My review of Professor Liu Lihong's book: Classical Chinese Medicine

Published by The Chinese University Press
The Chinese University of Hong Kong 2019

 

I would like to start my review of Liu Lihong’s book with the words with which he ends it:

"Why is this book titled “Contemplating Chinese Medicine” in Chinese? What is it that we are contemplating? It is nothing other than these underlying principles, nothing other than the mysteries of nature and life as deciphered through the orientations of time.”  

Liu Lihong was the person who invited me eight years ago to come to China to give an introductory seminar on five element acupuncture, and has since then steadfastly promoted five element acupuncture as a valid discipline of traditional Chinese medicine.  It was therefore a lovely moment of recognition for these years of my work in China since then to read the following in Heiner Fruehauf’s introduction:

 

…”Liu Lihong has developed the Institute (for the Clinical Research of Classical Chinese Medicine) into an influential platform that has reintroduced multiple classical lineages to contemporary scholarly discourse, most notably the Fire Spirit School of Sichuan herbalism (huoshen pai), the traditional system of emotional healing synthesized by the Confucian educator Wang Fengyi (1864-1937), and classical five-element-style acupuncture. Each one of these efforts has had a considerable impact on the grassroots momentum of Chinese Medicine education in China.”

 

Joyful at thus seeing evidence of the importance of my work in China, I was delighted at last to be able to read the book which was the catalyst those eight years ago for Mei Long to write to Liu Lihong, urging him to acquaint himself with this discipline of traditional Chinese medicine, one which she recognized was very close to his own approach.  It has been with much surprise and delight now to receive confirmation that all that I was taught by the great master of five element acupuncture, JR Worsley himself, all that I have since learnt for myself and from my readings of the classics through translations by Father Larre and Elisabeth Rochat, all of this finds strong, almost eerie echoes in what Liu Lihong writes.

Though the book includes much detailed discussion of herbal remedies, since Liu Lihong is a herbalist, I have come to regard it much more as a profound philosophical exposition of Chinese thought, and it could well have been entitled Classical Chinese Philosophy.  Certainly the profound insights about Dao, yin yang and the five elements, which are the main emphasis of the book, also form the bedrock of my five element practice.  In particular, he emphasizes, as JR Worsley always did, the importance of regarding ourselves as embedded in nature.  As he says:

“When discussing Chinese Medicine, the backdrop of the natural world cannot be forgotten. If you have a thorough understanding of the natural world, your foundation in Chinese Medicine will be sound and your understanding can progress.”(p. 375)

Of the many insights I gained from my reading of this book, none impressed me more than the clarity with which he compares traditional Chinese medicine and modern Western medicine, clearly seeing that they spring from different approaches which cannot be melded together into one system as so many people now attempt to do.  Instead he regards them as complementing each other, provided that their fundamental differences are acknowledged.  For instance he writes:

“Western Medicine is clearly biased towards objectivity rather than subjectivity…..Chinese Medicine is vastly different in this respect and places great emphasis on the subjective experience.” (p.262)

I also find the humility he shows in relation to his own understanding of his discipline quite startling and very impressive, such is his respect for his masters whose influence on his development he acknowledges.  I always feel that teachers who are not afraid to know that they have more to learn are the ones I can truly learn from.

And here I encounter a slight problem, for though, quite rightly, he claims that the best, if not the only true way of learning is to sit at the feet of an acknowledged master of whatever discipline we wish to practice (and did I not do exactly that when I was fortunate enough to find my way to JR Worsley?), how are we to find such masters in a world, as he says, where institutionalized classroom learning is valued more highly than the kind of personal transmission from master to pupil?  And even more pertinently, where are the great clinical teachers without which there can be no transmission of such profound age-old disciplines?  Liu Lihong, too, is also deeply concerned about the increasing depletion in the number of those who have sufficient clinical experience to warrant being given the name of masters of their discipline, whilst there are ever-increasing numbers of those eager to learn from such masters.

This is something I have had to struggle with during my time in China, for I often ask myself how can I and my small cohort of two other five element teachers, Guy Caplan and Mei Long, alone pass on as much as we can in the form of personal transmission through our seminars to as many people as we can.  It is with great relief, therefore, that, thanks to Liu Lihong’s efforts and that of those working at his Tong You San He foundation, I can at last be reassured that there is an ever-larger group of Chinese five element teachers who can now pass on their understanding of five element practice to others.

The world needs people of vision, such as Liu Lihong, and I am honoured to have been able to work with and for him.  I am profoundly grateful that my efforts to re-introduce five element acupuncture to the country of its birth have been recognized by him as making a significant contribution to his work in so firmly and courageously ensuring that classical Chinese medicine, including five element acupuncture, now takes its rightful place at the forefront of modern medicine as a profound medical discipline in its own right.

