A present from China!

The first email I opened this morning made my heart sing.  It is from one of my students in Chengdu, and I am passing it on in full exactly as she wrote it.  It delights me that this practitioner has gained such deep insights into five element acupuncture in such a short time (about 3 weeks during our seminars, plus a lot of learning in a small group with her fellow practitioners).  It is very heartening to get such positive feedback confirming that we are sowing the seeds for five element acupuncture's revival in China on such fertile ground.

"Recently I have some new understandings of water, and I’m eager to write to you to see if it’s right or not.

There was a patient of mine (I treated him with common acupuncture, not five element acupuncture), who I thought was a wood person for the first few times I saw him. I used to be quite sure of that because he argued a lot, and he liked to direct me what to do. And most of my friends of our Chengdu group considered him to be wood too. As he had read your book, one day when I told him about my diagnosis, he denied it, and he insisted that he is water but wood. So that day I had a longer talk with him, and I found that when he was talking with me, his eyes wandered, and his color was not green but bluish black. He kept telling me about this or that with a fast and droning tone and sometimes I had to stop him to ask another question. I started to think that maybe he was water, but I still thought that there was a lot of wood under water. And except for his casual back pain, he also told me about his main problem, excessive sexual desire, which obsessed him for years and I really didn’t know how to deal with it with common acupuncture. So I decided to treat him with five element acupuncture.

Because of the following two things, now I can be sure of his element, which is water. The first is of course the effect. He was very sensitive to the treatment, he would report his change to me every time after he was treated, and it was going to a very good direction. He found that he was becoming more and more calm, more optimistic to the future and more energetic. He now knew what direction he'd like to go to. The symptoms on his back and leg were almost gone, and his problem of excessive sexual excitement was much better too. The second reason was that one day we had a little argument, he kept saying things to let me know that he was right, which made me become very impatient and even a little angry, but instead of being irritated by me, he started to apologize to me. I thought if he was wood, he would become angrier than me, right?
      Now that I can be certain of his element, I have even more doubts. There are a lot of water people around me, but none of them are like him. They never speak out what they really think of. Even if they do not agree with my opinion, they hide their true feelings. But he seems to be much more overwhelming than other water people, he always pushes me to do things or accept things that he wants me to. Is it because he is a water person with a lot of wood or is this another characteristic of water?
      I was very confused about this until one day I remembered that I had read on Mei's blog that you described Mo Yan (the Chinese Nobel Prize winner) into "quiet flame", and I suddenly realized that since there were different kinds of fire, and there would definitely be different kinds of water, too! Most water people I knew may like small streams glide through the meadow, they skirt obstacles silently, but this patient is more like flood, he is so powerful and if there is a dam, he'll just rise until the dam is broken over. Am I right to comprehend it this way? And since he is becoming more and more calm after treatment, it represents that if a water person is so overwhelming like he used to be, it shows that this person is not in balance, right?

PS: After writing this letter, I read your descriptions of water again, and I found that what I need to know was already on the book! But this time I had much deeper understanding of what you’d written. And I realized that when you were not by our side, patients were our best teachers. We would never make progress if we don’t respect what patients teach us."