I do not myself rely only on my pulse-taking to help me diagnose a block
of any kind. As I have said on many occasions, pulse-taking is a very complex
art, much more complex than I think we like to admit to ourselves. In effect we are attempting to read the state
of the five different elements and their 12 officials with what I always like
to think of as the rather blunt instruments of our finger-tips. Of course we get more adept at doing this as
the years pass, but I have never forgotten the lessons I learned comparing JR
Worsley’s pulse-readings with my own, even after I had been more than 3 years
in practice (plus 3 undergraduate years training myself to read thousands of pulses).
He would tell me one of my patients had an Entry/Exit block or a Husband/Wife
block when I simply could not feel this.
Conversely, what I rather simplistically thought to be some kind of a
block would turn out not to be that. In
other words the delicate art of accurate pulse-reading was something I realised
would take me many years to learn. And in
the meantime I realised that I had to look for other indications in patients
which would help me suspect the presence of a block. It is always good to remember, too, that it never matters if we try to clear
a block of any kind, from Possession to a simple Entry/Exit block, if the block
is not there. It is then only like
trying to open a door which is already open.
So it is better to err on the side of treating for a block even if unsure
of its presence, rather than ignoring what might be a block.
Since I am always somewhat suspicious of the accuracy of my pulse
readings, I like to supplement what I think they are telling me with what I see
as corroborating physical or other evidence of a block’s presence. If energy is blocked, such blocks
can occur at any level of body, mind or spirit. In the case of a Husband/Wife block, for example, we must never forget that this represents an attack upon the Heart, and a patient must be showing signs of some desperation, of almost wanting to give up. They may not articulate this in words, and some may like to hide their despair, but as good five element acupuncturists we should always be looking below the surface to see what is really going on deep inside a patient. Unexpected outbursts of anger or irritation, too, are therefore
as much pointers to a block involving the Wood element, as feeling that there
is excess or lack of energy in the Wood pulses.
Over the years I have observed many physical and emotional
indicators which may suggest the presence of an Entry/Exit block to help me
supplement what the pulses tell me. You
can read more fully about these in my Handbook
of Five Element Practice.
It is very rare to find an Entry/Exit block between the two paired
officials within an element. In all the
many years in which I observed JR Worsley taking pulses, I never once heard him
say that he had found such a block. In
fact, I remember quite clearly his telling us that the yin and yang officials
try as hard as possible to share their energy in order to bring harmony to their
element. This is why he said we should
always start by treating both yin and yang officials equally within any
treatment. Even when he diagnosed a
patient as having the Gall Bladder rather than the Liver as their Guardian Official, we should not neglect the Liver. And as I am still not sure of my
ability to diagnose which official is the dominant one, I therefore continue to treat both yin and
yang officials.
The only exception is when I diagnose Inner Fire, and specifically therefore
the Small Intestine, where I try as far as possible to concentrate treatment
upon the many Small Intestine points, having been told early on in my training
that the Heart is considered a sacred meridian, and therefore should always be
approached with care.
Occasionally the treatment we give can have what are to me
even now quite startling results. One
such outcome occurred during my last seminar in Beijing.
A young man of 18, who by chance happened to have been educated up to
the age of 11 in England,
and therefore spoke excellent English, came for treatment. He was finding life very difficult, probably
because of his difficulty in integrating himself into the Chinese educational
system after all those years in England
in a very different kind of a school.
Because his knowledge of written Chinese was very limited, he had been
placed in a class which was 2 years behind his age group, a difficult thing for
any child to cope with, and this, I think, had caused him most of his problems.
I diagnosed him as Fire, and he responded to me in a way
which I felt was very characteristic of Inner Fire. He had had some previous treatment on Fire
early on his treatment some months back so I felt that we did not need to give
him the four treatments on Outer Fire first, as we should always do before
turning to Inner Fire. (The reasoning
for this is that we need to strengthen Fire’s outer defences before addressing its very heart). I therefore
thought it was reasonable simply to do the source points of Outer Fire, and
then move on in the same treatment to Inner Fire, again with its source points. We therefore needled a total of only 4 points.
I thought he looked and felt very different as soon as we
treated the Inner Fire points, but I was not expecting what he said, as he
walked towards me after the treatment.
This was: “I feel as though I’ve
just come out of a coma.”
No wonder I love what I do!
I am often asked how on earth we have attempted to offer a
five element diagnosis to the many hundreds of acupuncturists in China who have
come to our seminars over the past eight years.
I am just returning from another week’s seminar in Beijing where we have tried yet again to do
just that, so I would like to describe the procedure we have worked on over the
years to do this.
Of the 300 or so practitioners who attended, some 130 were
new to us. All these had previously attended
one of the many preliminary five element courses in many towns all over China organized
by the more experienced of our five element group of practitioners, now
promoted to the role of five element teachers.
By the time Mei, Guy and I arrive at a seminar all those attending
will have been given a provisional diagnosis of their element as a starting
point from which we work.
In China,
nobody seems to worry at all when I explain that all diagnoses we make are only
a first attempt at finding their element.
They are very unconcerned when we change these preliminary diagnoses,
and may change them again during the week of our seminar. This is probably because I always emphasize
that none of us can ever truly “know” the guardian element until treatment has
confirmed that we are on the right track.
As encouragement for myself, and for others, I always like
to remember JR Worsley telling us when we were students that we would all be
able to diagnose as quickly as he did when we had as much experience as he had
after his 45 years of practice. I have
now had 30 or more years of five element practice to help me, and if I add
these years to those of Guy and Mei, I like to think that together we reach
JR’s total of years. Certainly to my
surprise, every time to we return to China the three of us are getting better and better
at our diagnoses, and quicker and quicker at making them, too. And we work together very well as a team.