Finally, I want to express my admiration for the team of translators, led by the book’s editor, Heiner Fruehauf, who have made such a tremendous job of creating an English version which reads so beautifully and eloquently.  As a former translator in another life, and still a translator from French into English of Elisabeth Rochat’s work, I appreciate from a very personal point of view the many hours, days and weeks of hard work such an excellent translation would have demanded.

 

 

Europe - In or Out?

Oh, this wretched referendum being forced on this country against our will!  Who wants a referendum except those who want us to get out of the EU?  Certainly, I don’t, and I don’t know many people who do.  I have always regarded myself as European to the core, and never a Little Englander, so I fervently hope that there are more people who think like me out there voting on June 23^rd than those who don’t.

I come of a family for whom Britain’s connections to Europe dominated throughout the years of my childhood during the second World War, and one which had suffered deeply and often tragically from the xenophobic and racial hatreds which led to the war.  Unhappily, these now seem to be rearing their very unpleasant heads again, as poor suffering migrants, escaping the kind of persecutions my mother’s Austrian Jewish family had to suffer, are now being made scapegoats for many of the real problems people in this country (never the rich, mind you) are suffering.

I think we are going through strange and extreme times, of which the referendum is one symptom, as are the other odd signs of this, such as Donald Trump’s successes in the States, the rise of increasingly right-wing, almost fascist parties in Europe and the corresponding, and necessary, rise of parties of protest, such as those in Greece or Spain, and even what is happening to the Labour Party in this country.  The political uncertainties all this creates raise disturbing echoes of those at other troubled times, most obviously in the 1930s, which led to the rise of fascism in Germany and Austria, my mother’s and my birthplace. 

In turn, this has been accompanied, for me personally, by a renewed interest in the tumultuous background to my earliest years during the war.  By coincidence, several things have concurred to bring this period of European life to the forefront of my thoughts, among them the reading of some highly interesting books which have illuminated this period for me.  First there is the recently published book by Philippe Sands, the international lawyer, called East West Street :  On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity, a book of great interest not just to lawyers but to all those whose family suffered persecution under Hitler.  Philippe Sands interleaves his legal discussions relating to the background to the Nuremberg trials with discoveries about the history of his own family in Nazi-occupied Poland.  Co-incidentally, there are connections with my own family, since Philippe bought my mother’s house in Hampstead, and my mother’s cousin helped him decipher and translate some of the handwritten German documents he discovered during his search for his family.

The reading of this book also coincided with a re-introduction through a friend to an Austrian writer, Ilse Aichinger, whom I remembered reading some years back but had completely forgotten about.  She told me of Ilse Aichinger’s only novel, called in its first English translation, Herod’s Children, published in its original German in 1948, with the translation appearing in 1956.  This book, too, is about the period of the second World War, and follows a group of Jewish children in Vienna whose only permitted playground is a graveyard.  It is not a realistic representation of Viennese life under the Nazis, but a kind of mythical transposition viewing the world through a child’s eyes.  It is a book which deserves a much wider readership than it has at present.  So I am now on a mission to try and interest Daunts’, my favourite bookseller, to re-publish it, as it deserves to be out there again as one of the discoveries of forgotten masterpieces which they pride themselves on publishing.

Finally, to round off these few weeks of immersion in the past, I saw an amazing film called Son of Saul, about a Jewish prisoner in a concentration camp, who is part of the Sonderkommando, those prisoners who were set apart and given a few more months of life in order to act as guards shepherding their fellow Jews into the gas chambers.  He thinks he sees the body of his son, and the film is the story of his despairing attempts to find a Rabbi amongst the prisoners so that he can give his son a proper burial.  I was persuaded to see the film only after a friend reassured me that you do not directly see any of the terrible events taking place, but as dim background to the camera’s view which is trained always upon the father, particularly just on his face.  It is one of the most moving and, yes, uplifting, films I have seen.  Go and see it if you can still catch it.

Another beautiful quotation

I love unexpectedly coming across beautiful writing.  The quote below is from a book by Alexandra Fuller, who writes about her life in Africa.  All her books are worth reading, not only for what they tell us about a life lived through some of the turmoil of African independence wars, but also for the beauty of the words she uses to describe this life.

Here is a little gem which makes me understand, once again, why books are so important to me, and how they have the ability to transport me, as here, into the mysteries of the universe.

“The lion lay next to Mapenga, contentedly licking fish flesh off the edge of Mapenga’s plate, and we talked softly about other nights when we had sat around fires in Africa – with different people – listening to wild lions, or hyenas, or to the deep, singing, anonymous night.  Above us the sky tore back in violent, endless beauty, mysterious and unattainable.  There is no lid to this earth and there is nothing much fettering us to the ground.  Eventually we will die and be wafted back into the universe.  Bones to dust.  Flesh to ashes.  Soul into that infinite mystery.”

