though I was cross at myself for allowing myself to be outmanoeuvred in this way, I had to laugh because, feeling as I did that his element was Water, it had, as usual, managed to get its own way, and I, as Fire, had, as usual, allowed myself temporarily to be extinguished by its force.

Obviously each element will offer different challenges to different practitioners, and practitioners who are not Fire may not recognise this particular challenge, but everybody should look carefully at which situations cause them the greatest stress and then try to trace this back to the element or elements in their patients which are causing this. It is also an excellent way of helping ourselves track down an element, as I found in this instance. My careful unravelling of why this patient had made me uneasy helped to strengthen my belief that I was dealing here with Water.

Now my task is to try to regain control at the next treatment, and to make sure that my Fire blazes sufficiently strongly to turn the powerful force of his Water into less threatening steam. A good lesson for me, and I hope for anybody else reading this who has found themselves struggling to remain in control in the practice room. And the moment we lose control, we also lose our ability to help.

Preface to the Chinese edition of my Handbook of Five Element Practice

2011-09-10T08:36:00.000+01:00

I give below Mei Long's translation of Liu Lihong's Preface to the Chinese edition of my Handbook which has now appeared in bookshops throughout China. I am very honoured that he volunteered to write the preface, and am touched with what he has written. I think this preface is an important document charting the first steps in the return of five element acupuncture to its birthplace.

"The Handbook of Five Element Acupuncture, written by Nora Franglen, will soon be available to Chinese readers. Whilst for the 4th time reading this book admiringly, I must admit that I regret somehow that I have offered myself too eagerly to write the introduction. Since being still learning five element acupuncture myself, I realize that I could hardly give any comment on her book. However, to keep my promise, I’ll manage to write something here.

I came across 5EA because of Dr. Long Mei, who graduated from Chengdu University of TCM in 1991 and has lived in the Netherlands since 1997. In the beginning of 2010, she wrote me a 10-page-long letter, telling me how she came across 5EA, her understanding and experience of practising this school of acupuncture. Deeply touched by Mei’s letter, I realized how wonderful this style of acupuncture is. How amazing that the lineage, rooted in China, is still passing on abroad! Hardly can I stop feeling guilty unless making any effort to welcome it coming home. So last summer I invited Long Mei to run a one-week seminar on 5EA in Nanning.

Originated in China, 5EA has already undergone a history of more than thousands of years. In the second half of last century, prof. J.R. Worsley, an English master of five element acupuncture, made great efforts to promote this school of acupuncture. And thanks to his contribution, the transmission of 5EA has been carried on in Europe and the United States, benefiting so many people. Whereas in her homeland, 5EA has become unknown to Chinese people, both laymen and professionals. As prof. Worsley mentioned, it was an oral tradition, which is very much like the Zen tradition in China – no written history.

In his preface of ShangHan Zha Bing Lun, Zhang Zhongjing wrote: “Heaven distributes 5 phases to create and move 10,000 kinds of species. Endowed with 5 elements, human beings thus have their 5 zangs (organs), Fus and meridians. The deep secrets and the meanings of the manifestations and the changes of Yin and yang, which are closely interrelated and connected to each other, are revealed in such a subtle and profound way that they are hardly understood except for those who are gifted with profound insight.” As to me, this can be a perfect description of 5 element acupuncture.

… It is in finding our guardian element that has made 5EA so difficult and fascinating. Also, this is where we, as practitioners, need to improve ourselves. And by so doing, we are getting more and more into our senses.

To find the right element, is to understand the profoundness of human nature. So we have to, just as prof. Worsley said, “Get out of our mind and into our senses.” Getting out of our mind, as I understand, is to get into our heart. Therefore, to be able to understand and deepen ourselves in this style of acupuncture, we need to let go many ideas and concepts of stereotypes. Whilst the engagement of our brains is so emphasised as to gain the knowledge in the modern time, the heart, however, was much more involved in the old time. In the book of Neijing, the heart was regarded as the emperor, the brains, however, only as one of the Fu organs. It is here that we see the difference between the old value and the new ones. And it must be worthwhile for us pondering over such difference. Understanding the difference between the brains and the heart is probably the key to deepen our understanding in Chinese Medicine. 5EA certainly offers the shortest access to gain the essence of Chinese medicine.

As for the practitioners, 5EA, based on the principles of the Classics, has a special focus on the Spirit. This has made 5EA so profound a form of healing which guides her practitioners following a path that of a supreme physician’s (Shang gong), who always goes beyond the physical level. Whereas for laymen, understanding the elements would bring more joys to their daily lives and help them to live their lives in a healthier way.

In June this year, whilst attending the international TCM congress in Rothenburg, I had chance to meet Nora and from whom I received my treatment. Metal is my guardian element according to Nora. After following a complete process, Nora selected Yuji (Lu, 10, fish region), the most spiritual point of the whole body, she told me, to end the treatment. The point, Lu 10, made me think. As I always enjoy doing: getting the meaning hidden deep within the Chinese characters. I then realized that there must be a connection between character “鱼” (yu), meaning ‘ fish’, and another character “宇” (yu), meaning ‘the universe’. The secret behind Yuji, “fish region” must be” the universe region”! In the book of Yellow Emperor’s Yin Fu Classic, it writes: “the universe lies in our hand, everything in the universe lies in our body.”

Reading Nora’s Handbook, I’m inspired by her profound insights and wisdom; whilst getting her treatment, I’ve experienced the subtleness and sincerity. Being with her, feeling her faith and love for Chinese medicine, flowing out of the heart, I can imagine how delighted Nora feels that 5EA is coming back to the homeland, a journey which has been waiting so long. And I can’t stop admiring and respecting how she is, advanced in her age, yet childlike in spirit. But meanwhile, I feel awesomely sorry, and wonder: as being Chinese, what have we done and what can we do for passing on Chinese medicine?

Liu Lihong, in the midsummer of 2011, at the foot of Green Mountain, Nanning"

Heart-warming encouragement

2011-09-09T07:30:00.000+01:00

I have just received the following from an acupuncturist in Germany who is trying to deepen his understanding of five element acupuncture by working his way through my books. We have decided that when I feel he is ready for me to do so, I will come and visit his practice to help him with his patients. I give it to you in his own words:

“So far I read your guidelines* and do it now a second time. After finishing these, I will start with your handbook from the beginning, in which I sometimes dip in and read a chapter.

Your words are very, very helpful for me, because I had a lot of different information about 5-Element-Acupuncture in the past, and have now a good and safe point to start again. I like your observations of people and situations in general very much, as well as your relationship to feelings (like asking the pulses how they, the organs, feel). I looked for this kind of treating / observing for many years.

For me one of the most important point of your work (so far I may be able to assess this) is that you try to see the whole world around you in the context of the 5 elements. It is not a kind of work for you, it is your life. That seems to be your claim (I hope this is the right word), and it is also mine.

As well I’m fascinated about your clarity with all the different steps of 5-element-procedures. Most of the people who teach stuff like this are not this clear, sometimes they are not close enough to the bottom (which includes me as well).

I like it when you write about your weakness as well, because only if we are clear at this point, we have the best possibility to develop. But I like also, that you don’t hide your knowledge, develop your books and blogs. Sometime we are not brave enough to do this (who am I, to tell other people that is right and that is maybe wrong…). But without this, I would not have the gifts of your work. It is very kind of you to spread this out in the world, as well as back to China. All people need a way like this.”

It is receiving encouragement for my writings like this which makes all my work worthwhile. Thank you, Christian.

*Tips on How to Start Learning about the Elements, SOFEA website http://www.sofea.co.uk/

Five element acupuncture to the rescue during the Christchurch earthquake

2011-09-07T08:38:00.015+01:00

I was deeply moved and heartened to hear of the work of one of SOFEA’s graduates, Jane Grofski, in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand. This is her account of treating people from the Search and Rescue Teams with five element acupuncture. I hope this dispels one of the myths still hovering out there that five element acupuncture cannot be used for emergency treatment:

“We’ve had 7460 earthquakes now in the last 11 months and so you can imagine the state some of my clients are in. It’s certainly challenging to live through.

I worked for the Search and Rescue Teams here after our largest earthquake and gave them all a 30 minute treatment. They were queuing all day and I got through about 170 firemen each week. I remembered your words about being tough enough to stay on our feet for a long time! It was incredible to see how much faster they processed all their stress and fatigue with acupuncture treatment. Some of them said they felt better after the 2 weeks in Christchurch than when they had arrived!

I worked from the principle of using all the most basic points. Check for blocks and use source and command points. Somehow it seemed there were more Fire elements among the firemen! The chest points helped frequently with processing the grief and the CV points were also common. I have developed my skill of being able to ‘see’ the meridians and points, so I could treat the points that just looked like they were the most blocked. In fact at one point the lights went out and the patient’s body looked like it was covered in glow-worms – really beautiful and not something I’d seen before (I don’t treat in the dark!).

I believe there is a great use for acupuncture in trauma care. I’d like to develop treatment criteria for other acupuncturists in acute trauma care and that would be a great topic for us to discuss. Often the firemen were actually dealing with previous issues and some had seen thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dead bodies in their lifetime. My basic principle was that if I could speed up their ‘processing rate’ then they would be able to deal with their daily stresses and fatigue. They are all highly trained and incredibly well self-managed emotionally; they just required their system to be ‘sped up’ to deal with the increased load. They responded particularly well to treatment as they were already in a highly focussed state of mind and motivated to get the best results from treatment.

I've now been asked to be a specialist consultant for the International Search and Rescue Advisory Group based on the initiative I set up here. I would like to see acupuncture used more extensively with the trauma teams and am applying for a grant to enable me to research this more extensively."

I give Jane’s contact details below. She is interested to hear from anybody else who would like to share their experiences in working in this area. And perhaps there is some person or organization out there who would be interested in helping her fund her research:

Jane Grofski
Equilibrium Health and Wellness Spa
4 Teal Close, Ferrymead
Christchurch, New Zealand
021 795 855
jane@equilibrium.net.nz
http://www.equilibrium.net.nz/

A postscript to the above: I have just received the following from Jane to add to my blog:

"At the time of going in to work with the Search and Rescue Teams, my two children and I were out of my house and living in a tent, without sewage, water or electricity. It really was such a strong calling to go and do this work."

A moment of triumph!

2011-09-06T16:39:00.000+01:00

I went today to the Garden of Peace at the National War Museum here in London, which was inaugurated in 1999 by the Dalai Lama. A pillar commemorates his visit, and shows on three sides an English, Tibetan and Mandarin version of his words of peace to the world. I was overjoyed to find that, with a little bit of a helping hand from the English version, I could just about decipher the Mandarin characters for 15 May 1999. I also thought I recognised part of a character which had something very like the rather magical flourish beneath the character for the Dao, which I thought might represent one of the characters for the Dalai Lama.

I felt a stupidly warm glow of self-satisfaction at such a tiny achievement!

Interesting insights into the Water element

2011-08-31T19:13:00.000+01:00

I have just received from a former patient – all the way from India –the following fascinating insights into how the Water element feels.

She has always been very interested in five element acupuncture, and sees a similarity in approach to Ayurvedic medicine, which she studied for a while. She has been following my blog with interest, and was stimulated enough by my last comments on Fire to send me her own impressions of the kind of pressure Water exerts.

“Water has its surges (like tides I think) but will often feel unsure of its approach even when it is at a high (or communicable) state, even reaching out is filled with uncertainty and hesitation and the fear that the other person may not understand one's intention. There is no intended push (as in Wood) or pull (as in Earth) but just a kind of narrowing of a gap, an attempt to fill up some empty space or distance as water might do in nature itself. But it is done with wariness and the first sign of it not being recognized for what it is is enough to make it draw back and move elsewhere. This is a rather strange tendency and now that I can see it, I try and be less judgemental about people and about my own reactions.”

The energy of Fire

2011-08-29T07:25:00.000+01:00

In the past few weeks I have become very aware of the Fire element, particularly as here in England we hardly seem to have had a summer before late summer is in the air, and even, oh horror, so early, a hint of the autumn to come. Perhaps my own Fire element has craved more of the warmth and sunlight it needs to fill it before its season passes, but, whatever the reason, it is at Fire that I find that I am looking with somewhat new eyes.

For what I have noticed increasingly, in a way that I did not do before, is the sheer energy this element shows in all it does, like a spring within it always coiled and ready to be released at each new encounter with the world. It is even there in its smile, an outpouring of warmth towards others, very unlike the timid, passive or more withdrawn smiles of other elements. I don’t think I had realised until now quite how much yang energy is contained in this most yang of all elements, whose season, after all is high summer, the yang high-point of the year.

I think we often regard Fire as being a gentle element, perhaps because we believe that the love that it brings to bear on all things is a gentle emotion, which it so rarely is, just as Fire is far from being as gentle as the impression it likes to give of itself. I have recently been looking at videos on YouTube of famous Chinese people to take as examples close to home for when I teach in China, and this is when I was struck, so unexpectedly, by the weight of energy pouring out in all Fire’s movements. Watching yet again the Chinese pianist, Lang Lang, it is so vividly clear in the way he plays. Through his playing he reaches out forcefully to the conductor in front of him, the orchestra around him and the audience beyond him, almost as though trying to capture them with his joy. I compared this with other pianists I know, some of whom will sit quite still and withdrawn at the piano, so yin-like, as though communing silently with the music and apparently, during these moments of their playing, unaware of the world beyond them.

So if you are a five element acupuncturist and are trying to work out ways of recognising Fire, watch out for the energy you feel coming towards you. And then learn to compare this with the very different energies of those other two powerful elements, Wood and Water. Wood does not try to share anything with you in the way Fire so ardently would like to do, but wants more to force itself on to you. Water’s energetic thrust is much more elusive, being apparently so gentle at one moment, and then, like flood water, sweeping you aside in its rush to survive.

I am always delighted to discover yet again the elements’ ability to surprise me with the variety of ways in which they reveal their differences.

The delight of unexpected words

2011-08-22T08:43:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I spent an hour wandering through an exhibition at the British Library of that much under-rated and under-read writer, Mervyn Peake, of Ghormenghast fame. And I give below three lovely quotations of his for those who read this to ponder a little.

I particularly love the first, which echoes why we five element acupuncturists always, always, start, not, as is the unhappy custom now, from the Lung, but from that much more important organ, the Heart, which is numbered One in our Roman numerology of the 12 officials for that very reason.

“To live at all is miracle enough…
…. When every heartbeat hammers out the proof
That life itself is miracle enough.”

....“Neither be afraid of the unorthodox subject nor in finding delight in the contemplation of commonplace things. Anything, seen without prejudice, is enormous.”

....“For it is one’s ambition to create one’s own world in a style germane to its substance, and to people it with native forms and denizens that never were before, yet have their root in one’s experience. As the earth was thrown from the sun, so from the earth the artist must fling out into space, complete from pole to pole, his own world which, whatsoever form it takes, is the colour of the globe it flew from, as the world itself is coloured by the sun.”

An illuminating article by Heiner Fruehauf all should read

2011-08-15T21:27:00.002+01:00

I have just read Heiner’s article on Chinese Medicine In Crisis: Science, Politics, And The Making Of “TCM”, which appears in the August 2011 newsletter of his website http://www.classicalchinesemedicine.org./ . This is an update of his 1999 article with the same title.

I give below his opening sentence and the quotation with which he heads his article:

The latter half of the 19th century and through the end of the 20th century has been a time of great political, economic, cultural, and scientific transformation in China. Chinese medicine, the shining gem of traditional science, has had to endure many assaults in this process, sinking the field into a quagmire where it had to fight bitterly for its own survival. This course of events can be called “The Century When Traditional Chinese Medicine Was Tied up in the Straightjacket of Utter Delusion.”
–Li Zhichong, Director of Chinese TCM Association, 2002

Heiner writes that his article “is based on the conviction that the traditional art of Oriental medicine is dying – both in mainland China, home of the mother trunk of the field, and consequently overseas where branches of the tree are trying to grow.”

I think everybody who wants to gain a deeper understanding of the current state of traditional Chinese medicine throughout the world will find something to ponder about in this article.

Now China, here I come!

2011-08-14T19:16:00.000+01:00

Everybody interested in the future of five element acupuncture will share my delight that it is now making its way back to China, carried first on the wings of the Chinese-language edition of my Handbook of Five Element Acupuncture, which will be in Chinese bookshops in a week or so, and then by my own presence in China. I have been invited over there at the end of October by Professor Liu Lihong of the Clinical Research Institute of Classical Chinese Medicine attached to the Guangxi College of Traditional Chinese Medicine. He is a colleague of Heiner Fruehauf, who many of you will know as the author of the very important article Chinese Medicine in Crisis (Journal of Chinese Medicine No 61, October 1999). You can also see Professor Liu talking to Heiner on the website http://www.classicalchinesemedicine.org/. Professor Liu encouraged Mei Long, a Chinese postgraduate student of mine, now living in the Netherlands, to translate the Handbook.

I will be flying first to Chengdu, then to the Guanxi College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Nanning to teach a group of acupuncturists there for about a week. I will then fly on to Beijing to give a seminar at the large international conference which Professor Liu is organizing. He regards this as a very significant step in the important programme of re-introducing five element acupuncture to China and re-attaching Chinese acupuncture more firmly to its traditional roots. (Heiner’s article is a very good introduction to the background to this.)

It is a great honour to have been invited by him and to have been recognised by him as an important contributor to his work.

(You can also read a fuller background to this visit in my blogs of 1 June, 2 August & 8 November 2010 and 16 June & 7 July of this year.)

At the same time I am continuing my translation for Elisabeth Rochat de la Vallée of her 101 Notions-Clés de la Médecine Chinoise (101 Key Concepts of Chinese Medicine), which brings together many of her teachings of the classics of Chinese medicine over the years. It forms a fascinating companion to my own recently-started studies of Mandarin. I feel it is important that I can at least greet and thank my hosts in China in their mother tongue! As a former linguist, I have always felt it was a pity that I did not have enough time to study Mandarin in depth, and am happy now to be able to remedy this, with the incentive of my China visit spurring me on.

On the domestic front, it is also good to have news of the phoenix rising from the ashes of CTA in the form of the Acupuncture Academy starting soon in Leamington, appropriately the birth-place of five element acupuncture training in the UK. I have visited their new premises, and wish the Academy every success as it launches its innovative new course. Dublin, too, is going to have its own five element college. It is good to be able to report good news of this kind for five element acupuncture, both here and in the wider world, at the end of a difficult year on the acupuncture front.

More blogs about my visit on my return from China.

Zaijian! (Goodbye!)

We can only cope with what we can cope with

2011-08-03T08:20:00.000+01:00

As I get older, I hope I get a little wiser and also a little more tolerant of my own inadequacies. And one of the snippets of wisdom this year has taught me is contained in a mantra I now say to myself, “We can only cope with what we can cope with”. It’s no good our being cross at ourselves or at others for doing things which, at the time or with the benefit of hindsight, we know are not wise things to do or to have done. It is difficult enough working our way through the stresses life presents us with without adding to them the weight of too much guilt when we feel that our actions have been misguided. I think it is therefore good to get used to telling ourselves that that is all we could have done at the time.