So here I will describe the procedure for carrying out these
multiple diagnoses which we have developed to cope with the ever-increasing
number of those attending our seminars who wish to have some idea of their own
element. As we know, all five element
acupuncturists should as far as possible be sure of their own element as an
essential pre-requisite for their practice, for without this we do not know
what shadow our own element unconsciously casts over our patients. And all those attending quite rightly crave a
diagnosis from the most experienced five element practitioners they can find. I therefore think we have a duty to offer
them our expertise in diagnosing the elements, with the proviso that we make
these diagnoses in a rather idiosyncratic way to take account of the sheer numbers
involved. The Chinese, bless their
hearts, willingly accept this without complaint.
This is what we do:
To help us, we are given photographs of the new practitioners grouped
together according to the element to which they have been assigned in the introductory
seminars. We then count the total number
for each element. This seminar (April
2019) the numbers were:
Wood: 17, Fire: 10, Earth: 32, Metal: 21, Water: 42, plus 11 still left undiagnosed.
From experience we know that if we work quickly, we can get
through this large number in a day, divided into a morning section from 8.30 –
12, a long lunch-break of 2 ½ hours from 12 to 2.30 (the Chinese always take a
nap after lunch), and an afternoon session from 1.30 – 5.30. Five chairs are placed on the raised platform
at the front of the large seminar room, and Mei, Guy and I sit in the front row
of the audience group, with many people sitting on the floor all around us, and
everybody else seated behind us. There
is always a scramble for people to get as close to us as possible, because they
want to hear the discussions we carry on between us.
This time we started with one of the larger groups (when our minds were fresh!),
choosing Earth first, because starting with the largest group, Water, was
likely to give the room a more uneasy feel (Water’s fear showing itself as it
is asked to talk in front of such a large group of people). An Earth group is much more at ease, and this
helps to settle the room down nicely at the start.
Five of the each group sit down in turn on the platform in
front of us, and we look at this small group as a whole to see how far they
seem at ease with each other (or not), and whether any particular person stands
out from the group in some way. Then
each of the five is asked to talk a little about anything they want, as we
listen to their voices (the audience group is told to do this with closed eyes
for part of the time), and observe them closely. Over the years everybody coming to our
seminars has got much better at spotting the odd person who doesn’t seem to fit
in with the rest of the group. This may
be the one who sits forward whilst the others sit back, the one who turns to
look at the person talking, whilst the others look straight ahead, or is
constantly moving whilst the others remain still. We have found that the audience as a whole
has become surprisingly good at pointing out any significant differences.
Mei, Guy and I then put our heads together and decide
whether or not we agree with the provisional diagnoses. We discuss quite openly where we have doubts
and why this is so and which element group we think a person should be
re-allocated to.
When we have gone through an element group as a whole, we
ask all those we still think are that element to stand together on the platform
for us to take a look at the group as a whole.
And here we may change our diagnosis again, because in the large element
group, one or two will now stand out as feeling different. These we then re-allocate to join another
element grouping during the day.
At previous seminars Guy had the bright idea of providing
coloured stickers in the five element colours, which we would put on those we
had diagnosed so that everybody could see from a distance which element we had
provisionally allocated to those attending.
This time, instead of a coloured sticker, each person was given a much
more visible ribbon to wear around their neck, the colour of which could be
spotted a long way away to help us if we decided to change a diagnosis.
After this seminar I totted up how many changes we made for
each element. For Wood it was 5 out of 17, for Fire it was only 1 out of 10,
for Earth it was 17 out of 32, for Metal 8 out of 21 and for Water 8 out of
42. From this random survey we could
conclude that the Chinese five element acupuncturists running the preliminary
seminars are better at diagnosing Fire (nearly 100% right), than Earth (only
about 50% right)! For some reason there
are always a large number of Water people at our seminars, and practitioners
over there therefore have a lot of practice in diagnosing this element.
This may seem a rather complicated procedure, but it works
surprisingly well, and is an excellent way of helping a large group of
practitioners learn more about diagnosing the elements in one day than they
will learn from seeing only a few patients at a time. We do the diagnoses at the start of a
five-day seminar, which leaves us nearly four days in which to change our
minds. When you are sitting in front of
a roomful of people, all wearing very visible coloured ribbons around their
necks, it becomes surprisingly easy to see those who respond to what is going
on in an expected way and those who don’t.
I was delighted that the last thing I did as I left the platform on our
last afternoon was ceremonially to remove the red ribbon around a young man’s
neck and replace it with a yellow ribbon to great applause in the room. I had been talking about the Fire element, and
in my usual Fire way had stoked up a lot of laughter in the room, except in
this young man who only looked puzzled.
“He looks worried as though trying to process something, and isn’t his
colour yellow?” I asked myself. “He must
surely be Earth, not Fire”. He himself
was delighted at the change, as he had felt that he didn’t really fit in
amongst his fellow Fire practitioners.
We have also added another simple diagnostic technique to
our teaching, which is to ask the group whether they feel a patient coming
before the class makes the room feel “up” or “down” (i.e., yang or yin). If “up”, then it is likely to be either Wood
or Fire, if “down” then Metal or Water, with Earth “neither up nor down”, or
“both up and down”. This is again a
surprisingly simple way of helping those new to five element acupuncture start examining
the feelings different elements evoke in them.