Alexandra Fuller:  Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier, p. 232

 

 

Three lovely books to add to my reading list

I love coming across good books, and am always very quick at putting aside others that I am not enjoying, even though I may only have read a few pages.  I realise that the secret of a good book is that it teaches me something new about the human condition, and was pleased to find the following in an article about one of my favourite yet not all that well-known American writers, Elizabeth Strout, whose latest book My Name is Lucy Barton is now included in this list.  The article quotes her as saying that ”…her five novels have begun “always, always” with a person, and her eyes and ears are forever open to these small but striking human moments, squirreling them away for future use.  ”Character, I’m just interested in character,” she says”.   And then, “But ever since I was young, I have seen writing as trying to help people.  That sounds so corny but that’s really what I see as my job – trying to open somebody’s eyes just a little bit for one minute.  So, yeah, there are times I think, “This is foolish,” but I don’t know that it’s any more foolish than any other acts of trying to help the world.”

I realise that in my own way I also like to think of my writing as trying to help the world understand human beings a little more, in my case particularly through the medium of the five elements.

And here are two further American writers with books I want to add to my list of favourites.   One is a beautiful writer of what are called graphic books, which is how they describe all types of illustrated books, from cartoons to novels.  The writer Lauren Redniss has illuminated my last few days with her book called Thunder and Lightning, which is about the natural forces of nature.  It is quite beautifully illustrated, with a handwritten text which intertwines itself around the illustrations so that each page becomes an interesting work of art.

And my final author recommendation today is a prize-winning book by Anthony Doerr All the Light We Cannot See about a young German soldier in the Second World War and a blind young French girl. – very moving, very true and beautifully written.

Further thoughts on traditional acupuncture's legacy to the history of Chinese culture

I have recently written about the importance we should all give to the idea of a personal legacy which we pass on to others (see my blogs of 24 May 2015 The legacy we leave behind and of 27 August 2015 Transmission of a lineage).  I have been made particularly aware of this after reading a few books in the excellent series about China published by a very enterprising publishing house, Zed Books (www.zedbooks.co.uk), whose books I would recommend for those interested in understanding China's position in world history today, not only for people like me who visit China, but also for those concerned with world politics in general, as we all should be.   

For obvious reason I have concentrated my reading on steeping myself in things Chinese, and the Zed books I list below have given me much food for thought.  Each has changed my perspective on what my trips to China are teaching me (I am embarking on my 9^th visit in April), and each has made me re-evaluate my own role in re-introducing five element acupuncture to China.  I see more clearly now how this fits into the general thrust of China’s renewed interest in connecting with its past, as well as helping me understand more how it wishes to extend its connections with the world outside its borders.

The books on China that I have recently read are:
Wade Shepard: Ghost Cities of China
Michael Barr: Who’s afraid of China?
Leta Hong-Fincher:  Leftover Women
Tom Miller:  China’s Urban Billions

And then there is a further book which is not solely related to China, but addresses the global financial world, and has taught me more than any other book I have read about the historical reasons which led to the 2008 financial collapse, and the possible trouble now looming over us yet again.  It has made me understand the sheer selfishness of politics now, which contrasts sadly with what I see was what could be viewed as a golden age in British life in which I grew up, the post-World War years before Margaret Thatcher’s arrival on the political scene.  In those years  there really was a feeling that the whole country was trying to work towards a more egalitarian country, and the state itself  looked after the weakest as a matter of course, and not, as now, stigmatizing them for being weak.

So my last recommendation is for another Zed Book is The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis.  He was the Greek Minister of Finance at a time when it looked possible that Greece might be able to defy the almighty power of the IMF and the German government and refuse to cripple its citizens with further austerity, a hope unfortunately not realized.

 

 

 

 

 

My year-end stock-take

This is a longer blog than usual as befits the final summing-up of a year.

I always see the end of a year as a time to look back at the months that have passed and to try to fit them into the pattern of my life.  What, then, has 2015 brought me and taught me?

It has brought me much joy, and some sadness, from my family and friendships.  It has brought me introductions to many new writers, many of these in other languages I am familiar with, such as German, and renewed my interest in writers I have enjoyed in the past.  At the end of this blog I am listing some of my favourite reads of the year for anybody who, like me, is fascinated by the written word.

And what has it brought to my calling as acupuncturist?  After publishing my book, On Being a Five Element Acupuncturist, at the start of the year, I experienced a kind of mental blankness for some months.  I missed the feeling of being compelled to write by something inside me.  I continued with my blogs, but could find no central theme around which to build what might eventually become another book.  I struggled with this for some time until one day a friend told me that her son, not an acupuncturist, enjoyed reading my books because they taught him to understand human beings better, and that he was looking forward to reading more about the elements.  Somehow this stirred something in me to life, and I began to write odd bits and pieces, focusing on how I was developing new ways of interpreting my own reactions to the elements. I am continuing to do this, still with no particular structure in mind, but just darting here and there with my thoughts.  I trust that a structure will emerge at some point, as it did with my other books, and that the different pieces that I am now writing will in some miraculous way fuse themselves together into a book with which I will again hope to interest my lovely publishers, Singing Dragon Press.