It is a particularly useful lesson for me as a five element acupuncturist, because understanding what any particular patient can cope with is another one of the subtle ways of tracing the imprint of an element. When we realise, for example, that Metal cannot cope with the sort of things Fire can, or Wood with what Earth can, we are on our way to understanding a little better what makes the different elements tick.

The art of asking the right questions in the right way

2011-08-02T08:01:00.000+01:00

Since seeing a new patient for the first time last week I have been thinking a lot about what is the right and what the wrong way of saying things. Twice I found myself asking a question awkwardly or saying something clumsily, but realised this in time, and quietly re-phrased what I was saying in a way that satisfied me.

The first time was when I asked my patient, “Are you happy with your life?”, and realised immediately that this was not the right way to frame the question. I then changed it quickly to, “How happy are you with your life?” Thinking back on this, I realise that my initial question gave my patient only the option of saying “yes” or “no”, either reply being unlikely to reflect the truth, since nobody is either truly only happy or only unhappy about all aspects of their life. Such a black and white question makes it easy only to respond with a black and white reply, leaving no room for all those grey areas in which we live our lives most of the time, sometimes happy, sometimes unhappy, but never either of these all the time.

The second time was when my patient told me that she was going back to Ireland to see her family for the first time in 4 years, and I found the words, “How lovely”! How exciting for you!”, coming to my lips, before I bit them off in time, and asked instead, “Are you looking forward to this or are you dreading it?”. My first question was like one of those meaningless interchanges we litter our social life with and which mean absolutely nothing, such as, “How are you?”, “I’m fine”. It would effectively have closed the door on any hope of hearing how my patient actually felt about seeing her family after such a long time. Why had she left it so long, after all, if it was an easy relationship? Ireland, unlike Australia, is easy to travel to.

On such little shifts in the way we frame our questions and responses to our patients often hangs the development of a good or tricky relationship with our patients. I still myself remember the time when a friend told me that she was surprised that I had reacted as I did to something that had happened, and said, “I can’t understand why you didn’t…….” That effectively stopped me from telling her anything more about myself, because I felt I was regarded as a bit odd for being as I was. Instead of being offered an implied criticism, what I would have responded well to would have been to have been asked why I did what I did.

And we must make sure that our engagement with our patients, too, gives them the freedom to tell us truly why they did what they did and felt what they felt. We must never assume we know the answers to this. Only our patient does.

Find the element, and the points will look after themselves

2011-07-29T11:42:00.000+01:00

I am not somebody who enjoys experimenting in my acupuncture. I regard myself as a steady plodder, and like to think I work my way along paths well-trodden before me. One of the ways in which this somewhat cautious approach reveals itself is in my choice of points. I have often said that I have a very small repertoire of points, concentrating mainly on those few points which have a close and safe relationship with the element I am treating. I focus mainly on the command points,then on other points on the elements which I have gathered together over the years, on points which release energy blocks of all kind, and finally, and only then, on that difficult but important category of points which we select, as we say, “for their spirit”. It is this group which causes every acupuncturist the most trouble, since it is like opening a can of worms, as we ask ourselves which point exactly we need to use today for its spirit for this particular patient, and often can’t come up with the answer.

What I don’t usually do, though, is experiment. I have not had the habit, as other acupuncturists apparently have, of looking up the list of acupuncture points and branching out in a new direction by choosing a point I have never used, usually basing this choice on a point’s name. I have thought about this quite a lot recently, because I am at the stage in my practice where I am enjoying injecting something new into it, and what can be newer than using a point I have never used before? So, venturing on to new terrain, I have done this for one or two patients and then stood back to assess whether I have learnt anything from this experiment, and whether, more crucially, my patients, thus experimented upon, have responded in ways that differ from their responses to the more familiar kinds of treatment I have offered them before.

What I find, not unexpectedly, is that I really could not say what effect any of these new points have had, except that, as usual, my patients have continued to improve as they did before with my familiar array of points. I asked myself whether there was any sign that something new had occurred, and came up with the answer, “no”. So on a very small sample of just a few treatments, certainly, a mathematician would say, not a statistically significant number of any kind, I learnt nothing which shook my long-held belief that the fundamental nature of any five element treatment consists in addressing the element, rather than worrying about the points we use to address this element. I will always stick to my mantra, “Think element, not points”, to help me in my practice. The selection of points then always becomes secondary to the importance of selecting the right element.

So take heart all those many acupuncturists who seem to worry too much about point selection, and particularly about what exactly “selecting points for their spirit” means. All points, particularly those all-important command points, have a “spirit”.

Once you find the element, the points will look after themselves.

Preparing to meet a new patient

2011-07-24T10:46:00.000+01:00

I have written before about the courage it takes to be a practitioner as we prepare to confront the unknown in each new patient we meet (see my blog of 25 April 2011 on The unknowability of another human being). I am preparing myself to do just that this week when I meet a new patient for the first time.

It will be up to me to ensure that I conduct this meeting in such a way that it ends with my patient feeling that I have already helped her in some way. It should also leave me feeling, not that I must “know the patient’s element”, as though that is the be-all and end-all of this initial interaction, but that I know enough about her to make her feel happy to come back a second time.

Of course this knowledge, and all the other little bits of knowledge I will gain each time I meet her, will eventually together point me towards one element, I hope, but even if I feel confident about which element early on, that alone will never be sufficient. Just deciding on an element, however correctly we may make our diagnosis, only does so much, unless we add to it that deeper level of understanding, that “soul to soul” bit, which will give to our treatment its special flavour. And we must never forget that we can start off on what we eventually find is not the right element and yet help our patients at a deep level through our empathy with them.

Above all, I must be curious. Perhaps I am fortunate that I have always been fascinated by glimpses of other people’s lives. If I am amongst a group of people, what I most enjoy is sitting back, unobserved, and watching how they interact with one another. These interactions are endlessly fascinating, and, for a five element acupuncturist, endlessly instructive. I must bring this curiosity with me as the most important gift I will be bringing to my new patient. I need to gather all those snippets she will tell me about her loves, her longings and her disappointments, and use them to start building up a picture of her life and how she lives it now and will hope to be living it better in the future if the treatment for which she has approached me is to help her. And then I will need to look deeply into myself and examine how what she has told me, and the way in which she told me this, points me in the direction of one element.

I have learnt over the years not to be too hard on myself, and not to allow any dissatisfaction I may feel about the way I conduct this first encounter to affect me too deeply. I can only do the best I can at the time, and if I feel that I have somehow failed my patient in some way by not quite adjusting my approach sensitively enough, then there is always the next time in which to correct this. We must never ask too much of ourselves in this very delicate business of our engagement with our patients. As long as they feel we care about them, they will always come back a next time and give us another chance to get things a little more right.

There are 25 ways of expressing the 5 emotions

2011-07-13T20:56:00.000+01:00

It is worth remembering that, since each of us is composed of a unique combination of all the five elements, and each element expresses every one of the five emotions, there are in effect 25 possible expressions of the different emotions. The five principal categories which tradition associates with a particular element, such as joy for Fire and fear for Water, are therefore modified when it is not a Fire person expressing joy or a Water person expressing fear. When a Metal person expresses joy or fear, those expressions of joy or fear will be shaded by grief, Metal’s dominant emotion, and therefore will express themselves in a different way from a Wood person expressing joy or fear, or a Fire or Water person expressing joy or fear.

It is therefore not simply a matter of observing joy or fear expressed to their fullest in Fire or Water people, but of having experience of observing these emotions in people who are not Fire or Water. We have to begin to differentiate the type of joy or fear being shown, however much this may be buried beneath the dominant emotion of another element. Fire or Water will show these two emotions in their purest form, since they pour out straight from the organs controlled by these two elements, whereas joy shown by an Earth person or fear shown by a Metal person will be modified by the patina of sympathy or thoughtfulness Earth throws over all it does and the patina of grief which Metal shows in all it does. In other words they will show an Earth or Metal-type joy or fear, which will be quite different from joy or fear expressed in pure form by Fire or Water.

In trying to gain a foothold in the tricky world of interpreting the emotional signatures of an element, we therefore have to look carefully at all the different possible nuances of emotional expression. We have to bring to this all the knowledge of the elements we have accumulated so far to help point us in one of the five directions. We can do this in retrospect, as it were, by looking carefully at a person whose element we are sure of, and observing how they express the emotions of the other four elements, not just their own. How, for example, does a Metal person express their anger or their sympathy, or a Wood person their grief or their fear? Such an exercise is a very useful way of expanding our library of pointers to the different elements.

Unfortunately words are inadequate tools to describe such subtle distinctions, so regretfully this blog is the only answer I can give to the request of another acupuncturist who asked if I “could perhaps say something about the different responses you have to the control of Wood and the control of Fire. I have a patient who is like a blazing log stack, a wonderful human in there but very controlling, and I can't come down on a CF”. Sorry I can’t help you more than this, Kate, except to encourage you to focus your emotional antennae a little more each time you see this patient. Something about the nature of what you see as his/her controlling character will eventually point you to one or other element (which may after all prove to be neither Wood nor Fire, just to confuse you further!). But give it time! We’re usually, if not always, in more of a hurry than our patients.

The significance of a “Husband-Wife” imbalance and its diagnosis

2011-07-10T09:29:00.000+01:00

I have written this blog in answer to a query from somebody commenting on my blog of 23 June in my sister blog http://www.five-element-treatments.blogspot.com/, but I think it is important enough to include here in this blog. I was asked how I had diagnosed a Husband-Wife imbalance just by looking at the patient. What did I observe that made me diagnose H/W? I give my answer below. It is a very detailed answer because the question fired me to think carefully what a H/W imbalance means, and touches upon what is a very complex and profound area, that of pulse diagnosis.

We are told to diagnose a H/W through the pulses, with the pulses of the right side, the “husband’s” side being qualitatively stronger than those of the left, “the wife’s”. Diagnosis from pulses alone presupposes that our pulse-taking is sensitive enough to feel what may be an extremely subtle difference. I have often said, and will go on repeating, that it is foolish to rely entirely on our pulse-taking in making a diagnosis, since it is a very great skill accurately to interpret what the pulses are telling us, acquired only after years of practice. To understand this, but certainly not to be too daunted by this, it is essential that we remember at all times what we are attempting to assess at those 6 positions at each wrist that we gently palpate to give us a pulse-reading of the 12 officials forming the five elements.

We should think of the 12 pulses as access points to the elements. They can be palpated most clearly where the blood flow is at its strongest and nearest the surface. Since time immemorial in traditional Chinese medicine, and in modern times in Western medicine, too, the most easily accessible point has been accepted as being over the radial artery at the wrist. It is important to visualize the pattern the 12 pulses form on any pulse chart, and here we should divide them into 6, since at each position there are two, one at the superficial level and one at the deep level. (I know that different diagrams of the pulses have been drawn up over the centuries showing an intermediate position, which would in effect make 18 possible pulses, and also different pulse positions, particularly in relation to one of the pulses on the right side (the five element Outer Fire pulses), but I am writing here only about the order of the pulses which five element acupuncturists use.)

In effect, the understanding that the five elements will reveal the state of their health in body and soul at a tiny site like this, less than a couple of inches (oh how I still love my old form of measurement!) (a few cms) in length, is awe-inspiring and still blows my mind. It means, in effect, that the work of all the elements acting together is creating the blood flow at every point in the body, not just at the wrist, but that it can be detected most easily where the arterial blood is closest to the surface. (Pulses can also be palpated at the ankle or over the carotid artery in the neck where there are equally strong pulsations, but the wrist is used for reasons of easy access.) It is important always to remember the order of the pulses, and here not just the order on each hand but the order of both hands taken together. If we hold the hands together facing upwards (do this now if you are reading this), imagine that you are drawing a line which starts at the pulses nearest the wrist on the left hand, moves down to the two other pulse positions on the left wrist and then passes over to the pulses on the right hand, continuing down to the third position on the right before looping back over again to the first pulses of the left hand again, forming a continuous figure of eight. In effect, we are tracing the order of the elements backwards, from Inner Fire (Heart/Small Intestine), back to Wood and Water, back across to the right wrist to Metal, Earth and Outer Fire (Heart Protector/Three Heater), before looping back to the inner side of Fire again and so on.

We are taught to palpate the pulses in this way, first left-hand pulses starting with the first position over the Heart/Small Intestine aspect of Fire and then right-hand pulses starting with the Metal pulses. This is a simple way of reading the pulses, and emphasizes the importance of the Heart pulse as being the first pulse we palpate, but in doing this we tend to forget the actual order of the elements, even if we were ever aware that the pulses represent this, which many of us are not. It is only in helping us make a Husband-Wife diagnosis (and that of an Entry-Exit block) that it is so imperative to think of this order to understand what our pulses are telling us.

We know that the flow of energy moves along the Sheng cycle from Fire to Earth to Metal etc. We know also that we correct a H/W by needling the following points: Bl 67, Ki 7, Liv 4, Ki 3, SI 4, Ht 7. This order of points does the following: First it reconnects the mother element, Metal (a right-hand pulse) with its child, Water (a lef-hand pulse), then, by needling Liv 4, it draws energy from the Metal element (right-hand pulse) across the Ke cycle to the Wood element (mother element to grandchild element) (left-hand pulse), then by needling Ki 3 it does the same from Earth across the Ke cycle to Water, and finally it reinforces the Heart by needling the source points of Inner Fire, finishing with Ht 7.

In effect, by diagnosing an excess of energy in the right-hand pulses and a frightening depletion of energy in the left-hand pulses, the classic diagnosis of H/W, the pulses are telling us that there is a potential breakdown between the elements, and in particular between the point at which energy from Metal passes over to its child, Water. It isn’t a complete breakdown, because that means death, but it is sufficiently serious for us to regard a H/W imbalance as a dangerous condition because it is depleting the energy flowing to the Heart. It is therefore interesting to see how often the pulses leap back into balance immediately Metal is reconnected more stronly to Water, i.e, after needling Bl 67, Ki 7. It is therefore a good idea to read the pulses after you have needled these two points to see if you can detect the immediate sign of relief as the energy flow starts to re-establish itself, and the Heart can begin to relax.

With all this in mind (and I am sure anybody not a five element acupuncturist reading this will have given up well before now!), I will go back to the question which has prompted this exposition of what a H/W imbalance actually represents. If it reveals a serious weakening of the flow of energy from mother to child element around the complete cycle of the five elements, which it does, then this serious weakening must somehow show itself not only on the pulses but in the way a patient presents themselves, which it does. Patients will look despairing, as if they have given up hope (the Heart almost giving in). As well as showing this despair, they will surprisingly often say things which help our diagnosis, such as, “I don’t think I can go on” or “I feel like giving up”. They may look as if they are too weak to talk, just wanting to lie there passive with their eyes closed.

H/W can appear suddenly, as though the Heart all at once can take no more, unlike imbalances such as Aggressive Energy which appear slowly over time, so the change in a patient from one treatment to the next can be very obvious. In the case of the patient I was writing about, he came into the room looking so very different from how he had left me the week before, that the change was dramatic enough for me to suspect H/W even before I took his pulses.

Finally, I repeat my mantra, “never rely on pulses alone to tell you what is going on”. Use all your senses and all your feelings and any other diagnostic information to help you diagnostically, such as a patient rubbing their eyes in the case of a SI-Bl block or the onset of hay-fever in the case of a Co-St block, since our pulse-taking (mine included) may not be sensitive enough to do the diagnosis on its own.

Does plagiarism matter?

2011-07-07T21:19:00.000+01:00

I have noticed that writers get extremely hot under the collar when they suspect somebody of plagiarizing their work in some way. And I always wonder why. It seems to me that all the words of all the writers we have read echo within us for a long time without our realising it, and of course this is particularly true of the oft-repeated sayings of famous writers. I don’t think any of us would now write “to be” without hearing the echo of “or not to be” in our heads. And I was pleased to read the following yesterday in a book I bought at Stratford-upon-Avon after I had watched that marvellous actor, Patrick Stewart, re-create Shylock for me in The Merchant of Venice in a totally absorbing new way.

“Scholars have long and fruitfully studied the transforming work of that (Shakeseare’s) imagination on the books that, from evidence with the plays themselves, Shakespeare must certainly have read. As a writer he rarely started from a blank slate; he characteristically took materials that had already been in circulation and infused them with his supreme creative energies. On occasion, the reworking is so precise and detailed that he must have had the book from which he was deftly borrowing directly on his writing table as his quill pen raced across the paper.” (Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World, Pimlico 2005, p 13)

I think Shakespeare would be flattered if he had realised how deeply his words have scored us. Inevitably, then, the chances of our inadvertently including some figure of speech into our writing, some juxtaposition of colouring or shape into a painting or some musical expression into a composition, all garnered from other writers, painters or composers, are extremely high, so high indeed that I was told that Andrew Lloyd Webber is so frightened of copying somebody else’s work that he refuses to listen to other people’s music for a time as he composes. I don’t know how true this anecdote is, but it certainly illustrates the fear that we may be accused of somehow not being original.

This has never worried me, since I am always happy to acknowledge my own debt to all the many writers I have ever read. Only a few days ago I heard the cadences of William Faulkner’s idiosyncratic and beautiful prose in a sentence I wrote. I know that behind every sentence of mine lie banked up many thousands of others’ writings which have each in their differing ways created the foundation upon which I build up my own thoughts in words. I am also flattered, rather than dismayed, if I find, as I do, echoes of my own words in other people’s writings, particularly in my field of acupuncture. One such incident comes to mind. When I started my acupuncture school in the mid-90s, I coined the, to me, happy and thought-provoking phrase, “An ancient form of healing for a modern world” to describe what we did, then took it as a compliment, rather than as something worrying, when another acupuncture college a few years later used nearly the same words in their promotional material.

I think thought should be free wherever this is reasonable, not circumscribed by lawsuits and trademarks. I suppose this depends on the level and amount of copying and the purposes to which it is being put. A student cutting and pasting large chunks of other people’s writings without adding anything of their own and without acknowledgement is obviously one thing. A writer echoing a few words or cadences of speech in an entirely new creation is quite another.

Somebody recently asked me whether I had protected the translation of my Handbook in its Chinese edition with enough copyright safeguards. I have done what I have been told is sensible to do, but if by some chance some publisher somewhere, perhaps in one of the far-flung countries, such as Indonesia or Venezuela, which read my blog, decides to bring out an uncopyrighted edition of any of my books, I think that I might say, “Good luck to them”, rather than pursuing them, usually fruitlessly, with the law. At least in this way more people will read the books, and what I may lose in money (and there is little enough, if any, money to be made in publishing these days), I will gain in readers, surely the aim of all writing.

Mandarin – here I come!

