Teach Yourself Five Element Acupuncture for Acupuncturists - a proposal for a new book

The ideal introduction to a healing discipline such as five element acupuncture is in the form of a personal transmission from master to pupil. This was the only way people learned in the past, where the handing down of experience from one generation of a family to the next was common practice and the only type of learning available.  Modern forms of education, though, have increasingly emphasized the need to gather students together into classrooms, there to follow rigidly standardized courses with a ratio of one tutor to a roomful of students.  It is little wonder, then, that against this backdrop of formalized learning, the transmission of many years of deeply personal experiences from a practitioner to a student is a luxury denied to all but the very lucky few, those ones who have been able to find a teacher whose teachings they admire and who lives close enough to them to be available at sufficiently regular intervals to pass on his/her knowledge.

This being so sadly the case now, and the situation being made even harder by the lack of good five element clinicians prepared to teach, I have decided to do what I can to fill a glaring gap by writing this manual based upon my Handbook of Five Element Practice.  Since I cannot single-handedly (or with just a few other five element teachers) satisfy the growing need for this kind of personal transmission of what I have learnt, then I hope this manual will provide something which I cannot offer in any other way.  The purist will complain that long-distance learning of this kind is not only far from ideal but perhaps should not even be undertaken, because the student can be given so little feedback.  But the purist is not confronted, as I am, with many hundreds of Chinese acupuncturists from all over their vast country longing to learn about five element acupuncture, and many more spread all over the world, eagerly learning whatever they can through this blog.

For Chinese and other non-English-speaking students there are the additional problems of language barriers which complicate communication, both written and verbal.  Hence the eventual appearance of these lessons in both a Mandarin version for my Chinese students and an English version for all those other people of different nationalities, equally keen to learn, if the numbers reading my blog are anything to go by, and for whom English must be their lingua franca.

The Mandarin version of this self-tuition course is being translated by Mei Long as I write, so that it will be available for our next seminar in Nanning in April 2013.  I am just completing the English version, which I am planning to issue in book form.  I have yet to decide whether I will also include a kind of addendum listing the (very few) points I use and my reasoning for using them.  This is something I am working on at the moment.