Moving forward from my personal acupuncture-focused life to my more public life as a teacher, what of that?  Well, increasingly this now works on expanding what I am doing in China.  I have written before of how, much to my surprise, my work appears to have changed direction in the last few years, from an emphasis on helping five element acupuncturists in this country and Europe, to introducing it to China.  Increasingly now my task appears to be to continue adding to what I have so far achieved over there, which is a lot, indeed much, much more than I could ever have dreamt of when I first met my host, Liu Lihong, more than four years ago.  There must now be some few hundred Chinese acupuncturists who have come to our seminars and are venturing to start five element practices of their own.

This year-end also brings news of the Inauguration Ceremony of a Foundation of Traditional Chinese Medicine which is being set up in Beijing, with my contribution to this enshrined for perpetuity in a lovely certificate I was honoured to receive from Liu Lihong in April stating that I am a Consultant in Five Element Acupuncture to this Foundation for a period of 5 years until 31 December 2019.  Seeing this date on the certificate pointed me to further work that I need to do in the intervening years.  By the time we reach December 2019, I will, I assume, be well past the age when I will be of practical use as a teacher over there, although possibly still be a kind of five element figurehead to be wheeled out at intervals to remind people of the long five element lineage to which I am heir.

In China there are also moves afoot to translate more of my books (only one, my Handbook, is published in Mandarin).  My non-English-reading students are always clamouring to read the others in Mandarin.  I and my two regular companions, Mei Long and Guy Caplan, during our next planned visit to China in April 2016, will make our presence felt in Beijing to support the new Foundation there in addition to holding our usual seminar in Nanning.

So my stock-take for 2015 has shown me much that I can personally be very happy about.  It does a little to offset the news pouring in from around the globe of all the strife which human beings, alone of all the animals, seem to enjoy engaging in, and all the mostly man-made disasters bringing floods and famine to many parts of the globe.  I like to think, though, that what I can offer my patients, and encourage others to offer theirs, in some small way helps to contribute something important to the sum total of human happiness.

I wish all my readers a fulfilling and happy year to come when 2015 turns into 2016.

 

Postscript:

A few of my favourite books from my 2015 reading-list (D = Detective story):

Wade Shepard:  Ghost Cities of China
Jill Ciment:  Heroic Measures
Tom Drury:  The End of vandalism
Jenny Erpenbeck:  Wörterbuch (for my German readers)
Alexandra Fuller:  Don’t let’s go to the Dogs tonight
Robert Seethaler: A Whole Life
Elly Griffiths:  The Ghost Fields (D)
Atal Gawande:  Being Mortal
Ann Granger:  Dead in the Water (D)
Kent Haruf:  Our Souls at Night
Vaseem Khan:  The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra (D)
Attica Locke:  Pleasantville
G M Malliet:  Death and the Cozy Writer (D)
Alexander McCall Smith:  The Woman who walked in Sunshine
Robert Peston:  How do we fix this Mess?
Marilynne Robinson:  Gilead
Bapsi Sidhwa:  The Crow Eaters
W G Sebald:  Austerlitz
Magda Szabo:  Iza’s Ballad
Anne Tyler:  Searching for Caleb
Elizabeth Taylor:  A View of the Harbour

Fred Vargas: Dog will have its Day (D)

Anthony Trollope: Is he Popenjoy? 

 

An important book

I have just read an important book all should read.  It is The Internet is not the Answer by Andrew Keen.  As readers of my blog know, I am increasingly disturbed by the impact of what I call the electronic world upon us all.  We are enveloped (literally) in it.  Anything I do, where I do it, when I do it and what I do with it, can be tracked, as my life is monitored from minute to minute, my shopping preferences noted, my reading choices logged, my finances closely scrutinized and my telephone calls snooped on.

I am always surprised at the welcome given to all new inventions emerging almost daily from this electronic world, apparently with little thought given to any possible downside to them.  The latest evidence for this is the attention the fashion world is now paying to designing clothes with inbuilt pockets for mobile phones and all the other computer equipment people now carry with them, and with a self-charging capacity so that as we walk along we can charge this equipment up without the need to find a socket somewhere to plug it in.  We will in effect be plugged into ourselves. I had to look at my diary to check whether I had skipped a few months and this was April Fool’s Day!

Andrew Keen’s book points to the many pitfalls of this electronic world, not only ahead of us, but, dismayingly, already all too evident here and now.  The large all-powerful, all-devouring companies of Amazon, Google and the like already hold so much of our lives in thrall that it feels as though there is little any of us can do to counter their power except increasingly protest at this power and make, as I do, our own small gestures of protest.  These include doing things like buying my books at a small local bookshop rather than through Amazon, and buying my newspaper from my small local newsagent rather than at Tesco’s, so much more conveniently closer to hand.

