Preparation for my ninth visit to China

I am off to China with Mei Long and Guy Caplan on 14 April, first to give a seminar in Nanning in the South and then on to Beijing, where we will be going to the practices of several five element practitioners, as well as giving a lecture at the Beijing University of Traditional Medicine.

This time we will be focusing on helping the more advanced five element practitioners who have previously come to some of our seminars.  What these need is more guidance for their point selection.  I have therefore written a handout for them (given below) referring them to the relevant chapters in my Handbook.  In China we will give the page numbers from the Mandarin version.  The aim is to encourage participants to have the courage to enjoy the fact that there is always a personal approach to point selection. 

"One of the most important lessons all five element practitioners have to learn is how gradually to feel more confident in their point selection.  This is why I included some guidelines in the new edition of my Handbook of Five Element Practice.  The two important chapters to look at are Chapters 6 (pages 83 - 90 onwards) and Chapter 10 (pages 123 – 140).

Chapter 6 lists the different groups of points, such as command points or Windows of the Sky.  Chapter 10 is intended to help you select additional points for each element (pages 123 – 139), and gives you guidelines about how you should approach the first four treatments (pages 139 – 140).  In particular, you should read the introduction to these two chapters (pages 83 - 84 and 123 – 124).

 

The important thing you need to remember is that nobody can say exactly which points should be used to treat a patient for any particular treatment.  There are, of course, certain rules for point selection which are important to understand, such as always finishing each treatment on a command point of the guardian element.  But apart from these rules, point selection is always a personal decision by the practitioner.  

 

Nobody can therefore say whether one selection of points is better than another.  We must have the courage to accept this, and not be frightened by this." 

 

Having just heard that nearly 20,000 (twenty thousand!) copies of the Handbook have been sold in China, I am assuming that each person coming to the seminar will bring a copy with them from which to work as we go through the points to help treat the patients coming to the seminars.