2011-07-07T08:52:00.000+01:00

The translation of my Handbook of Five Element Acupuncture into Chinese (see my blog, Meetings with remarkable people, of 16 June) is a moment of completion for me, as if my journey into five element acupuncture, started more than 25 years back, has now come full circle, very satisfyingly. All the fears I had for five element acupuncture as I closed my school some 4 years ago have, in a surprisingly different way from any that I could have imagined, proved groundless. Here now the door back to China, and with it to all those countless people who still look to China to guide them in their approach to traditional Chinese medicine, has re-opened itself to this beloved discipline of mine, and invited it back in. I feel that my work has indeed been accomplished.

But not quite yet fully! For I am invited to China once my book appears on Chinese bookshelves, and to prepare for this I feel, as a former linguist, proud of trying never to travel to a country without at least some slight knowledge of its language, that it would be discourteous of me not to learn at least the rudiments of Mandarin in order to be able to respond to what my Chinese hosts will be saying. I have always been surprised that I have delayed so long before immersing myself in the Chinese language which underpins all acupuncture in a very profound way, particularly as I am now translating Elisabeth Rochat de la Valléé’s Les 101 Notions-Clés de la Médecine Chinoise (101 Key Concepts). Perhaps it was simply a matter of never finding the time, for I tried to start several times, or because I was afraid (and still am) that my increasingly deficient hearing will not pick up the nuances of Chinese speech. But now I intend to make up for this strange omission if I can, and am about to enrol in an intensive Mandarin course. More of this anon!

Why are actresses called actors now?

2011-07-05T06:59:00.001+01:00

In my last blog I wrote about a film actor and actress, and found myself irritated yet again by the, to me, utterly ridiculous convention which appeared some years back out of nowhere, and I hope may at some time in the future disappear as quickly again, that of calling actresses actors. Is this political correctness gone mad? We still distinguish a husband from a wife, a girl from a boy, a widow from a widower, a prince from a princess, so why not an actor from an actress? Of course some professions only have one word to describe both male and female practitioners, such as a barrister or a doctor, perhaps because women were only admitted later to these professions, whilst actresses belong to a long tradition. And nobody appears to have thought of calling a female barrister a barristress or a female doctor a doctress, although this is what other languages do. But why replace a perfectly good word which has been used for centuries? And in an obscure way, I find its removal to be demeaning rather than respectful to women, as though we all need to make an effort to remember gender equality.

Interestingly, the convention has not yet crept into everyday speech, where people still talk about the actress Judi Dench, but in the written press and on radio or television it has been banished to the archives, the latter obviously by BBC edict. And yet I was amused the other day to hear a journalist stumbling over himself, the word “actress” coming out unbidden, before being quickly corrected to “actor”.

Can anybody tell me when and why the change from actress to actor took place?

Postscript to this, added today, 7 July: I have read the following in the Independent of 5 July: "...two of Hollywood's best acresses, Helena Bonham Carter and Gillian Anderson,...."!

The quality of tenderness

2011-07-03T14:44:00.000+01:00

I have just seen a lovely French film, Potiche (Trophy Wife), with Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu. Watching Depardieu set me thinking again about that elusive quality called tenderness. This is a quality which this strange giant of a man (and he has now become almost gross in size) shares with another large actor, Robbie Coltrane. A friend of mine commented upon this after seeing the film. “What an attractive man Depardieu is”, she said with surprise in her voice. And I knew exactly what she meant. The tenderness shines out of his eyes, a quality of gentle loving-kindness which draws us to him. It is the eyes, those windows of our soul, which reveal the capacity of their owner’s soul to express love, and, in the case of these two actors, their eyes show it so unreservedly and warmly. It is worth going to see Potiche just for those few moments when Depardieu looks at Deneuve with love, and also for the beautiful scene in which the two of them, both middle-aged and slightly ungainly, dance gently together. This is more erotic than many much more explicit love scenes often lacking in any tenderness whatsoever.

It is a quality we need much of as acupuncturists.

“Protecting oneself from the eternities”

2011-06-25T09:47:00.000+01:00

I have spent the last days re-reading one of my favourite books, The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. If you haven’t read it, and want to emerge from the last page smiling and at peace, then do. It is a beautiful, heart-warming book. (And the film they made of it, surprisingly, recreates this warmth and beauty wonderfully.)

And, as usually happens when one reads, up popped some words which echo so much that I feel expresses my wonder at the depths and awesomeness of human life.

“She pulled her wrap closer round her with a gesture of defence, of keeping out and off. She didn’t want to grow sentimental. Difficult not to, here; the marvellous night stole in through all one’s chinks, and brought in with it, whether one wanted them or not, enormous feelings, - feelings one couldn’t manage, great things about death and time and waste; glorious and devastating things, magnificent and bleak, at once rapture and terror and immense, heart-cleaving longing. She felt small and dreadfully alone. She felt uncovered and defenceless. Instinctively she pulled her wrap closer. With this thing of chiffon she tried to protect herself from the eternities.”

Perhaps we can never truly protect ourselves from the eternities, nor should we. We should be awed by them, often frightened by them, but always, always acknowledge their presence.

Meetings with remarkable people

2011-06-16T20:26:00.000+01:00

I am fortunate to have had that part of my life, the part into which five element acupuncture burst like some spray of stardust, its second half, illuminated (not too strong a word) by two remarkable masters, both of whom, in their differing ways, moved my life onwards in a different direction, but to me, looking back now, somehow in a pre-ordained way.

The first was JR Worsley, the second now is Liu Lihong. The first led me deep into a world of the spirit which has informed my acupuncture practice ever since. The second has only just appeared over my horizon, but is just beckoning to me from that vast region of the physical world which is China, and from that vast region of the spiritual world which is Chinese thought embedded deep in its past, the thoughts of the Nei Jing, of Lao Tse and of all the long and ancient lineage of practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine.

I started my acupuncture studies because I was curious to understand the profound reactions awoken in me by my own treatment. I only encountered JR Worsley late on in my studies, but my further studies with him, his visits to my practice and my many visits with my patients to consultation days with him deepened my understanding of his profound contribution to moving acupuncture forward into the modern world and widening it to encompass the psychological insights this modern world has provided. He represents the first stage of my encounter with acupuncture.

The second stage starts after I closed my acupuncture college a few years ago, and this was followed by a gap in time before the next part of my acupuncture life began about a year ago. It was then that I met Mei Long, a young Chinese acupuncturist practising in Holland, and my acupuncture path moved forwards in a different direction, this time towards China (see my blogs of 1st June, 2nd August and 8th Nov 2010). Mei has now completed her translation of my Handbook of Five Element Practice into Chinese, and it is now in proof form (it looks beautiful), awaiting an introduction to be written by Liu Lihong.

And here we come to my second important encounter, that with Liu Lihong, which took place at the Rothenburg Conference a few weeks ago. Having written a seminal book, Reflections on Traditional Chinese Medicine, which Mei tells me is a bestseller in China, he is determined to bring back to traditional Chinese medicine the spirit which has drained from it, and sees five element acupuncture as representing that spirit in the field of acupuncture (he is a traditional herbalist). He is encouraging me to come to China once my book is published over there, which should be in the next few months. So as one door closed upon my life as a teacher in this country, the next, beckoning me to continue my teaching in China, now opens for me. My acupuncture life has indeed been fortunate to have been blessed by two such important encounters with remarkable men.

Finally, lest anybody should think that it is only men who have taught me the great lessons of life, these encounters were preceded by one which brought to an end the first half of my life, for this part of my life was illuminated by the insights of a very great woman, Anna Freud, Freud’s daughter. She died just before I encountered acupuncture, and she would have been delighted to know the direction my life took not long after her death, for she was always encouraging me “to do something big”. I think I now dare say, a little hesitantly and I hope with due humility, that I have now done what she would have liked me to do. I am sure that without her encouragement I would never have dared do what I have done or write what I have written, including this present blog! Nor would I have been ready to accept the challenges my life has offered, and might instead have been tempted to turn my back upon them as I would have done in earlier days.

I give thanks for having been granted the rare grace of encountering three such remarkable people, each of whom in some way changed or is changing the direction of my life.

A lesson in humility

2011-06-12T08:19:00.000+01:00

Without our being aware of it, we tend to overlook the shadows our own element cast over the patients we are treating, and which therefore inevitably to some extent distort the signals our patients’ elements are sending us. We all have one (or more) weak spots in recognizing specific elements, and if we are to be good practitioners we must learn to accept this and take this into account in any diagnosis we make. Mine is definitely distinguishing between Fire and Earth, something I find I have in common with many other practitioners. I see that this comes from the fact that both elements, in their differing ways, need people, and therefore respond to people with some eagerness.

In my case, I have come to see that one of the reasons for this may lie in the interaction between my own Fire element and Earth people and other Fire people, and the way in which my own Fire responds when confronting the needs of these two elements. My Fire need is to relate closely to each of my patients, and I will be tempted to interpret the warmth with which both Fire and Earth will respond to my warmth as though filtered through what I call my pink Fire spectacles. But Earth’s and Fire’s responses differ, as we know. Earth responds more because it is glad to be offered understanding, Fire more because it is happy to bestow warmth upon the practitioner. Both interactions will make my own Fire element happy, but for different reasons. With Earth I am pleased to see that my offerings are being so warmly accepted (we could say, taken in and swallowed), and I will bask in the warmth my Fire patients offer me.

The direction of movement is quite different in the two cases. Earth’s is to move back and take in, while Fire’s is to move forward and give.

I have been thinking a lot about this ever since a fellow practitioner said to me recently, “You know that famous film actress with the large smile? I see her as so typically Earth, with that mouth which you, Nora, have often called an Earth mouth, open like a baby bird crying out for food.” She was talking about Julia Roberts. I was taken aback because Julia Roberts is somebody I rather blithely included in my list of what I considered to be Fire people. Was it possible that my fellow practitioner was right, and was that, perhaps, the reason why Julia Roberts doesn’t actually make me feel warm inside, despite the great smile? So off I went to look at her on You-Tube, and indeed, when I looked more closely and more carefully, what I saw was somebody who demanded something of me, rather than somebody who gave me something.

This reinforces one of my mantras. Never allow yourself to be lulled into thinking you are absolutely certain about a person’s guardian element, but always keep open the possibility that you may be misinterpreting the signals coming from their elements. And always, always, remain humble and ready to learn. The uniqueness of each person is not easily encapsulated within the all-encompassing meanings contained in. one of five words, Wood, Fire…..

All the little relationships the Small Intestine is asked to enter into

2011-06-10T12:14:00.002+01:00

A conference like the one I went to at Rothenburg in Germany last week, with its 1000 participants, makes special demands upon my Small Intestine. The little mediaeval town is overrun with acupuncturists, making it extremely likely that the person you pass in the street will be a fellow acupuncturist. This presents a particular challenge for anybody who is Inner Fire, like me, for every contact with another person, however fleeting, offers the potential for a tiny relationship to be formed. Each person I passed in the Rothenburg streets therefore placed a slight strain on my Small Intestine as it asked itself how wide it wanted to open the doors to my Heart, or whether it was wiser simply to look away and not engage.

These constant challenges to my Small Intestine meant that it could never really relax, for if it does so it would feel that it is abdicating its responsibility to protect the Heart. Luckily, the meetings with good friends of mine who were also there helped to lighten the load. When I was with them, all was well, my Heart beamed with joy and my Small Intestine could at last relax. But never entirely, however, for it is such a necessarily restless aspect of Fire, and always has to be on the go, sifting and sorting, sifting and sorting.

In an idle moment I sometimes wish I were another element! And if I had a choice as to which one, I think it would have to be Metal, so quiet and self-contained, so able to cut itself off from people without a second thought. It would have no such problems as I have in deciding who to smile at and who to ignore. But then I know that it, too, will of course have its own different, but less people-centred stresses.

The effect we have on others

2011-05-23T09:14:00.000+01:00

None of us really knows the effect we have on others, for the spheres of influence we spread around ourselves are much more extensive than we think. Many is the time that somebody has said to me, “I remember what you told me…”, when I could not remember saying it, or even, sometimes, the person who came up to tell me that I had said it.

And just as many are the times when I have said, either silently to myself or to the other person, “I remember what you said”, and how far those words had spread their effects on me and around me down the years. One example of this is particularly vivid to me. Many years ago a friend of mine said, “I would never let anybody talk to me like that”, and I looked at her and saw that nobody would indeed dare talk to her like that. The signals she was sending out were telling those that approached her to beware. This was when I realised for the first time how a person’s aura (I would now say that this is a reflection of their element) envelops them so powerfully that it dictates the actions of those they encounter.

This realisation has been a profound lesson for me, for it means that the stronger and healthier a person’s elements become, the more they will be able to withstand the onslaughts of life and thus act as protection. This is a particularly valuable lesson for a five element acupuncturist, for it confirms that strengthening the guardian element enables the patient eventually to deal appropriately with stresses which before may have overwhelmed them. When in balance, a person’s element will be sending out messages to those we encounter telling them that they can go so far and no further. (This is why I like to call it our guardian element, for it does indeed, in balance, protect us from harm.) The protection it places around us may signal its presence often in very subtle ways, a look in the eyes, a firmness in the mouth, but it is so unmistakable that a person who may be minded to criticize may, as my friend showed me, decide instead to keep quiet. This is the way in which balanced elements show their power, and thus does nature, in balance, protect us.

Everybody, and not just acupuncturists, should learn about the elements

2011-05-22T15:56:00.000+01:00

A former student of mine has just told me that she is no longer practising acupuncture, but writes that what she learnt whilst studying with us “yet remains a profound education and absolute awakening such that it has imprinted my being for a lifetime. I am deeply grateful to you and those years studying at SOFEA.”

This reinforced what I have been thinking for some time now. A desire to learn about the elements should not be confined to those wanting to use them to study acupuncture or a similar discipline, although this is predominantly how they are studied now. To understand how the elements manifest in each one of us helps us become more aware of our own and others’ strengths and weaknesses, and thus develop greater tolerance both of ourselves and others. This goes way beyond a concentration upon the needle and where to place it.

If I were to start my life again, (and who knows, perhaps I will in another time and another place, and perhaps, too, on another planet!), I would want to found a school of the five elements, with only a small offshoot dedicated to acupuncture, to which all the world would be invited, young and old, and from any walk of life. It still pleases me that one of my graduates who understands the elements most profoundly was a builder with little education but enormous insight. I still remember his brief essay on the elements in which, in the simplest terms, he captured quite perfectly the essence of each element. Here’s to you, Errol, and to our years together studying the elements, from evening class to graduation and beyond.

I would love to be able to offer the elements to many more Errols in another life.

The love of words

2011-05-21T11:21:00.000+01:00

I love words, as all who read my books and this blog will have realised by now, so I was delighted to come across this lovely passage in an autobiography of an Irish writer, Dermot Healy, with whom I have only just become acquainted:

“I disappeared from Ireland and my family. I sat by the back window of Healy’s and read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Then I moved on to Dylan’s poems. The words shimmered on the paper and released themselves from the prison of the sentences they were in. They became things in themselves. A single word collected a myriad of meanings. Verbs bounded in open spaces. A noun was like a bowl of cream. It contained vast worlds. An adjective made an image infinite.”
(p. 58: Dermot Healy, The Bend for Home, The Harvill Press, London, 1996)

Apart from this autobiography I have read just two books by him, his latest Long Time, No See. Both are wonderfully strange and poetic. Why has he not won one of the major literary prizes yet?

The “if only’s” and “what if’s” of life

2011-05-16T15:47:00.000+01:00

I have been giving a lot of thought to how each element experiences regret. We feel regret at doing or not doing something that we wish now that we had done or not done. Each element has its own special relationship to the past, none more so than Metal, where the past is its special domain. It is here that it gets its most important work done, for it is its task to weigh up and evaluate past actions. The burden of regret will therefore weigh heaviest upon it, for Metal people want to be able to say to themselves, “I have done this well”. It is not surprising to note how often a Metal person will say, “if only I had done this…” or “what if I had done that”.

Other elements will feel the weight of regret less keenly, because for them what is past and gone will represent something different. Wood must plan for a hopeful future, and will have the least time to regret what is past. Fire experiences regret most strongly where it involves hurt it may have done to others, and will try to use this to make the present better. Earth is turned more towards itself, and may not have time to indulge in the luxury of going over the past. Water, the great survivor, may have the least interest of all in thinking of its past in its struggles to stay afloat in the present. For Metal, as we have seen, the past represents the place where it must do its work. The “if only’s” and “what if’s” of life will therefore place upon it the deepest cuts.

We can find a helpful pointer to these different approaches if we listen carefully to the tense in which we describe the most important events in our lives. I have found that whether somebody talks most in the present, future or past tense is therefore a simple, but often effective, way of helping me reach a diagnosis, to be added to all the many other little signs by which an element reveals itself. The present tense is about things happening now, the future about things to come and the past about things that have already happened, the tense in which Metal often expresses itself. Wood will be happiest saying, “I will be doing this”, Fire, “I am doing this”, and Metal “if only I had done this”. Somewhere in between lie Earth and Water.

Our guardian element leaves traces of itself in all that we do and say. I have found different modes of speech to be another simple way of tracking its footprints.

The classical pianist Lang Lang – an excellent example of Fire!

2011-05-15T10:14:00.000+01:00

For all the people who read this blog in China (and elsewhere round the world), I am happy to be able to point them to one of their compatriots, the classical pianist, Lang Lang, who is definitely (in my view) of the Fire element. You can see that he is trying to stop himself from smiling even as he plays, and is just waiting to burst into laughter as soon as he has finished.

I’ve just seen him on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show on BBC 1, so you may be able to catch him on BBC i-player.

Have a look at him there or on U-Tube, and smile at his enjoyment of his music-making and of life.

Don’t always think a red face is a sign of the Fire element

2011-05-14T07:52:00.000+01:00

One of the most frequent mistakes we have all made is to see a very red face on a patient, and immediately diagnose them as Fire. A flushed face, with an even red spread over the whole of the face is, I have found, never Fire, but either Wood or Earth.

Fire’s red tends to appear in blotches, interspersed with a much paler colour, particularly around the mouth and eyes. Its red also tends to come and go, as happens when we flush, one minute making the face very red and then dying away so that the face looks pale and drained of colour. I always see this as the Heart, and particularly its devoted servant, the Heart Protector, pumping away to try and bring a good blood supply to the face, but not having enough energy to keep the blood flow consistent.

Both Wood and Earth can have very red faces when they are out of balance, but their red does not come and go in flushes, but stays there all the time, placing a layer of red over the whole face which almost submerges the elemental colour of green or yellow beneath it. In the case of Wood, the red is a result of the weakness of the mother (Wood) causing distress in the child (Fire). In the case of Earth, the reverse is true, even though there is the same effect of flushing. Here Fire, the mother, is unable to pass on sufficient energy to its child (Earth), causing a build-up of Fire in the mother.