So books like this one by Andrew Keen, based on very detailed, insider evidence of the terrifying consequences of all these huge monoliths gradually taking over ever larger slices of our life, are essential reading, particularly for those, such as politicians, wielding more power than I can ever do.  They do have the chance to halt the progression of these juggernauts over the land.  But at least people are now increasingly awake to the injustice of their hiding away their huge profits in secret tax havens in such a way as to avoid paying taxes on them, and are demanding action on this.  A small but, I hope, significant step. 

Yet another beautiful quote

“In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence.  Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.  We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity.  But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

Maybe I should have said we are like planets.  But then I would have lost some of the point of saying that we are like civilizations.  The planets may all have been sloughed from the same star, but still the historical dimension is missing from that simile, and it is true that we all do live in the ruins of the lives of other generations, so there is a seeming continuity which is important because it deceives us.”

                                                              Marilynne Robinson: Gilead   

I have just read this lovely book, from which I take this quote.  There is much both in the book and the quote that I don’t really understand at first reading, and yet I know that it is teaching me much about life.  I love what she says about our being “such secrets from each other”, and being allowed “to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us”.

 

It is always such a delight for me to read a good book and discover a new author.  I now find that she has written two sequels to this book over a number of years, one called Home, which I am just starting and the other just published called Lila. 

 

I am always slightly suspicious of writers who seem to churn out books at rapid intervals, probably urged on by their publishers, and I always feel much more secure when I find that a writer’s books appear at long intervals.  This may be unfair to the more prolific writers, but the long gestation of a book often allows me to savour the deep pleasure of words which have been pondered over, many often discarded over time, and just their essence appearing in the final book.  Too many books I have recently read have just been too long and too what I call “unedited”.  A good editor would surely have pruned much away. 

 

Long may the Marilynne Robinsons of this world work slowly to bring forth masterpieces such as the one I have just read.

Good Earth quotes

I have always liked writing down particularly relevant quotes about the different elements in the books I read.  The first quote is from an excellent book I have just finished reading by Jacqueline Winspear, who usually writes detective stories based around the time of the first world war, but this time has written a very moving story of a family and friends who volunteer to go to the battlefields in Belgium.  This is a very appropriate subject for a book at the time of the centenary of this completely tragic and pointless war.


“Thea was aware of Kezia, nodding her understanding.  She remembered a certain look, from the very early days of their friendship.  Kezia would often take her time with a question, ruminating over it in her mind, chewing on it like a cow with a clump of grass, grinding it down from side to side to get the goodness – only with Kezia, it was as if she were looking for something in the middle of the problem.  The truth, perhaps.”

        Jacqueline Winspear: The Care and Management of Lies

 

I also list below some of the quotes I used to give my students at SOFEA as a way of helping them understand the Earth element better:

“What Anna most longed for in the days that followed was a mother.  “If I had a mother,” she thought, not once, but again and again, and her eyes had a wistful, starved look when she thought of it, “if I only had a mother, a sweet mother all to myself, of my very own, I’d put my head on her dear shoulder and cry myself happy again.  First I’d tell her everything, and she wouldn’t mind however silly it was, and she wouldn’t be tired however long it was, and she’d say, “Little darling child you are only a baby after all,” and would scold me a little, and kiss me a great deal, and then I’d listen so comfortably, all the time with my face against her nice soft dress, and I would feel so safe and sure and wrapped round whilst she told me what to do next.  It is lonely and cold and difficult without a mother.”

                                                                       Elizabeth von Arnim:  The Benefactress

 “He was one of those monstrous fat men you sometimes pass in a crowd: no matter how hard you struggle to avert your eyes, you can’t help gawping at him.  He was titanic in his obesity, a person of such bulging, protrusive roundness that you could not look at him without feeling yourself shrink.  It was though his three-dimensionality was more pronounced than that of other men.  Not only did he occupy more space than they did, but he seemed to overflow it, to ooze out from the edges of himself and inhabit areas where he was not.!

                                                                        Paul Auster: Moon Palace

"I thought of life as work.  You have a certain amount of time given to you and you have to find dedication, passion, concentration.  You have to cultivate yourself and be fruitful very much like a patch of land.”

                                                                        Jeanne Moreau, actress: interview

What Earth patients have told me:

“I felt as though the rug had been pulled from under me.”

“I feel the ground a bit firmer beneath me.”

“I always like having a sense of being right at the hub of everything.”

“I don’t think I should always ask other people to feed me.”

“I feel very ungrounded.”

“I feel supported.”

“Everything’s been wiped away from under my feet.”

