I have
taken the plunge (see my blog More about
books of 1 July), and now one of my books, Keepers of the Soul, can be downloaded on to Kindle. Confirmation that it was good that I have
done this has just come through a lovely email I received yesterday from China. The writer, Feng, studied acupuncture in Chengdu, but did not complete her studies because she did not
like the approach she was being taught. She moved to Europe, and then, quite by
chance (if there is such a thing!), made contact recently after many years with
my friend Mei, with whom she studied in Chengdu. She is now so enthused by five element
acupuncture that she will be coming to my seminars in the autumn, and wishes to
become a five element acupuncturist.
As you can see
from her email, she has bought one of my books in its e-book version, and has
sent me the following review. I pass it
on to you in her words:
“Dear Nora,
I downloaded from Amazon Keepers of the Soul to my Kindle one week
ago and now I just finished it and want to tell you how I feel
about it. I would put my thoughts together in the way as if I
were telling a friend about this book and I apologize for my gerglish.
At the beginning what touched me most is the utmost sincerity of the
author. As I started the reading I had the feeling as if I were
watching the author explore the elements, she was a little bit tense and me
too, she tried to convey to me the whole dimension of her interaction with
the elements and sometimes she succeeded and sometimes left me try hard to
figure out what she was confronting at that moment. I have never
experienced this kind of approach the author has to
TCM, honest, sensible, totally unassuming, open, and by
a highly cultivated western mind (?!). Reading the book brought some
subtle awareness to my inner world and I had the feeling I could even make
correction to some minor disorders inside myself without intervention of
needles. This led me to imagine what the intervention of a needle would do to
me! As the reading processed, the author becomes more and more relaxed and as
it comes to the description of the elements with example of prominent people it
is getting even entertaining. It is a book that opens and I would recommend it
to everyone without restraint.
Greetings from the summer of Chengdu,
Feng”
Thank you,
Feng, for these interesting comments. I
particularly appreciate your words: “It
is a book that opens.” That is what all
books should do – they should open something new inside us so that we see the
world and ourselves in a slightly different way.
I also like
the comment that you felt “I was a little bit tense” at the start of the
book. I probably was, as I was trying to
encapsulate in words all my feelings about the elements. Whenever I write, I always feel the
difficulty of capturing feelings within the sometimes clumsy and inadequate
framework of words.
It’s lovely to get feedback from patients about successful
treatments we have done. So here is something I can share with you.
A long-standing patient of mine told me that she had been
suffering for some time from persistent menopausal hot flushes. Her
element is Earth, and this is the treatment I gave her:
CV (RM) 12
III (Bl 38) (or 43 – if you prefer, which I don’t!)
XI (St) 41, XII (Sp) 2
All the points were tonified and moxibustion on each point was added to
the treatment.
My patient was amazed by the effect of the treatment. The hot flushes stopped that night, and she
hasn’t experienced any since.
I hope this goes some way to dispel the widespread myth that
moxa should never be used on patients suffering from hot flushes. The opposite is true. Whilst hot flushes make people feel very hot
on the outside, they can remain very cold on the inside. Indeed I suspect that the inner cold may be the reason why the Three Heater is working overtime trying to provide heat, but in the wrong place. Moxa helps correct this imbalance by sending warmth deep within the body (and soul!) to the meridian network.
This is called treating fire with fire.
Over the past years I have experienced many dark days when I
despaired for the future of five element acupuncture. Now, I can say with heartfelt relief, no
longer. It is not only that the whole of
China appears to have opened up to welcome it back to its heart after many
decades of absence, but in this country, too, maybe perhaps partly as a result
of this or because the spirit of the age demands it, five element acupuncture
appears to have regained its soul. I see
evidence of this all around me, and am deeply encouraged by it to continue my
work in promoting it.
One small, but significant, evidence for this found its way
round the world to me by a circuitous route, which illustrates how the world is
now indeed one. Mei Long, my young
Chinese student and friend, translates part of my blog into Mandarin for her
own mini-blog (called a weibo), which then speeds on its way round China and to
any Mandarin-speaker elsewhere in the world, where it apparently attaches
itself in some form to Liu Lihong’s blog which is read by a vast readership in
China. A reader of this blog is a young
Chinese girl living in London
who came to one of my seminars, decided to experience five element acupuncture
for herself and now wants to study it.
Things do indeed come full circle if we wait long enough.
Some of you may have been surprised when I wrote that I
dislike books which list the function of points in my blog of 17 June, The Simpler the Better (last
paragraph). So here are my reasons.
We should always remember that points provide access to the
meridians on which they lie, and through this to the elements deep within, each
point a tiny opening through which external energies can be drawn in and down and
internal energies drawn up and out. We sometimes forget this, because as
acupuncturists we only work on the surface of the body, and our concept of the
meridian network is often modelled too closely on the two-dimensional charts
hanging on our walls. But though we use
the points as places where we needle, their function is to convey the messages
our needles are attempting to send down to the elements upon whose meridians
they lie. They are therefore always
messengers, never the message itself.
Books listing the various functions of individual points can
confuse the unwary. If used carefully such books may well add to
our understanding of the points, though I myself doubt much that is written in
them, wondering upon how much actual clinical experience they are based as
opposed to theoretical musings about the ancient Chinese meaning buried in
their names. What worries me is that
relying on these books for our point selection, which so many acupuncturists
sadly tend to do, inevitably weakens the awareness of the link between point
and element, and potentially makes a knowledge of the element secondary to the
apparent function of a particular point.
As five element acupuncturists, we are on a slippery slope once we begin
to think of the point as having a function all its own quite distinct from that
of the element which gives it that function.
We must never confuse the messenger with the message. And if our treatment is getting nowhere, we
should not shoot the messenger (the points we have used), but look to change
the message (the element on which they lie)!
I think the following is a beautiful
description of the loneliness of grief, the feeling of isolation we all feel
when we experience loss. It comes from a book by the American writer, Francine
Prose, called Goldengrove, which is
all about how a young girl copes with the death of her sister.
“So many of (those trying to offer comfort)
said the same things that I might have thought that there was common ground, if I hadn’t known that I was alone on an iceberg
split off from a glacier….. When they wept, I cried, too, and for a moment I
almost believed that my iceberg might have room for another person.”
I have now put my Keepers
of the Soul into e-format, and could sell it like that on Amazon for the
Kindle. And yet I have been surprisingly
hesitant to take the last step, put off by the amazingly complex charging
arrangements Amazon have devised, but more importantly by my reluctance to see
my words encased, not in the enticing pages of book, but on a flat, metal (or
is it plastic?) screen.
The writer Julian Barnes has now helped me understand my
reluctance a little better. This is from an article of his on his love of books
in the Guardian yesterday:
“Every book feels and
looks different in your hands, every Kindle download feels and looks exactly
the same…..I have no luddite prejudice against new technology; it’s just that books look as if they contain
knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.”
