A fellow five-element acupuncturist who lives in Malawi,
Sophie Barrowcliff, has asked me about seasonal treatments, and this has made
me think about the often tricky question of when exactly we should be giving
them. I quote here from her email:
“The seasons here are not
just the opposite way round to the northern hemisphere, and I wanted to have
your opinion on a question that has long bothered me.
We typically have a hot
season, wet season, and dry season.
The start of the rains, when everything bursts into life, is
clearly spring. The hot rainy months are summer And the end of the rains, the golden harvest
time of autumn. This is followed by our
cold season (May-July), with cold winds streaming from the south and the lowest
temperatures of the yearly cycle; it feels wintery. And yet it is only the
start of autumn, the retreat back into the earth, with the leaves only coming
off the trees in a month or two.
Sometime in
August/September the winds change, it rapidly warms up, it gets progressively
drier and everything feels dead and the land is parched: this is the dead
inertia of winter. This is the conundrum for me - how winter here is actually
hot! So as I treat patients, I constantly vacillate as
to which the best seasonal treatment is.”
I was taught about the elements and their relationships to the
individual seasons in this country, Great Britain, which is in a temperate
zone where each element can be allocated to a distinct season. I have therefore never had to deal with the
complications presented by the tropical weather which Sophie describes. Her
questions have set me thinking.
The purpose of giving horary and seasonal treatments is to help a
patient’s energy attune itself better to the environmental energies around in
terms of the time of day, for horary treatments, and of the relevant season, in
terms of seasonal treatments.
It is easy to see that it is likely that a Metal person will benefit
from having his/her Metal energy boosted during the hours of the day when Metal
is at its strongest according to the 24-hour Chinese clock, which will be at
that time according to whatever time-zone we are in anywhere on the planet. The problem is how to adapt seasonal
treatments to places where the seasonal differentiations are not clear-cut. The
question for Sophie is when exactly is she to decide when autumn is for her
Metal patients.
I think it would be sensible for her to assess each seasonal treatment
on its own merits, adapting to what may well be fluctuating temperatures and
weather conditions. For example, if she
is treating a Water patient, it might be good to give Water its winter seasonal
treatment during the “dead inertia of winter”, but not if it is hot outside. If she feels that there is still autumn in
the air, but the leaves haven’t yet dropped from the trees, she might be best
to wait a little until giving her Metal patients their autumn treatment.
I also like to ask patients which season they feel they are in, and
adjust my seasonal treatments to fit in with what they tell me. I do this
because I realised very early on that each of us can have a very different idea
as to which the current season is after discovering that more than half of the
students in one of my classes thought we had definitely moved into summer,
whilst the remainder were equally sure that we were still in spring. Patients, too, may well have a different take
on the season from us as practitioners, and we should therefore learn to adjust
our treatment to correspond to a particular patient’s assessment of the season.
For example, it doesn’t seem right to
give a patient a Wood seasonal treatment if he/she feels that we are still in
the depths of winter. In other words, a
practitioner needs flexibility in deciding which seasonal treatment to give
which patients when.
And then there is still, to me, the unresolved question as to whether we
should give everybody a seasonal treatment in each season irrespective of their
element. I know that some practitioners
do this, but I do not. This is because I
remember giving a Fire patient a winter seasonal treatment (the Water points of
the Bladder and Kidney), and for her to be one of the very few patients who
told me that she had not felt well after treatment. This made me decide not to experiment any
further with seasonal treatments off a patient’s element. I am a practitioner who rarely moves away
from a patient’s element, so that giving seasonal treatments on other elements
does not sit easily with me. On the
other hand, many of my fellow five element practitioners may be quite happy
doing this.
I hope what I have written here helps you, Sophie.
.
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