 

 

 

Writing and reading as acts of creation

I am delighted once again to have chanced upon another good book, “We are all completely beside ourselves” by Karen Joy Fowler, which has made me see life from a different perspective, as should all good books.  The only tiresome thing about it is its long-winded title, one of the many similar titles with which new books are often for some reason now burdened, perhaps to make them stand out from the crowd, but which, because of their long-windedness, slip from my memory immediately.   


Apart from being beautifully written, it is also beautifully constructed with a startling shift of perspective midway through it which sent me straight back to the beginning again to see whether I had missed some pointers which should have alerted me to this surprising development.


I learn about life as I read, and I also learn about life as I write.  My writings, as for example of this blog, do not merely repeat thoughts I already have, but form stages in the process of developing these thoughts, which would not therefore see the light of day without the act of writing them down.  It feels as though I am drawing these thoughts from within me as I write.  Each then becomes a tiny act of creation, so that often as I read afterwards what I have written I surprise myself, as though I am reading something new written by somebody else.

The stresses caused by inequality

I am reading a very interesting book at the moment, The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.  It has made me think a lot about the particular stresses of modern life, and whether different countries are subject to different stresses.  Since I am off to China again in a couple of weeks, it has become particularly relevant for me to look at what stresses we in this country are exposed to compared with those of the Chinese.


I am fascinated by the main message of the book which is how much extreme financial inequalities, such as those now experienced in this country, affect everybody, not just the poorest.  I was interested to see, for example that it was noticeable how local communities reacted in different ways in New Orleans in response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, in contrast to the Chinese response to its devastating earthquake in 2008.  In the much more settled local communities in China there was much greater cooperation and help for the survivors than in New Orleans, with its very deprived communities, where looting and violence were the norm.  Sadly, of course, as China, too, becomes an increasingly unequal society, with the rich now becoming the super-rich, the support of a local community is becoming as rare as in this country, where the rich are now holed up in their large houses behind barriers, and the poor hammer at the gates with rage. 


All this increases the stresses of modern life in terms of mental health, alcoholism, obesity, infant mortality, the crime rate and much more, but equally affects those living behind those barred gates to a surprising degree.  This is a terrible downward spiral, encapsulated for me in the headline yesterday in the Guardian newspaper which states baldly “Divided Britain:  Five families own more than poorest 20%:  Handful of super-rich are wealthier than 12.6m Britons put together”.  Such enormous discrepancies in wealth, the authors of this book say, are the direct cause of some of the most complex types of modern illness, called, somewhat wittily, “anxiety disorders”, “affluenza virus” or “luxury fevers”, as the status anxieties that a consumer society fosters in everybody cause increasing levels of stress, unknown by me as a child during and after the second world war, when we didn’t go shopping for ever more tantalizing goods because the shops were empty.


Nor did we feel the lack of this at all.  I remember quite happily listening again and again to the few gramophone records we had, and reading again and again the few children’s books we had, and not feeling deprived at all – rather the reverse.


The message obviously is that where there is satisfaction with our lives, whether we are poor or rich, the healthier and happier we will be.  And the more status stress we cause ourselves by trying to emulate all the acquisitive habits of the rich (their clothes, their homes, their furnishings), the more illnesses we will suffer from.  There is a lesson here for acupuncturists, since our aim must surely be to help our patients live as peaceful and as fulfilled a life as possible.


Do read this book.  It opened my eyes to many reasons for the increasingly stressful environments we live in now, and made me understand why the enormous inequalities we see in the world today inevitably lead to increased ill-health.  We need to strive for greater equality for the sake of the health of all, not just of the poor.


This reminds me again of what my Indian friend, Lotika, asked me:  “Why do you in the West want to be happy?  We just accept.”  And this is what even the poorest Indians sleeping on the streets do, as I observed them as they smilingly made way for me on the pavements, and pointed out helpfully where I had to go as I stood waiting for a taxi at Delhi station.  I learnt a lot from that.  I could not imagine the same thing happening in this country now.  It is more likely that, in the same situation, far from being offered help, my handbag would be snatched from me.

Autobiographies

I read in the newspaper this weekend the story of somebody called Freda Kelly who had been secretary to the Beatles for many years and has only just now been persuaded to write about her time with them, something she had so far refused to do.  She sounds a lovely, balanced person and I was very struck by some of the things she said, such as:

“I never wanted to write a book.  I always thought they would want the juice, the argument bit, and I don’t believe in that.”  And, after being persuaded to tell her story by her daughter, “I wanted to make a little film for my grandson … to know what his granny did in her youth.  He’s three.  I want him to be proud.”  And finally:  “I’m not obsessed with money – I only need enough to live on.”