The red of a Wood imbalance comes from its child crying out for help, and the red of an Earth imbalance comes from its mother showing distress. The kind of red which appears will obviously be very different in either case, but will, misleadingly, appear to be the dominant colour. So beware of any snap decision about Fire when you see red!

Political power and the elements

2011-05-10T11:40:00.001+01:00

I have always been fascinated by observing the political scene from the point of view of the interaction of the elements in politicians. This country, now, is offering me fascinating insights into the different forms of power-play the elements of its leaders engage in. And of all the elements on show in our politicians, the one which engages me most is the Water element.

It is important to remember here that Water likes to do most of its work in a hidden way, like the powerful surges of the tide which leave the surface of the ocean unruffled. In my view, we have or have had three examples of Water in those in power. First, Gordon Brown, an ex-Prime Minister, who fought a deadly, often concealed battle with Tony Blair over 10 years to try and gain the ultimate prize. Then George Osborne, now Chancellor, and somebody, as I heard one political commentator say on TV last night, who always stays behind the scenes and only reluctantly comes out into the daylight. And finally, to complete my trio, Ed Milliband, the leader of the Labour Party, again a hidden man, disappearing in the past behind the obvious charisma of his brother, but stealing power by means of what appeared to be a series of hidden manoeuvres, truly a Cain and Abel story.

All three, Gordon Brown, George Osborne and Ed Milliband, show what are to me unmistakable signs of the Water element, a bluish-black colour, on TV at least, groaning, forceful voices with an inexorable push behind the words, and those fearful eyes which show Water’s ever-present fear. All three, too, are proof of the Water element’s all-devouring ambition to get to the top, allied with an unfortunate capacity to cause unease in those it encounters. None of these people exhibit the ease Tony Blair (Fire) or David Cameron (Earth) are able to draw on in their interactions with the public. Perhaps it is Water’s misfortune, that, though the likeliest of all elements to force its way to the top, it can never for a moment rest easily there, as Blair and Cameron did and can, for “uneasy sits the crown”, and its own unease and fearfulness in the relationships it tries to develop with its political colleagues and the public sow the seeds for what may be its inevitable downfall, as it did so spectacularly with Gordon Brown. We have yet to await George Osborne’s public fate, and perhaps David Cameron will shield him better and oppose him less than Tony Blair did Gordon Brown. Ed Milliband, still surprisingly so unknown a quantity, appears to be very awkward in his role, making many people already yearn for the days when his brother David, so very much more charismatic and at ease with himself (Metal?), charmed Hilary Clinton.

Lest you think that Water’s power only shows itself in men¸ I must add to this trio Cherie Blair, the ever-present, watchful presence behind Tony Blair’s throne.

And finally, as I have often said, my diagnosis can only be tentative, as I have never met any of the famous people I write about face to face.

Who ever thought that understanding about the elements was only of benefit to acupuncturists?

The unknowability of another human being

2011-04-25T09:36:00.000+01:00

I think that each of us harbours illusions about our ability to empathize with another human being. To do this entirely would mean stepping out of ourselves, out of that envelope which encloses the unique qualities which define us, and stepping into that of another person. The nearest we can get to this is always to some extent an approximation. Even with somebody with whom we think we are very close, such as a family member, we may think we understand what they are feeling only to be taken aback, as I have been on numerous occasions, by something they say or do which appears to be “out of character”. It is only so in our eyes because we have given them a character which in some respects is not true to them, but is defined by our own perceptions.

The important thing here is to accept as true that we cannot know another person as we can know ourselves. Since a part of another person is therefore always unknowable, we need to take this into account in our dealings with them as acupuncturists. In other words, we should always respect the unique inner core in another human being to which we can never have true access. The patients themselves do, however, have this access, and will open the door to themselves once they are convinced that we are to be trusted not to abuse our position, or to tread with clumsy feet on such delicate ground. We must therefore allow the patient to lead the way, and it is up to us to follow where they lead.

Little wonder, then, viewed the extremely delicate and complex nature of our first interactions with our patients, that the chances of our getting it wrong are surprisingly high. It only needs one unwise word uttered at the wrong time for the patient’s Heart Protector to slam shut the gates to the Heart, creating difficulties in our future relationship with them. Far better, then, not to be too hurried in our approach, but allow both the patient and ourselves time to orientate ourselves around each other.

The onset of summer always disturbs me

2011-04-17T11:09:00.001+01:00

People are often surprised to hear how reluctantly I welcome the longer days of spring, which for me herald an even more disturbing season, that of summer. Until I learnt about the elements, and about mine in particular, Fire, I could never understand why this was so. Now I can. I see this as a sign of the pressure building up on my element as the energies of nature change in response to greater warmth, first from the uplift Wood ushers in with spring, and then the full blast of summer’s warmer days.

You would have thought, I always said to myself, that I would feel increasingly comfortable as my own Fire energy started to receive its boost of increasing yang energy from nature outside. Why, then, does the reverse appear to be true? I find part of the answer to this lies in the feelings of threat I experience as the world out there starts to throw off its clothes to greet the sun. Everything and everybody then opens itself up more, exposing itself to the gaze. And this is the crucial point, I realise. People are everywhere around me, not hidden away as in winter, and this abundance of people can represent a kind of hidden challenge to a Fire person, because of the abundance of potential relationships it offers, as though its Heart may be overwhelmed as it tries to respond to the demands made upon it.

This may seem fanciful, almost incomprehensible, to anybody who relishes the summer, but then I myself cannot understand why people dread the start of colder days in autumn, which I welcome with a kind of relief. Each season will always represents a challenge of some kind, whether welcome or threatening, to those of that season’s element, because of the accumulation of energy it brings with it.

Of course, I realise, too, that my response to summer will always reflect the state of balance in my Fire element. I live in hope, therefore that one day I will float from spring into summer, welcoming it with open arms, as others appear to do. “Maybe this year,” I say to myself.

Two more of my favourite books

2011-04-15T08:00:00.002+01:00

I love being able to tell other people about books that I have enjoyed reading, and, more importantly, have taught me something more about human nature. Here are two more, quite different ones.

I don’t know how I came across Louis Sachar’s Holes, probably through one of those lists of people's favourite books. I gather that Louis Sachar is really a children’s writer, though Holes, like the books of Jacqueline Wilson, is really for everybody, and perhaps particularly for hard-bitten, life-weary adults, for whom reading about what can make life so precious is a powerful antidote to reading any of today’s newspapers. He has apparently written a follow-up book to this called Small Steps, which I have yet to read.

I always find it difficult to describe what a book is about. I have no memory for facts at all; I have difficulty remembering the name of the author, the name of the book or plot of a book, even the country it is set in, but I can always remember the feeling of a book, and, as now, if it is a good book, of something powerful having been added to my life. So the only way I can describe Holes is to say it is a kind of a myth about children despatched to some corrective establishment in some desert place, which is presumably America, but could be anywhere in the world, and the relationships of the children to each other, and, in particular, the beautiful relationship which develops between two of the children.

My second book of the day is by the travel writer, Colin Thubron, To a Mountain in Tibet. Obviously, from its title, I know which country this book is about, and the mountain is Mount Kailas, the Holy Mountain for both Buddhists and Hindus. Colin Thubron is neither, but he is certainly what I, with admiration, call a spiritual man, and the book can truly be called a spiritual journey in the deepest sense.

I found both these books uplifting, a word I use sparingly, because so very little is uplifting, but which I always think of as meaning something which helps me raise my eyes to what lies beyond and above.

Recognising the Water element

2011-04-12T17:55:00.000+01:00

Another practitioner asked me to look at one of her patients yesterday, and I found it interesting afterwards to think through what had gone on in the practice room which eventually led me on to my diagnosis of Water and away from the other elements.

I met the patient in the reception room for a brief exchange of greetings, and observed a quickness of movement, a rapid shake of the head, and an equally rapid dart into the practice room ahead of me. As she went to lie down, I mulled over whether this had taught me anything. I did not feel that she had looked at me at all, and this made me put both Wood and Metal at the bottom of my pile of elements. Wood, I felt, would have made direct eye contact with me, and Metal would have given me a feeling of somebody sharper, more defined, certainly more likely to observe me, rather than of somebody wanting to escape from my presence. So that left Earth, Water and Fire.

When she was lying on the couch I noticed that she shifted quickly away from me as I sat down next to her, and withdrew her hand as I put mine on hers. By now, I thought, Earth would have snuggled into the couch, and would be holding my hand tightly as though drawing me towards her. There was none of that feeling here. So what about Fire or Water? She smiled warmly, laughed quite a lot, perhaps a little too much, but failed to continue to warm me after the smiling stopped, as I would have felt with Fire.

So now I was left with one element, Water, and at last I could feel things falling into place. I observed my own reactions, and noticed that I was surprisingly unsure of myself, as if I didn’t know quite what to ask and what approach to take, a sign of the nervousness Water tends to make us feel, as a projection of its own anxiety. Added to this, I could see signs of fear in the rapid eye movements as she glanced quickly at me and away again. And, finally, I thought that I could smell something wet in the room, which is my own way of experiencing Water’s smell. On colour and sound I got no particular feedback to help me.

So with Water we started our treatment. What I suggested was very simple, but as always, profound, because we had first to clear a Husband/Wife imbalance. Then we ended with the source points of Water. She looked different as she left, showing that indefinable difference which is often the only evidence we may have at the end of treatment that a patient’s guardian element is revelling in receiving the treatment it needs.

Desert Island Discs with Martin Sheen: BBC Radio 4 Sunday 3 April 2011

2011-04-03T12:33:00.002+01:00

Occasionally, all too seldom, we hear something that lights up our day, and this interview with Martin Sheen on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs did that for me. I found to my surprise that he has always been a political activist for the rights of the under-privileged and marginalised, and been arrested more than 60 times for his activities.

Then he said one of those things that make you sit up and cheer. Asked what he gained from being so politically active, he said, “I do it for myself, not to influence anybody. You do it because you cannot not do it and be yourself.” That is a statement we should all ponder upon. And it made me think that I, too, in quite a different area, am professionally active for five element acupuncture, and I "do it because I cannot not do it and be myself."

I also loved the fact that he refuses to join a private golf club, and queues up to play on public courses because he “deeply resents” a sense of privilege. Much after my heart, too, he said that he listens to a lot of classical music, and that if he hears Mozart when he is driving, he goes past his destination until the Mozart has finished, because “I cannot bear to stop Mozart”. What he said about his drug-taking, alcoholic son, so much in the public eye at the moment, was also extremely moving.

Altogether a lovely man. Try and hear the programme which you can download from BBC i-Player if you are in this country.

And if you are interested in a marvellous example of a Fire person, you can do no better than to listen to his laughing voice, an extremely clear example of Fire in full enjoyment of life, but with an acceptance of all life’s sadnesses.

Tips on how to start learning about the elements

2011-03-31T15:31:00.000+01:00

I have now completed my tips on how to start learning about the elements, mentioned in my blog of 11 March. These are offered in the form of six PDF files, which can be downloaded free from our website http://www.sofea.co.uk./

You should start with the introduction, which is called, not surprisingly, Tips on how to start learning about the elements, and then download a PDF for each of the five elements. They should be read in the accepted order of the elements, starting with Wood.

Writing these tips has been my way of trying to help all those many readers of my blog out there in more than 60 countries, many of whom will have no access whatsoever to a five element acupuncturist or to any other form of first-hand learning about the elements. So, instead, I am offering them what I think will be helpful to everybody, acupuncturists and lay people alike. In writing these tips, I, too, have learnt something new about the elements, as I do whenever I think deeply about them.

I have enjoyed this exercise in trying to work out the most useful way of helping others start upon their journey around the landscape of the elements.

Update on the publishing of the Chinese edition of my Handbook of Five Element Practice

2011-03-20T18:10:00.000Z

We are surprisingly close to reaching the final stage in publishing the Chinese edition of my Handbook in China, which is being done through the good offices of Liu Lihong. As I have written before (see my blog of 8 November 2010),I find it very comforting that at a time of such turmoil in the acupuncture world in this country a future has opened up, so unexpectedly, for a return of five element acupuncture to its country of origin, China.

I am also delighted to hear that Liu met Dr Peter Eckman when he visited the United States recently. Some of you, and I hope an increasing number of you, will know of Peter as the author of what I consider to be the only full account of the journey of traditional acupuncture from East to West, and specifically that part of it which relates to JR Worsley and the other early pioneers of acupuncture. His book In the Footsteps of the Yellow Emperor is a fascinating account of the many paths along which traditional acupuncture travelled on its way west. I was delighted to hear of the meeting between Liu Lihong and Peter, and the mutual exchange of their books. This is yet another connection in the serendipitous links which appear to be weaving themselves around me and five element acupuncture recently.

Peter and I have worked together on my translation of one of Jacques Lavier’s books, Histoire, doctrine et pratique de l’acupuncture chinoise, published in the 1960s; Peter helped me with both the classical and medical terminology, and has kindly offered to write an introduction when we find a publisher. As some of you will know, Lavier was one of JR Worsley’s teachers. Anybody familiar with what we all called JR’s Black Book, which he withdrew from circulation at one point, will be interested to know that many of the point selections which he listed there appear to have been taken almost word for word from the appendix of the Lavier book, yet another important link in the chain of transmission.

I am also now in the midst of translating Elisabeth Rochat de la Vallée’s 101 Notions-Clés de la Médecine Chinoise (101 Key Concepts of Chinese Medicine), for which she is hoping to find an American publisher. Pulled along in its wake, I hope that somebody will want to publish the Lavier, which I consider an important and valuable book.

Exploring ways of teaching five element acupuncture

2011-03-11T20:08:00.002Z

I seem to be spending a lot of time at the moment trying to work out ways of teaching five element acupuncture now that the colleges who were teaching it as their main form of acupuncture in this country have unfortunately closed or are in the process of closing. The three years since the closure of my own school to undergraduates have been a time of recovery from all the very hard work involved in running a college, and also a time of taking stock as to what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Somebody asked me yesterday, surprised at hearing how much I still worked, whether I would consider retiring at some point, and the answer to that is an emphatic “no”. I can’t visualize a life in which I am not continuing to practise and in some way involved in acupuncture teaching, and specifically talking about my particular love, the elements, and what they continue to teach me about life.

The field of acupuncture has suddenly started to look like a battlefield, with corpses of colleges strewn around. I predict more may well be under threat as the tumultuous events which are about to descend upon universities hits them too. Seven universities, I read in the newspapers today, are about to fold for lack of funds. This must surely have a knock-on effect on university-based acupuncture courses. I have always felt that we followed universities too closely, and now it seems they are leading the profession up a blind alley. That being so, I feel I must involve myself, perhaps more than I originally intended to, in supporting five element acupuncture wherever I can.

This has now become the focus of my attention, and with the help of others equally concerned about the future of five element acupuncture, we are together already planning an exciting way forward. More anon, when we have consolidated our plans.

In the meantime, I am preparing what I call my Tips on how to start learning about the elements, which you will soon be able to download from our website http://www.sofea.co.uk./ I have so far prepared tips for the Wood and Fire elements, and am now working on those for the Earth element.

With all these things in the pipeline, I would like to hear from anybody out there, in whatever country you live in, who is interested in studying the elements in greater depth, whether or not you then want to pursue that interest further into the field of acupuncture or not. If you are not already on our mailing lists, email us on info@sofea.co.uk and we will keep you informed of our plans.

An unexpected skill – predicting bestsellers

2011-03-07T06:26:00.000Z

I read a lot, and like to read all I can about any new books which are being published. So I scour the weekend arts supplements in the newspapers to see if anything catches my eye.

To my surprise I find that I have developed a good sense of what will constitute a bestseller, well before most other people have even heard of the author, let alone the book or books that will set him/her on their way to fame.

I treasure the fact that I read the first books of the following best-selling authors at a time when nobody else had. All have made fortunes for their authors and their publishers.

Alexander McCall Smith: No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

J K Rowling: Harry Potter and the Wizard’s Stone
Edmund de Waal: The Hare with the Amber Eyes

I must admit that I gave up on the Larsson books two-third of the way through what I considered to be the rather heavy-going second book, though people tell me that the third book is the best, so I may try again.

I got 10 pages into the first Harry Potter, when I happened to pick it up in the children’s section of the library, before sadly putting it down again unread when I realised that it was not going to be the successor to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings that I had hoped for, far from it.

The de Waal is a magical book, beautifully crafted around a family’s netsuke collection as it finds its way from West to East and back again. It has very illuminating insights into the cultures and world events its owners experience, and since these cover my own family’s background and experiences in pre-war Austria, it added some poignancy to what I already knew.

It seems that I might have a new career ferreting out the next bestseller for some publisher when my acupuncturist’s skills dim!

CSO and E

2011-02-27T10:50:00.003Z

I have always had a problem with teaching students how to learn to recognise the presence of an element through the four famous sensory indicators of colour, sound, smell and emotion (CSOE). I know from my own experience that it has taken me many years to perceive some smells, colours or sounds, and then pin on them the label of one of the elements. Even now, after more than 25 years sniffing at my patients, looking closely at them, listening closely to them, I may still not be able to pinpoint exactly what that particular smell, tone of voice or colour is. I have always felt that I am on much surer ground when I look at emotions, and not just those five emotional categories we have divided the elements into, but the whole emotional weight we carry with us which impacts with a jolt upon those we meet.

Of course we can sift this down into the small words of joy or grief with which we label an element, but our emotional make-up is much more all-encompassing than just whether a person looks happy or sad, since it is the overall impression of the whole of our inner emotional life which pours out from us in all that we do. And since we have all reacted to the emotional impact of other people from the day our mother first smiled at us with love (at least we hope it was a smile and not a frown!), this is the elusive quality with which we are, I believe, more familiar than the way we may or may not have reacted to the colour upon our mother’s face, the smell of her body or the sound of her voice. Of course these, too, will have affected our responses in some way, particularly perhaps the sound of her voice, but, unless we are blind or deaf, we are unlikely to continue to be as aware in such depth of all the other sensory signals as we are by the signals we detect with our emotional antennae.

I don’t think I am the only one to have learnt to rely more on emotional feedback than on that from my other senses, because I see the difficulty those new to five element acupuncture have in seeing, smelling or hearing anything which can help them differentiate between the elements. They appear to be able to attune their emotional responses much more quickly as a way into the landscape of an element. This being so, I think it is a bit unfair for students to be expected to give all four sensory indicators equal weight to start with. One consequence of implying that they should be able to do this is that this is likely to make them feel disempowered from the start, and the whole aim of any training must be to empower.

