A five element review of my year: December 2019

As I approach the end of another year, I like to add up its pluses and its minuses, always hoping that its pluses are the greater.  On the professional front I am pleased to think that they definitely are.  On the political front, definitely not, as we just emerge from another unsatisfactory election and face an even more unsettling future expelled from the comforting family of our European friends.  But since the world as a whole is going through a period of great turmoil, with no end in sight, I will concentrate here on the joys my professional life has brought me this year, none more so than observing the blossoming of five element acupuncture in China.  

And appropriately for a five element acupuncturist, I am breaking down my time in China into its different elemental phases.  There was its initial Water phase, when the seeds of five element acupuncture’s re-emergence in China were slowly being sown, after Mei Long had met me at a seminar in the Netherlands, and then written about this to Liu Lihong.  Then Wood’s buds, planted so inspiringly by Liu Lihong, slowly germinated, first a few of them in our seminars in Nanning, then more and more, as the buds of China’s five element spring gradually spread, until they have burst into full summer blossom in the last few years under the warmth of the Fire element which Mei and I bring to what we do.

How happy I was when I came to China this October to see the fruit of all our work in the large team of Chinese five element teachers who now teach the basic five element principles to the many hundreds of those wanting to learn.  These teachers represent the true fruit of what we have sown in the past eight years, doing the Earth element’s work for us.  And then appropriately as we approach the end of the year, we come to Metal, as Liu Lihong adds his inspiration to all our work, and Guy Caplan bestows Metal’s quality upon all the teaching we do.   

Finally, the growing success of what we are achieving in establishing five element acupuncture’s position in the traditional medicine landscape in China lies in the capable hands of the strongest of all the elements, Water, for without Lynn Yang where would we all be?  She holds everything together, drawing things into a circle so that one seminar ends and without a hitch the next is already at its planning stage.   Without her Water energy the circle which symbolizes the re-introduction of five element acupuncture into China would not be complete. 

Liu Lihong once told me, “Now we need a Chinese JR Worsley to appear”.  I am sure the seed for this has already been sown, and will emerge when the time is right.  As he said, “There’s no hurry, Nora.  If it takes 100 years or more for five element acupuncture to establish itself in China, it doesn’t matter.”  I am a much more hasty person than he is, and I am delighted to see that it has not taken the 100 years he predicted, but less than the eight years I have been going to China, for I see it happening already.   

So each element has added its magical touch to my years in China.