It’s such a relief to come across somebody so different from all those famous people nowadays who think it’s alright to write (or have ghost-written) an autobiography before there is anything in their life, apart from their fame, to be written about.  In my day (such a horrid, but true expression), I thought autobiographies were only written towards the end of a life as a way of the author assessing what has happened to him or her, not as a way simply of making a lot of money.  And I notice that some famous people now write more than one autobiography, as though they view their life from a different enough perspective to make another book worthwhile.  Surely we need some distance from the events in our life before we are ready to assess this in any meaningful way?

I have often considered whether I would ever like to write my own autobiography, and always decided against it for various reasons.  The main one is that I like being absolutely honest and I dislike hurting people, so that I would hesitate to write the truth about important episodes in my life.  I can hardly restrict what I write to people who are safely dead because many of those who knew them are still alive, and may be upset by what I write.

I was struck by something Mary Beard, the classical scholar, wrote in one of the books of her blogs.  She said that she regards a blog in some ways as being both a diary and an autobiography.  As I, too, am thinking of publishing my blogs in book form, perhaps that will take the place of my autobiography.

Making a book out of my blogs

My next project is to re-read my 3 years of blogs, and decide whether they would fit well into a book format.  I have read through about a third of them so far, and am surprised at how happy I would be with drawing them together into a book. 

Blogs are for a quick glance and an even quicker read-through.  They are more in the nature of offering readers a snack, a bite of information, rather than the sustaining meal of a book.  At least this is how I see them.  Since I feel what I have read so far merits as much time spent on it as readers of my books must have done, I think assembling them as a book will not only be enjoyable for me, but worthwhile, I hope, for my readers.  I always feel it is much easier on the eye to page through a book than to scroll down a computer screen, but then, as you know, I am not a great fan of Kindle and other e-books, however practical they may be.

The only other book of blogs I have read is that by Mary Beard, called It’s a don’s life.  She has written some interesting things about the advantage of a blog in the shape of a book which have encouraged me in this particular venture.  I will make a final decision when I have read all my blog posts.

 

The Bookshop Strikes Back

This is the title of a little book by the lovely American writer, Ann Patchett.  It tells the heartening story of how she and a few friends decided to open up their own bookshop in Nashville after their two small local bookshops were forced to close.

 

Her booklet describes the often daunting steps they had to take towards the achievement of their aim.  As she says in her final words: 

 

“If what a bookstore offers matters to you, then shop at a bookstore.  If you feel that the experience of reading a book is valuable, then read the book. This is how we change the world:  we grab hold of it.  We change ourselves.”

 

I found this booklet in my local Daunts bookshop, just after blogging about The Power of just doing Stuff by Rob Hopkins (see my blog of 7 July).  I suggested to them that they should put the two books together in a prominent position in their shop, as Daunts, too, is one of the few independent bookshops in London.

 

So for any book-lovers out there, I suggest you grab her little book, which is published by Bloomsbury and costs a mere £1.99, the cost of a cup of coffee, and far more nourishing to the soul!

 

 

The Power of Just Doing Stuff

I have just read this lovely illuminating and inspiring little book by Rob Hopkins The Power of Just Doing Stuff – How local action can change the world, and recommend it for anybody at all interested in developments which help people in their own communities.  Read it and be heartened that there are good things happening on a small but significant scale all round the world.

You can order it from the Guardian bookshop at the reduced price of £6.74 instead of £8.99 www.guardianbookshop.co.uk, or support your local bookshop and order it there, and in so doing do your little bit to help your local community.

 

 

 

  

Revising my books for re-publication

It has been a very interesting exercise for me re-reading my four books as part of the process of revising them for re-publication by Singing Dragon Press (see also my blog of 8 May).  First, I am happy that they are going to keep each other close company in terms of the design of their covers, because all will now have one of Hamish Horsley’s lovely photos on them, as the Handbook now has.  Anybody who came to Mandela Street or comes now to our clinic in Harley Street will recognise another of his photos, that of the students gathering together on the hillside outside their monastery, which is to go on the Simple Guide.  All four covers now have the same house style.

And beside the covers, there is what is inside them, my writing.  Luckily, and to my surprise, I felt that the only book which needed some work on it was the Handbook, a careful reading of the others confirming that they still expressed what I wanted to say.  The Handbook was another matter, and has made me think deeply about its content, particularly as this new edition is going to include my Teach Yourself Self-Help manual as an appendix.

Writing the manual highlighted areas which I felt the Handbook touched on too lightly, and sometimes even in a somewhat confusing way, and these related to points and point selection in general.  Amending one section had a knock-on effect on other sections, and has often led to a change in chapter order and content.  My poor translators, Mei Long for the Mandarin version, and Sylviane Burner for the French version, will have some work to do to bring the Chinese and French editions into line.  I haven’t yet dared tell my Russian translator, Zare Melyan, about the changes (although if she reads this blog, which I think she does, she will now know this!).  In a week or so I fly off to Holland to sit with Mei for a day and go through the new version with her.