I certainly felt disempowered in those early days as I attempted to see anything which could be called a colour on the areas of the face I was told it apparently showed itself, the side of the temples and round the mouth. This is not the where I see colour particularly even now, but instead I have gradually recognised it as imparting an elemental sheen over the whole body. I use my rather red Fire hand as comparison, and by placing it anywhere on the patient’s body I can see another elemental colour appear on the patient's skin in quite startling fashion, and there before me now lies a bright yellow body or an ashen white body. If, on the other hand, I lay my hand on a Fire patient, the red of my hand softens into a more gentle pink, as the patient’s skin and my skin seem to meld together in harmony. (For any practitioners reading this, try this out yourselves. The leg is an unobtrusive place to do this. You will learn a surprising amount about colour from this.)

Obviously there are people who have better vision, smell or hearing than I have. These are fortunate people. I remember that we had somebody in our undergraduate class who picked up smells with remarkable accuracy, but that was an unusual trait. How we envied him as we struggled to smell anything!

So all people out there trying to trace CSOE on their patients, take heart. It will take some years, but gradually the ability to see quite marked differences seeps into us, so that now I can walk in the street and be shocked at how clearly I may see a very green face, or hear a weeping voice talking in the bus. If we try too hard, though, our ability to distinguish these subtle differences appears to fade. It is far better to let the sensory impressions float towards us. And if, like me, you feel you can more easily diagnose which element a person belongs to through the emotions they evoke in you, then this is a perfectly valid way of starting to pin down the difference between elements, as the emotional signals everybody sends out raise an echo deep within us.

Changes to my Five Element Acupuncture Treatments blog

2011-02-21T09:27:00.000Z

I am repeating here a blog I have just posted on my Five Element Acupuncture Treatment blog.

"By now readers of my blog will have got a good idea of the kind of simple treatments I do. And if they have not, then I suggest they go slowly through the treatments again. I think, therefore, that I will spend more time explaining the importance of specific areas of practice, as I have done with the last entry, Patient 24 Wood. You will see that I have gone in detail through the importance of doing an Akabane test and correcting any imbalances found. The Akabane correction is an effective and quick way of helping correct any discrepancies in energy between the left and the right sides of the body. Any marked imbalance is often the reason why one-sided symptoms occur. For details of how to carry out an Akabane test, see my Handbook of Five Element Practice, page 62 (available through our website http://www.sofea.co.uk/).

In my patient, for example, I found an excessive build-up of energy in four meridians which run down the hand to the fingers, and this was particularly marked in the two, the Small Intestine and the Heart, which pass over and through the pisiform bone, which is where she is experiencing pain. Having corrected this imbalance during this first treatment, I will be interested to see whether the patient notices any improvement in the pain she is experiencing in her right wrist. This pain can be viewed as being the result of an excessive accumulation of energy on the right side of her body with a resultant depletion on the left.

I will also be interested to see whether clearing the SI/Bl block will have relieved a similar kind of build-up, this time around both eyes. I view symptoms of the kind the patient was experiencing, which were excessively runny, red-rimmed eyes with buzzing in the ears, as a sign of a blockage to the flow of energy as it tries to pass from the end point of the Small Intestine at SI 19 at the ears to the first point of the Bladder at Bl 1, at the corner of the eye.

A glance at all the 24 treatments I have listed so far will show how important I regard clearing entry/exit blocks as being, and how often they appear. Clearing them is like releasing a tourniquet, or opening a sluice gate to a dam. The pain at the points can often be quite sharp for a time, as the renewed flow of energy pushes past where it was dammed up, but the relief felt can be enormous and immediate. Many physical symptoms simply disappear when we do this.

It is also important not to forget that a block also represents blocked energy at the emotional level, too, which is potentially much more debilitating than a purely physical block."

The Mystery Within

2011-02-15T15:41:00.000Z

I have just read the following in Sujata Varadarajan's blog from India, which I would like to share with everybody involved in healing work of all kinds. She writes:

"We all need reminders. This time, mine came through my friend Nora. She wrote describing how she believes that what goes on inside each of us is a mystery and cannot be read in entirety through graphs and chemical tests.

It's something we forget, more so after visiting conventional doctors or hospitals. Modern medicine, in its desire for objectivity and rationality, has lost sight of that which brings about healing and balance - the inner spark of which we know little. There are some exceptions, a handful of doctors, some books (my favourites being 'Love, Medicine and Miracles' by Dr. Bernie Siegel, a surgeon at Yale and the 'All Creatures Great and Small' series by James Herriot, a vet. who worked in Yorkshire) and a few films (eg. Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, Munnabhai MBBS) to remind us that medicine is not about statistics, it is about individuals. Illness and health work in ways that are not as well understood as doctors would like us to believe.

As I visit hospitals, I see many kinds of illnesses on the rise, notably those to do with endocrine and reproductive health and lifestyle related problems. And I see the patients - people of all ages waiting patiently ('patient' is apt here!), many showing signs of stress, frustration or despair. And I think once more of what I would do if I were running a centre to tackle these kinds of problems.

I would definitely rope in an acupuncturist, a masseuse and a yoga teacher to help release some of the physical and mental stress. I would create a separate room for discussions for patients- with each other or in a group, as they please (have you noticed how isolated or pressurized some of these people look? And how their faces light up at the sight of a smile, even though it comes from a stranger?). A library with books and music to help them while they wait. And last but not least - lots of clean bathrooms and plenty of drinking water. And sit back, wait and watch those 'healing statistics' soar as each person feels better in his own way."

Wouldn't it be lovely if people could be greeted, as Sujata would like them to be, with smiles and love and care, rather than with the cold informality with which hospital and doctors' reception desks now usually greet us?

Matters of life and death

2011-02-14T07:50:00.000Z

Sometimes we come upon a quotation which sets us thinking. This is what happened yesterday, when I started reading a lovely book, another one of those books that have opened up my mind to further thoughts. It is a biography of Michel De Montaigne, the 16th century French essayist, and the man who coined the word “essay” (“essai” means “attempt” in French) which every schoolchild now uses. The book is by Sarah Blakewell and is called How to live – a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts, a lovely title in itself.

Apart from stimulating me to plunge back into Montaigne’s Essays, it brought me this quotation from his writings:

“If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry. Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.”

And this stirred another memory for me, taking me back to the first time I read Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, a meditation on where we should place death in our lives. The quotation below from the end of the 20th century gives me much the same feeling as Montaigne’s words from the 16th century:

"Dying is no problem. It will happen quite successfully. It's how we die."

What both have in common is an acceptance that the advent of death is a natural event and something we should slot into our lives, rather than as something which is to be viewed as a dislocation, an abrupt, unwelcome ending to be feared. As an acupuncturist I have had to learn to deal with the death of patients of mine, and have had to work out my own approach. It could be thought, as I did at first, that a patient’s death is proof of the failure of my skills, but then I came to understand that I did not hold life and death in my hands; that if it is ordained, by whom and for what purpose we will never know, that a person’s life has run its course, then it was my task to help make that ending as fruitful and serene as possible, rather than to lament the fact of its ending.

I find both the words of both Montaigne and Sogyal Rinpoche comforting, bringing death and life into a kind of companionship, rather than viewing them as enemies.

A very acute comment about the difference between Wood and Metal

2011-02-05T08:46:00.000Z

I have a friend of mine, Maja, to thank for the following comment which I think is worth passing on for people to mull over:

“For Wood people, death is far away. For Metal it is very close.”

Building up a library of the characteristics of the different elements

2011-02-04T14:50:00.000Z

Often without our being aware that we are doing so, we gradually build up a list of the characteristics of each element by which we have learnt to recognise them. These are like our own aide-mémoires, our short-cuts which lead us to an element. It is worth our while to think a little more about this, as we often follow along what to us is a well-trodden route towards an element without being aware we are doing it, and, more importantly, without checking at intervals to see whether our responses have become stereotyped and no longer reflect the great diversity with which the elements manifest themselves. We should always, as it were, at intervals do a stock take, and throw out any worn-out clichés about an element which have passed their sell-by date.

None of the descriptions by which I attempt to define the elements can be absolutely clear-cut, any more than the distinctions between one element and another can ever be clearly defined. Like the colours of the rainbow, the elements meld into one another at their edges, so that they will share, faintly, some of each other’s characteristics. Though faint, these similarities can nonetheless confuse us, some more than others, I find, and explain the difficulties we all have in distinguishing between the characteristics of different elements. My own greatest confusion has always come from the differences between Earth and Fire, and my least from those between Metal and Water, with the similarities I perceive between other pairings falling somewhere between these two. Other people will find it difficult to distinguish between other elements.

Each of us should remain aware of where our own particular difficulties in differentiating between the elements lie, and use them as warning signals along the path to a diagnosis.

In praise of libraries

2011-01-30T18:08:00.002Z

Libraries are some of my favourite places, and now all the more precious to me for being under such dire threat from government cuts. I have always been a stalwart member of my local library, careful to order as many books as I could through it as my contribution towards helping persuade the local council to keep it open. This year, though, I indulged myself and gave myself the luxury of a Christmas present by joining the London Library, a private library in the heart of London with a 150-year old tradition on its shelves.

The two libraries, my local library and the London Library, are two very different places, and offer two very different but complementary experiences. In my local library I can be sure to find all the recent bestsellers, the detective stories which I love, and all the standard repertoire of books to be found in any Waterstones. They will also order a surprisingly wide variety of books which they do not have in stock, either summoning them from other libraries, or, quite often, buying them for me, something that I still find amazing in these cash-strapped days, all for some tiny contribution in pence from me.

The selection of books in the London Library, on the other hand. reflects its long history. Its dimly lit shelves are laden with weighty volume after weighty volume, conveying an aura of great scholarship for research-minded people, amongst which, unfortunately, I cannot count myself, but I love the smell of old books, whether I open them or not, cherishing the feeling that within them lies hidden so much that creates what we call our culture. Yesterday I found my way to a book of Mozart’s letters, then moved on to browse amongst French novels, before settling down to look at their French dictionaries to help me with my translation of Elisabeth Rochat de la Vallée’s work.

Long may all libraries flourish, from the smallest in some village hall to their most exalted representative in the British Library. And we should all fight to keep our local libraries open, for when they close a little bit of civilization dies with each book that disappears with them.

Why it helps to know about the elements

2011-01-25T09:47:00.000Z

Knowing something about the elements can help explain our own behaviour, the behaviour of other people and in particular our behaviour in relation to other people. We do not exist in isolation. Everything we do impinges on those around us, as they impinge upon us. The well-worn cliché about raising a finger here on earth and thereby altering the movement of the most distant star is just as valid in the purely human sphere of our relationships to one another. Nothing I do can leave another close to me untouched, just as they in turn cannot fail to influence me. Often these influences may be too subtle for us to notice, but they are nonetheless there. Sometimes, of course, they are so obviously powerful that some encounters knock us off-balance. We may like to think that we live our lives cocooned in a bubble of self-sufficiency, but we all have growing out from us soft antennae, like tendrils, which touch those passing by us, and these touches shift something in us and change our shape in small or large ways.

If we are to smooth the path to better understanding and greater tolerance, we must not forget how different we are from one another, despite all our many similarities, and, I would say, that we are necessarily different, for this creates the amazing variety of human thought and behaviour. It is surprisingly difficult to understand how others view the world. And to those who differ from us we often react with irritation or perhaps even downright dislike, since our inability to understand their way of thinking makes us judge them harshly. We tend to criticize what is unfamiliar to us, and herein lies the root of so many of our prejudices. If, then, our understanding of the elements helps us to see where these differences are coming from, then we are well on the way to engaging in more harmonious interactions with those around us. And, however basic may initially be our understanding of the elements, even the tiniest bit of knowledge will contribute to greater tolerance, a quality sadly much lacking in the world around us, and therefore all the more to be cherished.

Showing different sides of ourselves to different people

2011-01-24T20:11:00.000Z

On the whole, in our relationships with the people we choose as friends we tend to show only one side of ourselves, the one which fits comfortably with the other person. It is likely that we will have discarded early on any too uncomfortable fits, unless we enjoy punishing ourselves or unless, as I as a young girl found I did, I felt it was somehow my fault that I didn’t get on with somebody and persisted in maintaining the friendship long after it stopped adding something to my life. Things are much more difficult with family relationships, because on the whole they are there for a lifetime; we therefore have to learn ways of avoiding those areas we find uncomfortable, and we do this more or less successfully.

With patients we enter quite a different level of relationship. We do not choose them as we do our friends. They ask to see us, and we agree to treat them unless there is any professional reason why we should not accept them as patients. We are expected to enter into a patient/practitioner relationship with them whatever our personal likes or dislikes, for our personal preferences should not play a part here. Whether a patient votes the same way as we do or has religious beliefs that we do not should not be a reason for our not treating them. There is also something reassuring in the fact that, unlike in the case of our family and friends, we do not need to extend our concern for our patients into that part of our life which lies beyond the practice room. It is one of the signs of a maturing approach to our practice that we learn not to let it overshadow the rest of our lives as often happens in the early days of our practice, when we may become too preoccupied with analysing every tiniest part of our interaction with our patients.

I have often quoted the words of Sogyal Rinpoche, “Do not get attached to your giving”, but I am happy to repeat them here for they have in many ways helped me maintain the necessary professional detachment without which we may allow our own feelings to cloud our perceptions, and in this way fail our patients.

Accurate feedback from a Wood patient

2011-01-20T09:10:00.001Z

It would help us in corroborating some of the principles according to which we work if patients were able to report precise effects when feeding back on the outcome of any particular treatment, but it is rare for patients’ assessment of improvement (or otherwise) to be so precise as to enable us to relate this to any particular treatment rather than to a combination of treatments. To encourage us, however, it does, occasionally happen that a patient may say something like, “whatever you did last time made me feel marvellous (made my backache better, helped me cope better)”.

On rare occasions, feedback can be even more specific. I treasure still, like some beacon in this particular wilderness, the memory of a Wood patient who, when I needled Gall Bladder 40, described immediately in perfect detail what has been handed down to me as the Gall Bladder’s meridian pathway. He traced the movement of energy down to the toe and back up along the outer leg, where with great accuracy he showed me the odd lateral dip the Gall Bladder is said to take at mid-calf, and then continued to draw a path up over his knee to his abdomen, finally arriving at his head, where he said, “I seem to feel something up here at the side of my eye.” I have had other Wood patients describe the line of some movement of energy along a Gall Bladder pathway in this way, but none so precisely as this. It may well be that Wood, the element which structures us, can feel the structure of its own shape reasserting itself as more energy, like sap in a plant, courses through its pathways. I have not had such detailed descriptions of the passage of energy from patients of other elements.

Comment made by a patient about my Blog of Jan 7th about the challenges facing the Fire element

2011-01-16T10:36:00.000Z

I was heartened by a comment made by one of my patients, a Fire patient, who came for treatment the day after I published this blog. She follows my blog with interest, something I find surprisingly comforting because it confirms for me that what I write must be based on a valid understanding of human nature, certainly valid enough for her to recognise herself in what I write. She told me that what I had written about the Fire element’s impulse to offer gifts wherever it can had sparked an echo in her, and made her understand her own motivations better. In receiving such direct confirmation of an aspect of the Fire element which I had noticed, I accepted this as a kind of reward for some of the hard work I have to do in trying to unearth again and again small kernels of truth about the elements and then find a way of writing about them. Thank you, Susan, for offering me this encouragement.

Further insights into point selection

2011-01-14T08:07:00.000Z

Prompted by a comment about point selection on my treatment blog (Treatment 15), I have been thinking more about the principles upon which I base my point selection. Writing about Bl 38 (43) made me remember JR Worsley’s explanation for why he chose it for a patient. This led me on to thinking about how very rare it was, in all my years of observing him with patients, to hear him explain in any depth why he chose a particular point for a patient, or more frequently a particular series of points. We were certainly discouraged from interrupting treatment with such questions, and we just got on with marking up the points he told us to use. Occasionally I would hear a gem fall from his lips, but often in little asides, as if I was only meant to hear it if I was really attentive. One such occasion was with a patient who was incontinent, when he lightly touched his lower abdomen and muttered, “We’d better do something down here for you”, suggesting CV (RM) 2 to me.

I came to see that what we sometimes thought of as his obstinancy in not divulging more about his reasons for choosing certain points was instead a very profound form of teaching between master and pupil. I remember him once saying, “If she has to ask that question, she won’t understand the answer”. Now I understand much more clearly that I was being told that it was up to me to work out the answers, and that only when I had worked things out for myself would my real learning begin.

I have always been very suspicious of books which give lists of the actions of one point after another. I have often said (see my Nov 16 blog “Think element, not points”) that the secret of good treatment lies in understanding the elements, rather than pickn’mixing points, as though we are making a selection at the sweet counter. We always have to maintain the connection of a point with the element which feeds it. When we concentrate on trying to understand the elements at an ever deeper level, this thankfully brings with it quite naturally a deeper understanding of which points to use when.

I repeat, “Think element, not points”, and I would add to this now “and then the points will look after themselves.”

Fears patients may have

2011-01-10T21:14:00.000Z

If we are honest, we must acknowledge that we all feel some slight apprehension at meeting a person for the first time, particularly when we are about to embark on some form of therapy, where the therapist takes on the role of the person who knows, and we may feel we take on a somewhat subservient role, of the person to whom something will be done, about which we at first know very little. In the case of acupuncture, there is the additional fear of the needle itself, instilled within all of us from our earliest days of sitting on our mother’s knee and submitting to the pain of vaccinations through a similar instrument. However much we may try to hide or override this fear as adults, it is always to some extent there, however faintly. In some, the fear of the needle may be so strong that it stops them from entering our practice room in the first place. All these fears, faint or strong, may set up a barrier to our first contacts with our patient which we need to take into account.

As patients, we also have to deal with our natural fear of exposing ourselves to another person, as our practitioner tries to get to know us. The words “tries to” are here significant, because, either deliberately or involuntarily, we may resist revealing too much of ourselves in the early stages of treatment if we are uneasy about the kind of relationship with our practitioner this will expose us to. We may not actually tell lies, although that, too must not be ruled out, but we may, as the expression goes, be economical with the truth, saying just enough not actually to tell an untruth, but not enough to tell the truth about ourselves. This means that we will inevitably paint only a partial picture of what is going on within us, which can easily be misinterpreted by our practitioner. It takes a surprisingly long time for a patient to feel safe and confident enough in their practitioner’s compassion and discretion to open themselves up with honesty. In fact, I believe that each of us will always retain a part of ourselves which we reveal to nobody but ourselves, not even, or perhaps particularly not, to our nearest and dearest, for many different reasons, amongst them the need to retain our own sense of self-respect. As practitioners, we must always allow our patients the right to keep this private area within themselves hidden to the outside world rather than expecting them to open themselves up to us in total honesty, but we must not lose sight of the fact that it may be there.

This is where our perception of the elements guides us towards what is really going on within a patient, for the elements, unlike words, do not lie; they just learn to hide themselves a little to too intrusive an eye. This is also why we should never rely on words spoken to tell us the truth, but use sensory and emotional signatures clearly to spell out this truth in their own particular way. It is easy for our lips to lie in the words they utter, but not in the way they shape themselves as they are uttering this lie, or the way our eyes can reveal something at odds with the tone of our speech.

Daily challenges to our Fire element

2011-01-07T08:35:00.000Z

We may not ourselves be aware of how far each minute of our life lived amongst other people will be occupied with relationships of one kind of another. I will use an example taken from the brief duration of a typical day’s journey into work to illustrate this. We may be surprised to find how many tiny threads of relationship we knit together on this journey, from the moment we open our front door and turn to wave goodbye to our family, to an encounter with a neighbour, the interaction with a newsvendor and a ticket collector, the avoidance or acknowledgement of eye-contact with all those packed tight with us in the underground or bus, and finally the arrival at work with the greeting of our colleagues. All these involve numerous small or large skeins of new and old relationships being sorted into their different threads. This covers just a few short hours in a 24-hour period at most, and an infinitesmally small part of all the hours of one year in our life, let alone all the hours of all the years in our life.

In each of these encounters with another person, the Fire element’s need to establish a relationship wherever it finds itself with other people will be taxed to the full. Just detailing all this activity is quite tiring, but not nearly as tiring as Fire may feel if, during these few hours between home and office, something occurs which puts excessive strain on this element, such as an argument before leaving home, an unpleasant encounter on the bus or the dread of a meeting with a feared colleague. The constant level of hard work needed to help the Fire element in its task of adjusting to all the demands others make upon us places a particular strain upon Fire people, for of all the elements they are the ones which most ardently (oh, such a Fire word!) desire to make these relationships work. That is, after all, what they regard as the main purpose of their existence.

What, then, are the main ways in which we can help Fire in its relationships? To a Fire person the answer appears so simple; it is by allowing them to make us happy, in other words, allowing them in some way to give us something. Fire wants the recipient of its gifts to be happy to receive them, even when we may not ourselves have asked for them. Fire may not consider how appropriate its gifts are, in fact will only do so in states of great balance, for it may be so intent on the gesture of giving that it does not have time to gauge how its recipient is reacting. Nor is it gratitude that Fire is asking for. Instead it seeks the smile and warmth of eye in another person, and, if denied this, will experience this as a slap in the face, a rejection, something which can scar its heart.

A lesson in dealing with a Wood patient

2011-01-03T10:26:00.000Z

One of my Wood patients told me, rather aggressively, that they found my presence challenging, and, being also an acupuncturist, they attributed this to my being, they thought erroneously, of the Wood element. Although I have learnt over the years never to show that I am taken aback by personal comments from patients, I found that I reacted inside myself with quite a vehement desire to answer back sharply, and had to hold myself back from doing so. Afterwards I found that the episode had disturbed my inner equilibrium, and I tried to work out why this was.

By dint of some careful self-examination, I realised that this patient had projected on to me her own dislike of being challenged and had in effect made me angry, often the effect Wood can have when out of balance. I then analysed my feelings to see what they told me about anger in myself and how far my reaction had been unbalanced, before finally using what I learned from this as a way of understanding not only the Wood element better, but other elements within me, such as Water (my fear of the anger) and Fire (my own element’s reaction to stress). An interaction of just a few minutes therefore became, through this, a valuable lesson about the part of me which reacted to the Wood element, as well as about Wood and other elements in general.

New Year’s greetings to all who read this blog

2010-12-30T07:34:00.000Z

I always like to take stock as the year ends and we turn towards the future. And I am doing this here for that part of my life which revolves around acupuncture.

There has, unhappily, been much to be saddened by in the acupuncture world in this country in the past few months, the saddest of all for me being the impending closure of my own college in Warwickshire, and the sudden disappearance, as though overnight, of two other colleges. Happily, though, there is much else to carry forward into the New Year; amongst these things, to my increasing surprise, there is my blog.

Being new to the world of blogging, Youtube, Twitter and such-like before I started, I suppose I am more surprised than others might be at how far into the distant reaches of the world my blog has penetrated. At the latest count it has spread to more than 50 countries, and I still find it exciting when I see that somebody from Ghana, Guadeloupe or Kazakhstan has tapped into their computer and found me. What, I ask myself, has made them interested enough in five element acupuncture to home in on what I write? Not only does this stimulate me in sending out my thoughts, but the interest shown gives me daily confirmation that in writing about the elements I am speaking in a universal language understood by all.

And through this blog I am also seeing that more and more individual seekers after five element knowledge, a rare and growing breed, are prepared to search out teachers who answer their needs, and are finding their way to me and other five element teachers. This is the kind of teaching I love, to people who are prepared to study hard, often on their own and in their own time, to explore the elements and learn how to use this knowledge to help others. I am aware that there are many people out there who have no chance at all of finding a five element acupuncturist, let alone a training college, in their country (or even on their continent!). These are the pioneers of the future, just as JR Worsley and his many teachers before him were the pioneers of old. I hope they have the courage to explore and innovate, as he did, and I hope, too, that the people who need to will find their way to me and to other five element teachers and will ask us for whatever we can offer. I and others have plans for setting up another five element centre in addition to that in London, this time on the South Coast. I can see these becoming an increasingly important resource which all those interested in developing their five element skills can draw upon in the future.

Finally there is the excitement of seeing five element acupuncture on its journey back to China through the efforts of Mei Long and the translation of my Handbook. I will end with a lovely message Liu Lihong sent me from China. He hopes the translation of my book will get published soon, which he thinks is the most important thing of all for promoting five element acupuncture in China, and he finishes by saying, “Imagine 10,000 people out there will read this book. Even if only one of them finds the truth there it is still good news. With 20,000 readers we will at least get 2 people who want to practise it. This will be a good start already.” So I greet in my thoughts all those 20,000 people out there waiting to read my book, and I look forward to welcoming the two who Liu Lihong predicts will practise what is in it.

A Happy New Year to all my readers in all the 50 countries around the globe. Amongst the many of those in China reading this there may (who knows?) already be Liu Lihong’s two!

A labour of love completed

2010-12-20T18:45:00.000Z

I have just finished translating one of Elisabeth Rochat’s works in which she examines what is written in the Chinese classics about the different meridians and their points. This time I worked on the 9 points of what she calls Heart Master (called variously also Pericardium, Circulation-Sex or, which I have always liked, Heart Protector). I have translated other things for Elisabeth to include in her Monkey Press books, but this points notebook has been the most difficult by far. First I have had to learn to understand what are very complex concepts, expressed in that most poetic of all languages, French, and then, once understood, work out a way of expressing them in the much more practical language of English. This has involved thinking myself into another idiom and another mode of thought.

Having battled with these difficulties (and at times battle was not too strong a word), I developed a kind of flow, steeping myself happily in this pool of classical thought. And then the translation went more quickly, Points 1 -3 taking what I felt was forever, whilst I seemed to race through Points 4 – 9. I have now sent the files off to Elisabeth for her to make of them what she will. The translation is eventually going to find its way to the States, where I understand an editor and a publisher are waiting. So my work is done.

One unexpected bonus of doing this translation is that I allowed it to serve as an excuse to join the London Library, claiming to myself that I needed its vast hoard of reference books and dictionaries to complete this work, but in fact just for the pleasure of walking through stack upon stack of books which I am allowed to borrow for as long as I like. For me a luxury indeed, and my own present to myself for having helped, in my own way, to give the English-speaking world greater access to more of Elisabeth’s thoughts.

Preface to the Chinese edition of my Handbook of Five Element Practice

2010-12-19T10:04:00.000Z

The translation of my Handbook is now complete, and I have been asked to write a preface for it for Chinese readers. I give it below:

"I am very happy that this Chinese translation of my Handbook of Five Element Practice will now be available to Chinese readers.

I am particularly honoured that Master Liu has encouraged this translation, and has given this book his special blessing by offering to write an introduction.

My own journey into five element acupuncture began when I met an acupuncturist at a party in London nearly 30 years ago. I experienced so many profound changes in myself as a result of my own treatment that I decided that I wanted to study it, and was fortunate to be able to study under a great master of acupuncture, J R Worsley. And now that I have studied it and practised it for all the years since then, I have great joy in offering what I have learnt to others through my teaching. For 12 years I was the Principal of the School of Five Element Acupuncture in London, and am now continuing my work in helping others to deepen their own practice. For me, the concepts underlying my practice represent a profound understanding of the soul within each of us, and recognise how that soul influences how we cope with life and what illnesses we allow to attack us.

This Handbook is intended as a working textbook for those wishing to study and practise five element acupuncture, and who want to understand the principles upon which it is based. These principles reflect all the traditional values set out in the great classical medical and philosophical texts such as the Neijing and the Lingshu. They recognise that each one of us is a microcosm of the great Dao, and that disease of body or soul only creeps in when we do not live in accordance with the natural order.

Traditional Chinese medicine made its way to the West through many different routes, and is now flourishing over here. It is lovely to think that its journey from East to West is now coming full circle, as it travels back to its homeland, China. I am proud that this Handbook is one further step on this journey home. Let us hope that what I have written finds its way into the hearts of all those dedicating their lives to helping their patients through a deep understanding of the elements which create all living things.

I would like to congratulate Mei Long on completing the task of translating this book so quickly and so competently. I would also like to acknowledge how much five element acupuncture owes to her enthusiasm in embracing it on her arrival in Europe, and then having the courage to approach Master Liu in her desire to encourage the practice of a true form of traditional Chinese medicine in China."

Do seasonal influences play their part in Entry/Exit blocks?

2010-12-14T14:02:00.000Z

A student sent me the following queries about seasonal treatment to help her in her interesting research topic. I give it below, followed by my answer to it.

“I am doing some research into Entry/Exit Blocks and in particular whether there is any link between unseasonal or changeable weather patterns in nature and the appearance of these blocks in patients. I have only a very small amount of data so far, and one or two published articles from practitioners who note that in their practice Entry/Exit blocks tend to appear in clusters at the change of season or during unseasonable or changeable weather (though not exclusively of course).

My data does actually point to a link between the two but (being a beginner in 5 Element Acupuncture) I am struggling a little to understand whether there may be a link or if it is just coincidence.

I was wondering if you had noticed any similar patterns in your own practice over the years and if so, why is this and do you have any examples? I am looking at some of the classics with regard to Wei Qi (as this is where the Blocks are felt) and how its movement is linked to nature, and to me at least it seems fairly obvious that the movement of Qi within us could be affected and "blocked" by external (macrocosmic) qi movement which goes against the normal flow of seasonal movement of Qi from Spring through the Seasons to Winter

I did ask Neil Gumenick directly, by email, about this, and he said there was absolutely no seasonal connection, but as I said earlier, in practice, it does seem to occur. Other authors I have looked at, including Jarrett, do not include seasonal change as one of the causes of Entry/Exit Blocks.”

Here is my reply:

"You’ve posed an interesting question about Entry/Exit blocks. So here are my thoughts on this, although I had not until now really considered this question in any detail, so it has set me thinking!

When I find an E/E block, as well as clearing it I always think which officials are in trouble and why this might be. Sometimes we simply don’t know, but in most cases I can work out why this particular block may have occurred at this time. I tend to think more of the psychological or physical reasons, rather than seasonal reasons, although I have thought of these, particularly if the block relates to the patient’s guardian element. For example, one of the most frequent blocks is Co/St (Co 20, St 1). If it is a Metal patient who is blocked in this way, I think of what the patient can’t let go of, or if it is an Earth patient, what the patient can’t stop thinking about or transport. But I have only thought about a seasonal connection if the patient is in their element’s season, i.e., Metal in autumn or Earth in late summer. It might cross my mind that the block has been exacerbated by the season, but I don’t tend to think of the season as causing the block. I will not think about the season at all if I find a block in a season not related to that patient’s element, i.e., a Co/St block for a Fire patient in autumn (but perhaps I should!).

But, and it’s a big but, I am sure that the extra inflow of energy to any particular element from a seasonal influence must affect in some way how those elements manifest in us, since each element will receive the influence of its particular season, just as it receives the influence of its particular time of day. That’s, after all, why we do horary and seasonal treatments. I am not sure, though, how obviously the subtle changes in the balance of the elements as they move from season to season can be detected on the pulses, for example, or even how far they will lead to an E/E block. An E/E block is a sign of a great build-up of energy in one meridian which is unable to discharge it to the next along the Wei cycle. As felt on the pulses, it is a strong build-up, and therefore it seems to me unlikely that a simple change from one season to the next will affect this enough on its own (otherwise we would have E/E blocks all round the year as season changes to season!).

So in theory it is likely that there may be a subtle influence of the season on the energies of the different elements, but in practice, in my view, it is only likely to add to an E/E block if there is already a block building up. Unfortunately for your research I don’t think we have the means of assessing whether this is so or not, so I think this may always remain a theoretical discussion, without practical proof.

I hope this explanation helps.

Did points come before meridians, or meridians before points?

2010-12-11T09:42:00.000Z

I find it is interesting to speculate whether the concept of meridians came first, and then the points, as it were, popped up along them afterwards, or whether it was the other way around. Were the points there first and somebody (who?) joined them up, like some dot-to-dot picture our children trace? Historically, as I know from my translations of Elisabeth Rochat de la Vallée’s work on the points, there is disagreement as to which meridians certain points were allocated to, and uncertainty as to the lines of the meridians, which were not as firmly fixed as they are now. This would appear to indicate that points came before meridians, but there is obviously no clear answer to any of this. Speculation about this is, however, worthwhile because it prevents us from being too rigid in our thinking, and encourages us to look at things from a different angle, always a good idea if our thoughts are not to atrophy.

Points as sites of access to the deep within us

2010-12-11T09:40:00.000Z

We must not think of points as they can appear on our charts, as something stuck on to the body like pins in a pin-cushion. They must be seen as sites of access to the energy along a meridian, which in turn creates the pathway which eventually passes deep inside us or comes up from deep inside from the organ in question. A point is therefore part of the structure which creates the body (and soul) over which it lies. It provides a point of entry to it and thus allows us, through the needle, to alter the structure of the body (and soul) in some way. Since all is interconnected, we must remember that no point has an intrinsic value all its own, isolated from that of the meridian from which it emerges. The power of a meridian does not therefore lie in its individual points, but in the energy relating to that meridian to which these points form different kinds of access.

Any place on our body, when pressed, stimulated or manipulated in some way, in the case of acupuncture with a needle, will produce some local effect, akin to that of our scratching an itch or rubbing a painful area, but such an effect will remain restricted to that one small site, unless it somehow taps into the larger area to which a meridian has access. Each meridian reaches down into the innermost workings of an organ and from there spreads up and out back to the surface, where we meet it at the acupuncture point we decide to needle. Each time we needle the surface in this way, then, we must remember what lies beneath, and remain aware of how deeply we can influence these depths by this action on the surface, and how the energies lying hidden in the depths can propel themselves to the surface through stimulation by the needle.

The body as map

2010-12-06T11:56:00.000Z

I like to think of the body as a kind of map with the meridians as its roads. The individual acupuncture points are the landmarks placed at varying intervals along these roads, some close together, others more widely spaced apart. Some of the areas of the body more crowded with points can be regarded as our body’s villages and towns. These are the energetically bustling areas of the lower arms and lower legs, whilst those expanses punctuated only rarely by points, such as parts of the back, upper arm and upper thigh, represent the energetic equivalent of the sparsely inhabited areas of the earth, such as the deserts of Africa or the mountains of the Himalayas. To select points buried within the contours of such a widely varied landscape of the body is then the equivalent of trying to plot a course through the different regions of the globe. It is good to think of treatment and the individual point selections which go to form a treatment schedule in this way, for it is by keeping in mind the landscape of what we can regard as the human globe that we retain that sense of the whole which is essential to good practice.

Perhaps we could go further and think of each element as being one of the five continents on the human globe, with its two yin and yang officials as two countries on this continent. The routes connecting all the continents together are then formed by the meridian network, with its acupuncture points representing staging posts of various importance and size along what are effectively trade routes, the trading of different sources of energy from one area of the energy network to another. This helps us remember that any action anywhere on our body can never be regarded as an isolated action restricted to that one site of the body, but must be seen as having a domino effect, just as a single domino can topple the whole line as it responds to a knock.

I think this metaphor of the body as globe is a true one, for it not only emphasizes the interconnectedness of everything that happens on the surface of the body and deep within, but it is, importantly, also an appropriate representation of the circle of the Dao which encompasses all that is, and of the unbroken circling of the meridian network within us. Somehow the charts of the body with their seductively straight meridian lines make us forget the circular picture which is in truth how we should regard the body. The energies of the five elements do not so much weave us into the straight horizontal and vertical lines of the meridians our charts show, as draw every part of us into a circular movement, much like the 24 hours of day and night draw time into an ever-revolving circle of minutes, hours, days and years. If we can keep this sense of the circling of energy in our mind when working out our treatment protocols, this will prevent us from falling into the error of seeing treatment as forming a straight line, with only one way of getting from a to b. Rather, it should be seen as a circular action into which different practitioners will draw different treatments at different stages, but all supporting the circle of energy as a whole. Regarding treatment as something cyclical rather than linear supports my conviction that the order of point selections is not as important in the overall success of treatment as the boost to the energy given by a succession of treatments.

It is useful for each of us to develop a map of the body which is personally significant to us, and learn to accept that the selection of points we feel at ease with will always be personal to us, and need not, indeed should not, mimic another practitioner’s. We must not be frightened to own what we do in the practice room, each treatment decision we take, each way in which we treat our patients, all must have our personal stamp upon them because they arise from insights we have ourselves gained. This being so, I will be sharing with you in these blogs some of my thoughts about my own personal body map which I have developed over the years and which I hang metaphorically on the wall of my practice room to help me get my bearings.

Circles of energy

2010-12-04T18:36:00.000Z

We know that the elements describe a circle creating all things, including the human body, the energies of one element feeding the next and so on in a never-ending cycle. In the body we usually see this as one over-arching circle linking one element to another in the familiar sequence of Wood-Fire-Earth-Metal-Water and back again. We know this sequence as the Sheng (Shen) cycle, the cycle of production. Within this cycle there is a further cycle which has its own sequence, that of mother to grandchild, the Ke (K’o) cycle, in the sequence of Wood-Earth-Water-Fire-Metal and back again.

Here, then, are two circles of energy within us. There is also a further circle, a smaller reflection of this five element circle, which we often forget about and therefore tend to be much less familiar with. This occurs in the order of the grouping of points we call in five element acupuncture command points, which forms one of the most important, if not the most important, group of points. Command points are on the extremities, between the elbows and fingers on the hand, and the knees and toes on the feet. They lie on the meridians of each of the 12 officials, in a specific order, one for the six yin officials and another for the six yang. Most, but not all, command points are what we call element points; this means that they have a specific relationship with one of the five elements. On each meridian there is, therefore, what is called a Wood point, a Fire point, an Earth point, a Metal point and a Water point. In addition to the element points, the command points include what is perhaps the most important point of all, those we call the source points (yuan points). Of all the command points it is the source point which offers the most central reinforcement for other treatment.