But the exercise has been a very productive one, because it made me go back to first principles, and work out exactly the process by which I translate my well-known mantra of “the simpler the better” into point selection.  After many a redraft as I honed my ideas more clearly, I now have a version with which I am pleased.  

The publication date for the new edition of the Handbook will be the end of the year, with the other three books appearing a little earlier.

"To save everything, click here"

This is the title of a book by a very interesting technology writer called Evgeny Morozov, who has followed up his first book, The Net Delusion, with this one.  He warns against our increasing abdication for the responsibility for our lives to networks such as Google.  I am off to buy his books, but, for a condensed read, look up his article in yesterday’s Observer New Review (10 March 2013), and the lead article on him entitled “Time to question our love affair with new tech”.

I love one answer he gives in his interview to the question “How do you manage your own net use?”

“I’ve become very strategic about my use of technology as life is short and I want to use it wisely. I have bought myself a type of laptop from which it was very easy to remove the Wi-Fi card – so when I go to a coffee shop or the library I have no way to get online.  However, at home I have cable connection.  So I bought a safe with a timed combination lock. It is basically the most useful artefact in my life. I lock my phone and my router cable in my safe so I’m completely free from any interruption and I can spend the entire day, weekend or week reading and writing.”….“To circumvent my safe I have to open a panel with a screwdriver, so I have to hide all my screwdrivers in the safe as well.”

Despite years of owning a laptop, I haven’t yet worked out how to use Wi-Fi properly outside my home,  so I am able to go off to one of my favourite coffee shops to read and write without any kind of computer aid, but I do think the idea of locking off my home computer securely at certain times is a very sound idea.  At the moment, I switch it off early in the evening, thinking in that way that I can control its power over me, but then find myself compelled to turn it on again a little later “just in case”.  Maybe I need to lock my cable connection away in a safe, as he does!  

Four masterpieces

I’ve recently set myself some difficult reading tasks to achieve this year, and have accomplished three out of four.  Some of these books make for easier reading than others, but all are masterpieces.  So here’s my list:
   Will Self: Umbrella (2012)
   James Joyce: Ulysses (1922)
   Thomas Bernhard: Extinction (1986)
   James Joyce: Finnegan’s Wake (1939)

I started with what I have since found the easiest to read, Will Self’s book, a direct descendant of the lineage of James Joyce, and that sent me back again to Ulysses.  I embarked on this with a gulp, knowing from my previous reading that I was about to plunge into deep waters and then, increasingly, finding myself swimming around in a maelstrom of words, all ultimately somehow flowing together into a current I could understand.  Then thanks to a friend I was introduced to the German writer, Thomas Bernhard, and found myself choosing his last book.  Here I faced 600 pages (in German) without a paragraph or a chapter, but thankfully with the occasional full stop.  This represented a greater challenge, requiring of me short immersions of about 25 pages a time, or at the most a daring 50, but a masterpiece without doubt.

And now here I am, swimming even further out into the moily depths of Finnegan’s wake (see how Joyce’s language is already affecting me), determined as I am at last to reach the distant shore of its final cryptic words:  …”A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the…”, which will bring me back to its beginning again.  I understand very little of it so far, and am at page 100!  But I am getting some help from the synopsis in Wikipedia, and I take to heart the editors’ advice, beautifully written in itself, “Gentle reader, were you to ask How should I read this book? we would answer: passively, like any good book, neither too fast nor too slow.  Do not pause because you cannot understand a word or words:  you are not expected to understand it all….You are learning a language:  a night language.  Morning will come and the clouds of unknowing will begin to dissipate.”

I leave you with a quote from what I regard as a book of supreme poetry rather than prose: “From goddawn glory to glowworm gleam.”  And I trust that morning will soon come!

 

 

Announcing the publication of my books as ebooks

As a great lover of books, who enjoys the feel of a well-produced book in my hands, I have been reluctant to move into the ephemeral world of what I regard as phantom books. I don’t like to think that in some way I am handing my books over to giant concerns who do not allow my words to be shared or handed on, as I like to do with books I read. But ebook format is very practical, particularly when travelling, and so I have bowed to the demands of the day.

Now my four books are available for downloading both through Kindle and, in ePub format, through iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Sony Reader Store.   

Whether in printed or ebook form, they can be ordered through my website www.sofea.co.uk.

 

More about books

I have now put my Keepers of the Soul into e-format, and could sell it like that on Amazon for the Kindle.  And yet I have been surprisingly hesitant to take the last step, put off by the amazingly complex charging arrangements Amazon have devised, but more importantly by my reluctance to see my words encased, not in the enticing pages of book, but on a flat, metal (or is it plastic?) screen. 

The writer Julian Barnes has now helped me understand my reluctance a little better. This is from an article of his on his love of books in the Guardian yesterday:

“Every book feels and looks different in your hands, every Kindle download feels and looks exactly the same…..I have no luddite prejudice against new technology;  it’s just that books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.”