If we trace the sequence of the element points, we can see that in both yin and yang officials they follow the order of the elements, but with different starting and end points. If we move up from the extremities, all yin officials have a Wood point as their nail points and progress through the cycle of the elements to finish at a Water point at elbow and knee, whilst all the yang officials start with a Metal point and finish with an Earth point. The actual distribution of the points along the meridians between the element points differs slightly from meridian to meridian, with a few of what are called non-command points lying interspersed at differing intervals between the command points, depending on the meridian involved. This apparently random distribution of the non-command points is yet another proof of the unpredictability of anything to do with acupuncture, each meridian having a unique sequence of command and non-command points, as though deliberately designed to trip up poor students as they try to memorise them. Even now, I sometimes have to refer to my charts to remind myself of a particular order of points.

To see the line of the command points as ending at elbow and knee, with the line continuing along the meridian with non-command points as though we are tracing the meridian from its extremities up the body or from the body down to its extremities, runs counter to our view of the continuous circling of energy from element to element. Instead, it is appropriate to see a kind of connecting link drawing the energy flowing as far as the elbow and knee back round out again to the nail points and on up again following the sequence of the elements, to form a continuous cycle. Thus the Earth and Water points at elbow and knee can be considered as connecting up again with the next points along the cycle, the Metal and Wood points at fingertips and toes. We can therefore envisage all these element points as creating another unbroken circle of energy, a further but smaller circle of energy within the larger, overall circle formed by the meridian network as a whole.

There is something uniquely symbolic about this reflection of the five element circle on our limbs. No other grouping of points elsewhere on the body has such a similarly fundamental relationship to the five element circle in all its mutually supportive power, as one element follows the other in a mimicry of the larger productive five element circle. Even the Associated Effect Points (back shu points), which have a specific relationship to one element each, do not lie along the back in the five element sequence, being linked in a much weaker way with the points of the other elements, since the ones lying above and below them do not follow the five element order. This helps us understand the importance of the command points in connecting our energies to the cycle of the elements. When using a command point of one element we should therefore remember that we are, in effect, drawing to some extent upon energy flowing within a complete cycle of the elements.

Each person is “a house with four rooms”

2010-11-29T14:46:00.000Z

I have just bought the second volume of the autobiography of the lovely writer, Rumer Godden, who lived most of her life in India. It is called A House with Four Rooms. I quote her dedication at the front of the book:

”There is an Indian proverb or axiom that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but, unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.”

Mid-August Lunch (Pranzo di Ferragosto)

2010-11-29T14:45:00.000Z

I have a friend, Susan, to thank for pointing me towards this lovely film about a middle-aged son, his aged mother and an unexpected houseful of similarly aged women over the weekend of this holiday. It is a tender and true film, which made me laugh, smile and cry a bit, but more importantly helped restore my faith in what a skilled writer and film director can do with the simplest material.

Like my little circular box (see previous blog), it continues to make me smile as I write about it. And this is all the more important, as I find that there have been very few other things in the wider world outside which make me smile at the moment.

The pleasure of beautiful things

2010-11-28T16:27:00.000Z

Yesterday I bought a little circular box which I had seen in the window of a local charity shop and fallen in love with. I was told it was carved out of rhinoceros horn, but I don’t know whether that is true or whether it is merely imitation plastic. In any case, if it is made of horn, I hope that the rhinoceros from which it came died of natural causes and was not one of the poor animals now hunted by poachers for just such a piece of horn.

The box is about 3 ins in diameter and about 1½ ins high, and has a little hinged lid with a little carved knob on top. Its tiny brass hinges and the brass studs around its base point to its being quite old. I can’t see a modern trinket-maker spending the kind of time needed to work these into the side panels. And it is also carefully lined with slightly worn black velvet which could again indicate an object made at a time when craftsmanship was more readily available and cheaper than now. It is a kind of mottled brown in colour, shot through with cream, and the small panels of its base could indeed come from something circular, such as a horn. I will not know what it is really made of, and when it is likely to have been made, until I give it to a friend of mine who haunts the Victoria and Albert Museum and knows all about these kinds of things.

I have put it on a low table on which I gather precious things I take pleasure in looking at. Here it is joined by a tiny green malachite elephant, said to come from the Congo, and a small replica of the Degas dancer, stretching her hands behind her and pointing her toes. I smile whenever I look at my little box. At a penny a smile, it is surely worth the few pounds I paid for it.

“Don’t get attached to your giving”

2010-11-25T22:42:00.000Z

Behind many of our fears as practitioners may lie the concern that a patient who is not perhaps getting what he/she wants from treatment, or whose treatment is not progressing as quickly as they had hoped, may decide that they do not want to continue treatment. We must not allow this fear to dictate the course of treatment. We should always let them to leave with as little feeling of disappointment or doubts about our own performance as possible, and learn to move on quickly.

It often happens that we never know why a patient stops coming to see us. Some few tell us why they are stopping, but many others, usually the majority, simply disappear, probably because they are too embarrassed to tell us why they are stopping. And this can happen after many months or even years of being our patients. The hardest to take are those long-standing patients of ours who either decide to move to another practitioner or stop having treatment of any kind without informing us. These we may never hear of again, and, human curiosity being what it is, we would dearly like to know what is going on in their lives, but may never do so, except by chance. As I heard a very wise Tibetan master, Sogyal Rinpoche, saying: “Don’t get attached to your giving”, one of the hardest lessons we have to learn.

Sometimes we hear news of our patient indirectly through somebody else. One such occasion, which I treasure for teaching me a lot about the effect of even a few treatments, occurred recently. A new patient of mine said that he had heard of me through a good friend of his who had had treatment from me, and who had told him that this treatment “had transformed her life”. I struggled to remember who the patient was, but looking back through my notes realised that she had come to see me for precisely three treatments many years ago, and then stopped coming. Without hearing what her friend told me, I would have qualified her treatment as a failure, as I did at the time. So we never really know what effect our treatments, and perhaps more importantly our presence and approach, can have. And this episode taught me not to underestimate the power of the interaction between the patient and me, nor of the power of those first few treatments in which the elements are addressed so directly and so vigorously for the first time, particularly through the initial cleansing treatment (AE drain) we give. Sometimes for some patients all that is needed is to point the elements in the right direction through these first simple, but pure, treatments, and leave the elements to continue on the path towards restored health through their own efforts as it were. Other patients may need our support for longer.

It is of course obvious that the nature of the relationship we enter into with our patients is crucial to the success of treatment. Of course a patient will have personal preferences which may have nothing to do with a practitioner’s competence, and we have to accept that. A patient must feel at ease with their practitioner, as one of the essential prerequisites for successful treatment. If this relationship is for some reason not right, patients will be reluctant to continue treatment, and the treatment itself will rest on very shaky foundations. The kind of uncertainties an uneasy relationship brings with it can lead the elements to hide or distort themselves, as though a screen has been thrown up between us, and the hesitancies which such unease can create in us as practitioners can confuse our perceptions of how to interpret what we see. We may ourselves be anxious and overlook anxiety in our patient, for example, or irritated and interpret through our own angry eyes our patient’s emotion as anger.

The lines of communication flowing between the patient and us and between us and the patient need to be as uncluttered as possible, so that the messages passing along these lines are interpreted according to their true meanings rather than being distorted by kinks somewhere along the way.

A practitioner’s intention

2010-11-24T08:58:00.000Z

Each practitioner in their own way influences the course of treatment not merely by their selection of the treatment itself but by their very presence and the nature of this presence. This is the quality which should make the insertion of a needle into an acupuncture point so much more than that needed to obtain a blood sample from a hypodermic needle. For, enclosed as it were within the physical action of penetrating the skin with the needle, there should be some inner quality transmitted by the practitioner’s spirit into the heart of the action which transforms this action from a mere physical process into something akin to what is imparted by a caress.

And that is not too emotive a description of what we do, for at a deep level where the practitioner attempts to engage the patient’s spirit, he/she must do that with the kind of gentle warmth we impart to those we love. At the heart of all acupuncture treatment at the level of which I am talking lies love, the warmth of one human being for another, allied here to the desire to help another, which is a practitioner’s role. Though the needle is solid, unlike a hypodermic needle, in one way it should be regarded as hollow, offering a channel through which the practitioner passes something more elusive and intangible than a physical substance. Within this lie such ephemeral gifts as the practitioner’s experience. This will include the confidence he/she will impart born of this experience, which will include an understanding of the transformation the action residing within points can bring about in a patient.

It is therefore vital to understand that the actual insertion of the needle is only a very small part of the process by which the energy to which the point has access is stirred, in much the same way as the manner in which we touch a child can comfort or frighten it. If we are unaware of this, we become mechanical acupuncturists, going through standard rituals, and our needle is then little more than a more delicate hypodermic needle inserted at a physical level to carry out a specific physical action. But, as I argue strongly, what we do must always have within it something of the spirit, and thus the selection of an acupuncture point and its needling must also always be bathed in just such a spirit. So when I select a point I will already have endowed it with something from my spirit which breathes into it my own understanding of why I have chosen it for this particular patient and for this particular treatment, and when I lift the needle what I intend this point to do for my patient flows from me into the needle.

It is difficult to define the elusive nature of the quality we bring with us into the practice room, which is why one person using the same points for the same treatment as another practitioner may have a completely different effect. There is no doubt that the more focused the practitioner is, the more effective treatment becomes. Another acupuncturist once told me that he was surprised that he did not get the same results from treatment as I did, although he was trained in the same discipline and used the same points for the same reasons. This initially puzzled me, until I realised that, at heart, he had doubts about the efficacy of what he was doing, whereas I did not.

It is important that we do not think that this area of our practice, that in which a practitioner can summon to treatment some quality of understanding they have gained from their experience, is only accessible to the experienced practitioner and might make it difficult for a novice practitioner to carry out good treatment. This is far from the case. It is merely that it is important that a practitioner from the earliest days is made aware of this important facet of their practice, and is thus open to harnessing whatever experience they slowly acquire to guide their treatments in the right way. We can focus our intention to achieve whatever we hope to achieve from the first few hesitant steps we take in practice through to those more confident steps experience helps us to take. Merely being aware that a practitioner brings something all their own to the insertion of the needle which can endow that insertion with something much deeper is the first step in this direction.

Point names, and how far they help us in point selection

2010-11-22T07:59:00.000Z

The individual site we know of as a point has been endowed since the earliest days with a (nearly) unique Chinese name about whose meaning there is much learned debate in those circles which boast a knowledge of ancient Chinese. It might be considered simple to use a point’s name as the basis for treatment, without reference either to the meridian on which it lies or to its anatomical position. This represents to me a crude form of point selection, if used as the main basis for selecting what treatment to offer, for it is to take a point out of the context of the body as an interconnecting globe of energy pathways.

Since I have started translating Elisabeth Rochat de la Vallée’s work on Chinese point names, I have become increasingly aware of the complex issues surrounding the meaning of point names discussed in the many classical texts she examines. This has helped me recognise that there are wide variations in meanings attributed in these texts to the same point names. They also show many differences not only as to where some points are located, but also on which meridian they are to be placed.

If there is so much debate in the classical texts, it is understandable how much all of this shades over into the even more complex area of the translation of names into other languages. Linguistic purists may complain that the English (or French or German or Japanese) words may eventually bear little or no relation to the original Chinese character upon which they are supposedly based, but such changes are inevitable, given the journey from culture to culture and from language to language that these names have made. This being so, I think, for my part, that a study of the original Chinese characters, fascinating and illuminating though this is, may well best be left to the historian and the linguist, if I, as a practising acupuncturist, am not to be overwhelmed. What I feel is the most important to me clinically is the rationale underlying my point selection, and how far some idea of the meaning of a point’s name helps me in this choice.

Every practitioner will have absorbed a number of points into their practice which they feel comfortable to use, and it is likely that this list will contain points with which we have grown familiar because of their use in the tradition we have inherited. The important thing here is that we develop an understanding of our own concept of the meridian network, with an internal logic we can justify to ourselves as we choose individual points. We must place our point selection in the widest context possible, and develop our own rationale for the points we select. Nor must we forget how many layers of learning seep into us from all the many different people we have learned from, who are trained in the discipline which shapes the branch of acupuncture we inherit. All these different pathways of learning, including what personal interpretation we make of a point's name, together go to form a kind of individual acupuncture heritage, and coalesce to form the understanding we have of what points to choose, making point selection always into a very personal journey of adventure.

The important thing here is to be prepared at any stage to widen both our repertoire of points and our perceptions as to when to use a point. I have often found that another practitioner will mention to me a point they use which may be one that I have never thought of using, or one that has somehow dropped off my radar. Adding this point to those I select from then reinvigorates me, refreshing my practice, much as if I am putting new flowers into my practice room. Our practice needs constant stimulation with new ideas of this kind if it is not to grow stale. This is one of the reasons why I like writing about acupuncture, because thinking about what I want to write makes me examine every aspect of my practice with a fresh eye, as though coming new to it.

Seasonal treatment

2010-11-16T17:14:00.000Z

I have a reader of this blog, Sean, to thank for prompting me to write the following, in answer to his question about my treatment of a Wood patient: “I’d like to know why you choose AEPs of Wood, especially for an autumn seasonal treatment.”

The error here is in thinking that I was giving “autumn seasonal treatment” to this Wood patient. The only seasonal treatment I do is treating a patient’s guardian element in the season of that element, and with its own element points (for example, St 36 and Sp 3 (Earth points within the Earth officials) in late summer for an Earth patient). No other points, including therefore AEPs, have any connection with seasonal treatments, except of course that any treatment we do in an element's season will have that little extra effect because it is drawing on nature's contribution to that element.

I know some people give seasonal treatment for patients of other elements apart from the element whose season they are in. In other words, for a Fire patient they may give a Metal seasonal treatment, LI 1 and Lu 8. I do not do that, as I see it as unnecessarily moving away from the patient’s own element. An element in balance should be able to deal with any seasonal changes through strengthening treatment on its own points. But the guardian element is always under greater strain than any other element, and will feel this load particularly in its own season. This is why we try to help it by doubling up the support we are offering, in other words by adding more Metal to Metal in autumn, or more Wood to Wood in spring, which is what we are doing when we do seasonal treatments.

All this applies, of course, to horary treatments as well (treating a Water patient with Bl 66 and Ki 10 in Water time, between 3 and 7 pm). And to be able to do a seasonal treatment in horary time is said to be the best treatment of all (you are in effect trebling the amount of help you are giving an element). For logistical reasons, this is difficult to do for some elements (Wood and Metal in particular), since patients would have to come to our practices in the night. JR encouraged us to arrange for several patients to come together during these anti-social hours, which, as a good pupil, I started doing, until I realised that a few patients who had loyally turned up between 11 and 3 in the night for their Wood horary treatments turned out, with more treatment, not to be Wood after all! I have since, for obvious reasons, not least my own health, discontinued this practice.

The cumulative effect of points

2010-11-16T08:49:00.000Z

It is good to understand the difficulty of assessing exactly what effect one point has rather than that of an accumulation of points added to the effect over time. A point might, in principle, I assume, prove its efficacy not immediately but after some time, as change can occur slowly. Since our patients on the whole continue their treatment with us from week to week, they will have further points needled which may have added to the effect of what we can call that original point, cancelled it or given it a completely different emphasis, so that it is no longer possible to assess exactly which point did what when. Certainly even if it were only the first point that has this future effect, we will never be able to isolate this for all the above reasons, so unless we are simply to needle one point once and await its effect, without adding any further points for a sufficiently long time to give us some certainty of whether it has had an effect or not, we can never know in absolute terms what the effect of that one point on that one patient at that one time is.

Does it matter? Well, yes, it does, but only if we are trying to assess the value of individual points in isolation and to test the accuracy of the information, all generally anecdotal and handed down, by word of mouth or hearsay, or from traditional sources which have grown up around that point and give it a weight and substance that we have no way at all of assessing. I am, however, emphasizing the cumulative importance of treatment rather than that of an individual point. The long-term effects of points used together, either in combination in the same treatment or in sequence as part of a pattern of treatment, will be observable over time and can thus be attributed, one can assume, to the cumulative effect of all the points that have been needled so far. We will never know whether it is indeed only one amongst many that has been effective, or whether it is the whole lot of them combined, or whether it is any combination of some of them, with some remaining ineffective, as another evidence of the dead wood I mentioned. But at least we can gain confirmation or not about the cumulative effect of the points we have so far needled.

Think element, not points

2010-11-16T08:47:00.002Z

When we approach treatment, our mantra should always be: Think element, not points. We know that we treat by needling a series of points, but we must think of these points not as individual stitches in a garment, but as shaping the garment as a whole. It has always surprised me how much attention practitioners seem to pay to individual points, whilst placing very much in a subsidiary role the element upon whose meridians these points lie, of which they form only a small part.

I am convinced of the cumulative nature of working upon an element, rather than the need to rely upon the individual action of specific points. In my view it is therefore never just one individual point which does the trick, and turns the tide of treatment as it were. Rather, there is a gradual accumulation of effect, as the selection of different points on that meridian/element adds layer upon layer to the element’s effectiveness in redressing a patient’s imbalances. There may come a tipping-point as a result of one treatment, where ill-health turns at last to good health, but it is created, not by the points selected for that particular treatment, but as a result of having, with each preceding treatment, through the selection of one point or a series of points after another, placed weight upon weight on the side of the scales of health labelled balance.

The greater the over-emphasis on points to the detriment of the subtleties of the elemental and meridian networks to which they belong, the more practitioners are reluctant to engage with the elements at the deep level such a relationship calls for. This deep level of understanding helps remove the emphasis on individual points, replacing it instead with what I regard as a much simpler scenario. Here the power of each element and of its servants, its two yin and yang officials, remains always to the fore, with correspondingly less emphasis placed on deciding which of its points to select to harness its energy. All points belonging to an element enhance in different ways that element’s energy, each becoming one of the many doorways through which this energy can be directed. This is why it is possible for practitioners to choose quite different points on the same meridian and yet lead to a similar level of improvement in the patient.

If the effectiveness of treatment lies in the cumulative effect of selecting points on the same element rather than in selecting a succession of unrelated, individual points, it is then very much a matter for individual practitioners’ preferences which points relating to that element are selected at which stage of treatment. These selections are usually based on the protocols used in the particular branch of acupuncture in which they have been trained or by the individual teachers who have passed on their knowledge to them, and they will therefore vary from school to school and from practitioner to practitioner.

My calming routine

2010-11-14T12:38:00.000Z

I have developed a kind of calming routine as soon as I experience the tension of not knowing which element to concentrate upon. If I am unable to home in on any particular dominant sensory or emotional signal coming from one element above all the others, I will experience that all-too familiar feeling of slight panic at not knowing what to do next, which all five element acupuncturists will, if they are honest, often feel. I then move into a routine which I have devised for myself in which I slow down what I am doing, and try to put myself back in the position I was in when I first met the patient. In other words I try to see the patient with completely fresh eyes once again. To do this I may concentrate on one of the sensory signals, voice, for example, and just engage in some conversation, not primarily to hear what the patient is saying, but how they are saying it. Or I may make a deliberate effort to smell, maybe by moving the blanket away to get closer to the body. I may also take this as an opportunity to look again at my notes. Doing this helps to insert a pause in what I am doing, since I have to page through the file and there has to be silence whilst I am reading. The patient, lying quietly there, is not aware of any hesitation in me, seeing only that I am absorbed in reading my notes and therefore is more likely than not to be pleased that I am taking so much time and care over them rather than, as I might worry, becoming impatient.

In fact the cultivation of periods of silence when nothing is happening except in the practitioner’s mind is a good practice to follow. It allows the patient to relax and the practitioner to think unhurriedly. One of the problems we may all have is in believing that we must always be doing something in the practice room, as though action is always a sign that we know what we are doing. If we don’t know what to do, because we are not reading the signals coming from the patient clearly enough to work out what treatment we need to do, we must give ourselves time to think, without feeling that our silence will be interpreted as incompetence by the patient.

I have always been quite happy, too, with admitting to a patient whose treatment appears not to be progressing that, as I have learnt to put it, “there is something here which I don’t understand”, and asking them whether they are happy to give me the time to work this out. No patient has ever been anything but delighted that I am prepared to give them so much of my time, and all have been happy to agree to coming more frequently for treatment if I think this is necessary, until I have worked out the direction I want treatment to take. For it is unprofessional if, knowing that we are unsure where treatment is going, we then agree not to see the patient for quite a long time, say a month ahead. This only delays the time we will take to get our treatment focused properly, and does nothing but increase the level of our uncertainty, since we have too much time to worry over our patient, with no feedback from seeing them to help us.

We should instead openly discuss our uncertainty to the patient, and ask them to give us the time to work out what we need to do. In such a situation it is essential that we see the patient as frequently as possible, because this gives us the opportunity of looking at them afresh and with these new eyes seeing the elements within them more clearly. Nor should we worry, as some of us do, about our patient’s finances here. We should leave it to them to say whether what may be an unexpected return to frequent treatments is making things financially difficult for them and, if so, perhaps we should consider reducing our fees for a short time. In the long run this saves patients both time and ultimately money since the frequency of treatment now will reduce the overall time the patient needs to come for treatment.

Uncertainties surrounding diagnosis in five element acupuncture

2010-11-14T12:29:00.000Z

I have been reminded recently of an important fact about the realities of being a five element acupuncturist. An experienced practitioner of many years’ standing told me that what he finds difficult about five element acupuncture is that its practitioners often appear to change their minds as to their patients’ guardian elements, starting, say with working on the Metal element, and after some, or even many, treatments moving away on to Earth. He could not, he said, work in a discipline which offered him so little diagnostic certainty, and he was surprised that I did not find this as disturbing as he did. Instead, as I pointed out, I find it exhilarating that my discipline is open to accepting in this way the complexities, and perhaps ultimate unknowability, of a human being. When I asked him exactly what certainties his own practice gave him, we together eventually attributed this to the fact that his practice concentrated almost exclusively upon focusing his diagnosis upon physical criteria, for which he had learnt specific standardized treatment which hardly varied from patient to patient. Where, for example, did the patient experience pain? If in the knee, then he had a fixed protocol of points to deal with this, which came from his knowledge of the meridian pathways affected, and included additional treatments, such as ear acupuncture or cupping, which he had learnt specifically addressed physical problems.

When asked how he would deal with a patient telling him that he was finding it difficult coping with life, he fell silent and then admitted that, apart from offering some generalized sedative treatment to calm the patient, this was an area of his practice that he did not venture into. This was evidence to me of the different emphases different traditions place on specific aspects of a patient’s well-being. The central pillar of all five element practice is formed by those areas of what, in Western thought, we would call psychology. The same does not hold true for all other forms of acupuncture. This may also be one of the reasons why five element acupuncture appears to prompt much heated debate as to its validity and arouse a surprising degree of hostility for a branch of acupuncture which is so completely rooted in the deep spiritual traditions of the east upon which all acupuncture is based. You have only to read the classics, such as the Nei Jing, to appreciate how strongly bathed in the spirit were the traditions from which all acupuncture emerged. There was never a split between body and soul as there is on the whole in Western medicine, where psychology and physical medical practices lie far apart, and sadly, too, as there appears to be in modern Chinese acupuncture. To a five element acupuncturist, where no such split exists, or should exist, the emphasis upon a diagnosis based predominately upon physical symptoms therefore represents an oddity, only to be explained by an over-reliance on what appears to be physically there, to the detriment of what cannot be seen.

It may well be that a society over-dependent on the physically observable since the rise of science, and thus symbolically prizing the microscope over the touch of the hand or the glance of the eye, has forgotten how far the microscope only reveals, as it were, the physical dimension of things, but can never, unlike the human touch, reach their ephemeral hidden core. It is here that five element acupuncture approaches the realms of psychotherapy, the treatment of the soul, and where those who find such an approach either perplexing or disturbing may label it, as one practitioner, firmly embedded within the “acupuncture treats the physical” school, did, as “too airy-fairy for me”. If airy-fairy means spiritual, well then I would agree that this is a fairly accurate description, but without the overtone of disparagement attached to this remark. It is the “airy-fairyness” of what I do that fascinates me, because I regard the intangible inner core each human being possesses as dictating the health of the whole structure of body and soul and, in its response to treatment directed at it, creating the conditions which allow the health of the whole edifice to be restored.

But the practitioner who was disturbed by not being able to “know” with certainty what element a person is highlighted a valid point which deserves to be addressed. If the elements within us are such subtle manifestations that they are difficult to detect even for those with experience, how far does that invalidate the discipline of five element acupuncture as a whole, and, as corollary to this, what particular difficulties does this present to an inexperienced acupuncturist? Far from invalidating it, I believe it strengthens its right to call itself a true discipline, for it acknowledges all those areas which lie at the heart of human life and give them meaning. As to the problems it presents for a newly qualified acupuncturist, the lesson, here, is to remain aware of the uncertainties our practice arouses in all of us, experienced and less experienced alike, and not to deny their existence or belittle the problems they cause. If uncertainty is accepted as being a necessary component of all healing practices, which I believe it must be, since with such practices we are dealing with the complexities of the human being, we can each in our own way learn techniques for dealing with this, and thus lessen our fears.

My next blog will describe a method I have developed to help me cope better with the uncertainties of practice.

A lineage is a line

2010-11-11T11:39:00.005Z

Below I give the text of a comment I have just left on the five element site 5e_acup.

"Having at long last joined this group, I am only just getting to grips with how to read what is in it, but I have managed to read the last messages, and the many comments they express. You have listed many important questions, Michael, and there are many other queries, all of which deserve exploring. Here, though, are my thoughts on some of what I have so far read.

A lineage is a line. It is never complete. It means a line of transmission, and that line starts before a master of that lineage enters the line and continues after that master has died.

I have translated Jacques Lavier’s History, doctrine and practice of Chinese acupuncture from French into English. As you know from Peter Eckman’s book, Lavier was one of the teachers of JR, Dick van Buren, Mary Austin and others. Much of what is in JR’s black book comes directly from the appendix of Jacques Lavier’s book, and presumably Lavier in his turn took his information from some of the masters with whom he studied in the Far East. JR is therefore one in an awesomely long lineage going right back to the pre-Christian era, and hoorah for that.

There is no doubt that JR developed his thoughts during a lifetime’s practice. I witnessed some of these developments. He undoubtedly dropped much of the more symptomatic acupuncture which fills the black book and to an extent also what is listed at the back of his Meridian and Points book. For example, when discussing possession, I never heard him suggest we select different ID points for patients “with depression” or “without depression”. With my first clinical patient as a student at JR’s college, I found weak pulses on both Metal and what I call Outer Fire (Three Heater and Heart Protector). The patient was a Fire CF. I was told to tonify both Metal and Fire. I was also taught sedation as well as tonification techniques as a matter of course. In the years of my observation of many hundreds of patients with JR, he never (not once!) suggested that we sedate a patient. The clearing of AE and removal of all the other blocks, such as Possession, Husband/Wife and Entry/Exit, all reduce the build-up of excess energy between different elements. These must have been improvements to practice which JR developed over time.

A lineage dies out if it is not fertilized by new thoughts in this way. It is the duty of those taught by a master to develop his teachings otherwise they become as sterile as some of the discussions and questions flying around now. JR very rarely answered the many sort of questions that are asked. As I heard him say once, in one of those profound and cryptic utterances with which masters like to puzzle their pupils, but which force us to go away and think, “If you have to ask that question, you won’t understand the answer.”

I don’t like all these boxes people forever seem to be trying to enclose five element acupuncture in, and boxes with abbreviations to capital letters I like even less, as though a particular branch of acupuncture is being given a trade-mark which, God forbid, somebody else will be forbidden to use. Will somebody take me to court because I always put needles into the Heart AEPs from the start (but with extreme care), because I have found AE on Heart and not on Heart Protector? Shock, horror, to those of us, who were taught as I was, only to put needles in the Heart AEPs if there is AE on Heart Protector. I have also found that by putting the needles in the Heart AEPs, AE then emerges afterwards on the Heart Protector needles! That is something new that I have learnt and which I now teach others to do. Have I thereby deviated from the lineage to which JR belonged? I don’t think so. I see it as developing that lineage and keeping it alive.

And one way in which I hope I am helping to keep the lineage alive is through my practice and through my writing, in particular of my blog, which I find is fertilizing my thoughts at an unexpectedly deep level. I like to think that I am encouraging others coming after me to go on exploring and through their own practice developing new ways of practising. As JR said, “if you had all had 40 years of practice as I have, you would be able to do what I am doing”. That may, or may not be true, for mastery is given to only a rare few, but the thought behind his words is that of a true teacher to a pupil. It is to go out there and do better than me."

Famous people I think are Water

2010-11-08T09:12:00.000Z

I think the following people are of the Water element:

David Beckham
Judi Dench
Rowan Atkinson
Gordon Brown
George Osborne
Michael Schumacher
Bob Geldof
Martin Johnson
Cherie Blair
Richard Nixon

Tips to look out for:

Water people tend to make us feel uneasy, even if they themselves look quite calm. They can have a kind of frozen stillness, which can leap into action if they feel threatened, such as when something unexpected happens. Then their eyes are the give-away. Water eyes are always wary, watching everything carefully, and ready to swivel away to look at anything unexpected which might be happening to the side or behind them. They can suddenly look startled, even though the rest of the face can remain surprisingly still.

I see Water’s colour as being of two kinds. There can be a very dark shadow over the whole face, in men often accompanied by the typical blue shadow which Richard Nixon showed, particularly when he was under threat politically. You can then think of the whole face as being dark, even though when you look closely it doesn’t look so dark. Then there is the other kind of Water colour, when it has a kind of translucence, so that other colours show through it. I like to think that the dark-blueish colour is the Kidney, the more hidden, deep yin, and the translucent, lighter colour is the Bladder, the more outward-facing, yang part of Water.

I have grown increasingly better at detecting a Water smell. It can be very obvious indeed if there is great imbalance, when the smell of stagnant urine can be quite clear. At a more balanced level, I have found that when I am standing at the couch, what comes up to me is a feeling that I am literally near water in some way, as though near a pond or a bathful of water, and it feels as though there is dampness around. This is when the smell just wafts upwards to my nose. This is certainly not an unpleasant smell at all, which the word “putrid” seems to indicate, but instead just a rather pleasant dampish smell.

I find the sound of the voice makes me feel a little tired if I listen to it for a long time. It is a droning sound, which seems to hammer away at me, but in a more hidden, less direct way than the force in Wood’s voice. Listen to Bob Geldof or Gordon Brown talking (extracts on U-tube are an excellent way of doing this), and this drone, like a bee buzzing away at us, becomes very clear.

But, above all, feel how you feel in the presence of a person, and ask yourself whether you are the person who is feeling a kind of uneasy fear, and, if so, whether this is the fear in the other person, well-hidden, as Water always tries to hide its fear, transferring itself to you. Water is often mis-diagnosed, as it is very adept at hiding itself behind other elements. When I think I can see many different elements in one of my patients, then I have found it is often Water that is the element underlying them all.

How nice to feel this blog is finding its way to China!

2010-11-08T09:09:00.000Z

This follows on from my blogs of June 1st and August 2nd:

Two very heartening developments, which help to offset my deep sadness and uneasiness about the future of traditional acupuncture in this country in view of the closure of LCTA in London and the impending closure of CTA in Warwick.

Mei, who is translating my Handbook of Five Element Practice into Chinese, tells me that Liu had emailed her to say that “he hopes the translation of your book will be finished and get published soon, which he thinks is the most important thing of all for promoting five element acupuncture in China.” He told her: ”Imagine 10,000 people out there read this book, even if only one of them finds the truth there, it is still good news. With 20,000 readers, we will at least get 2 people who want to practise it. Then we get a good start already.”

And I have just received the following further communication from Mei: “I’ve emailed some of your blog articles and your new blog (Nora’s five element treatments) to the students of Liu, who find them absolutely valuable. I think your teachings are exactly what they need so dearly. So your tele-education on 5 element acupuncture is on its way in China.”

The load of keeping a spiritual tradition alive within the core of acupuncture practice has been very heavy for me at times, sometimes, it has felt, overwhelmingly so. These encouraging communications from within the heart of Chinese medicine in China itself help lighten this load. Though it sometimes feels as if a door is closing in our faces here in the West through over-regulation and mistaken attempts to fit into an orthodox Western medical framework, it is good to know that another door is opening elsewhere. And where more important than in China!

A reader’s comments on my blogs on Metal and the elements within

2010-11-05T08:33:00.000Z

“I am finding your snippets on the different elements useful and it really helps cut out a lot of judgemental biases that creep in while dealing with people. A friend of mine is is Metal and I have always found it hard to prevent irritation and resentment creeping up because of:
a) a feeling that our whole family is being constantly judged;
b) her laughing at some aspects of things but immediately becoming defensive or evasive if any of us is critical.

Initially I thought it was a cultural difference, but now I realize it is something that is a part of her and she doesn't mean any harm and this helps me tremendously.

A couple of other points (perhaps reminders) that I found useful were:
a) the elements are often coloured by other elements: There are times when I glimpse two elements strongly, shifting with each other, and at one time I think this must be the main element in play and at other times I feel it is the other;
b) it's helpful to consider this along with seeing what reaction the person evokes in oneself. I think this is a good way of further understanding others and oneself too, because feelings are often more informative than a certain visual cue. And I realize that in a broad way, I have a natural affinity to certain elements (or aspects of them) and a wariness of or impatience with others.”

(Reproduced here with the writer’s permission)

Famous people I think are Metal

2010-11-02T10:19:00.002Z

I think the following people are of the Metal element:

Nelson Mandela
Barack Obama
Victoria Beckham
Peter Mandelson
Laurence Olivier
Daniel Day Lewis
Anthony Hopkins
Tiger Woods

Tips to look out for:

Metal people have a much greater sense of stillness about them than other elements. There can be a complete absence of movement when they lie on the couch, for example, almost as though they are like those stone effigies of knights lying in their tombs in cathedrals. This is not a suppression of movement, as there might be with Water because of it is frightened to move, but a feeling of withdrawal and detachment from what is going on.

They make very steady and acute eye contact, and it is to the eyes that we are drawn, rather than to the mouth, as we are with Earth. Whilst looking directly at us, and obviously seeing us very keenly, they appear at the same time to be looking past us and through us, as though searching for something beyond us. It is in their eyes that the sense of grief underlying this element is revealed.

When trying to work out whether a voice has the weeping tones of Metal, it is worth trying to close your eyes and just listen. Somehow when we listen in the ordinary way, watching the person talking, I find we can overlook the quiet, yin, drooping quality in a Metal voice. Listened to by itself without any input from our eyes, the voice becomes surprisingly flat and low, and draws us downwards. This is exactly the opposite of the yang, rising tones of Wood in particular, and to some extent also of Fire.

When trying to work out whether somebody is Metal, it is worth watching how the person is making you feel. Are you finding that you are somehow careful in what you say, as though choosing your words carefully in case you may be criticized? Metal judges; that is its role, to weigh the good and the bad, and discard the bad. It therefore cannot help itself from judging us, and we can feel this as implied criticism, although it may not be intended as such. It is, of course, above all critical of itself, but will not take lightly anybody criticizing it. You can laugh with Metal, it can laugh at itself (it can have a very acute, sharp sense of humour), but you can never laugh at it without finding that it withdraws completely from you (and in the case of a patient may be the reason why they decide to stop treatment).

The concept of the “elements within” that of the guardian element

2010-11-01T08:25:00.000Z

At a seminar I have just given, one of the students asked me about how much attention she should pay to what we call, in five element shorthand, “the element within”. This describes the particular colouring or modification given our guardian element by another element or elements. One way of understanding what I think is a very complex concept is to see our guardian element, modified by other elements, “the elements within”, as being in elemental terms the equivalent of a person’s genetic make-up. We each have a unique elemental imprint which consists of our principal element coloured by the unique shadings this element is given by other elements.

A Wood person, for example, will, as we know, have green as their dominant colour, shouting as their dominant voice, anger as their dominant emotion and rancid as their dominant smell. But the quality of all these sensory signs which gives this Wood person the unique qualities which distinguish him or her from every other Wood person is given the element by shadings from other elements. Thus one person’s Wood characteristics may be modified by Earth, so that their colouring is a yellowish green, the voice a sing-song shouting, their emotion anger laced with sympathy and their smell a sweetish form of rancid. Similarly, another Wood person’s Wood characteristics may have a tinge of Fire in them, so that their colouring is a pinkish green, etc.

I have always pictured this as a kind of “wheels within wheels within wheels”, since the Earth within the Wood, in the first example, will itself be modified by another element, say Metal, so that the colouring becomes a more whiteish, yellowish green, and so on. This is why no one person has exactly the same tone of voice as anybody else, thus making it possible for a unique voice-print to be picked up by a mechanism activating the opening of a door.

What is important in the student’s question is, however, how far all this is significant from a clinical point of view. And since I am, above all, a practical acupuncturist, concerned predominantly with what can help me in the practice room, I feel that spending time worrying about the elements within the guardian element may well be time better spent trying to home in on the dominant element itself, since most of us, myself definitely included, find it hard enough to find what I, rather flippantly, call “the element without”.

Interesting as it is to speculate as to which imprints other elements place upon the guardian element, the important thing is to find this element, a difficult enough task! From a clinical point of view, it has little bearing on the kind of treatment we select, for it is only in very rare cases that we modify treatment in any way to take account of the element within. It may, though, have a bearing on our perception of our patient’s needs. In other words, the Wood patient in our first example may be in need of slightly more sympathy, whereas the patient in our second example may be more receptive to a bit of laughter in the practice room.