A little lesson in the difference between the Earth and Fire elements from today’s practice

It is in small differences, and in our ability to pick them up, that much of the secret of our capacity to understand the distinctions between the characteristics of the different elements lies. When we realise this, we can use this knowledge to test ourselves and widen our understanding.

I will give an example of this from my practice today. An Earth patient told me of the feeling of mental confusion she often experiences. As she did so, she lifted her hand and pressed it close to her head as if trying to still the thoughts she said churned around inside her. I asked myself whether this gesture could be considered significant as pointing to something particular to Earth. Would I, of the Fire element, ever make a similar movement with my hand? I tried to mimic this movement and realised that I was using a gesture which was totally alien to me. I wondered why this was, and came to the conclusion that, even if my thoughts become confused, which they often do, I clear my mind by talking, as if translating them into a verbal form is what I need to do before I can develop my thinking.* (See footnote added on 24 July 2010 below) By contrast, what my Earth patient apparently cannot do when she is out of balance is put her thoughts into words. Her hand movement was in effect telling me that her thoughts had somehow got stuck inside her head, and the movement could therefore be seen as an attempt to dislodge them.

When I translated this into the kind of treatment that might help her, I came up with the lovely point, St 8 (Head Tied!), located on her head exactly where she had placed her hand, and with a function we could say perfectly fitted what she needed, which was to disentangle the thoughts tied up in her head. Whereas these thoughts of hers had not yet been processed sufficiently to emerge as words, mine, by contrast, never seem to need this kind of help. Rather it is the words themselves which I speak which have to act as sieves for my thoughts, a completely different process, which highlights one of the differences between Fire and Earth.

Such distinctions may seem very slight, but they are significant as pointing to one element or another, as everything is that we do. And one of the best things to do is to mimic the words or the movements of another person to see how far the feeling this mimicry evokes in us can lead us to some new discovery about a particular element. Certainly my experience with my Earth patient today has taught me something both about her and about myself, and thus at a subtle level helped me to a deeper understanding of the contrasting thought processes employed by Earth and Fire.

*Footnote to this, posted on 24 July 2010
I have just read the obituary to Edna Healey in the Guardian of 23 July 2010. They quote her as saying. "Somehow the thing that's in my head is never matched by what's on paper....If only I could write what's in my head I might never have wanted to do anything else. But sometimes, it seems, I only really know what I think when I've heard what I've said."

A tragic example of the failure of the body’s coping mechanism

It may seem insensitive to write about the recent massacre of 12 people in the North of England in five element terms whilst events are so fresh in our minds, but I think I am justified in writing about this because five element acupuncture may be able to offer an explanation.

The question everybody is asking is how an apparently mild-mannered, “normal kind of a bloke” could turn into a mass-murderer overnight? Those who have studied five element acupuncture will recognise this as being, in all likelihood, an extreme example of what we call possession. I have always disliked this word because of its rather spooky, and totally mistaken, suggestion of alien forces invading us from outside, but it is the word in common use and, although not a helpful description, I cannot at the moment think of an alternative. A less emotive way of regarding this state is to think of it as being one step beyond obsession, at the point where obsessive thoughts and feelings become overpowering. Hence the poetic description which compares such a condition to being akin to internal demons taking over control. Luckily, as five element acupuncturists we have at our disposal the means of treating this, to which we give the name, again poetically, of summoning the dragons to fight the demons. Seven points are used in combination for this treatment and their aim is to help to re-balance the spirit and reconnect it to the outside world. If treatment is successful, it will in effect bring the patient back to himself/herself again.

All the many descriptions of Derrick Bird emphasize the look in his eyes, or more accurately, the absence of the kind of eye contact we expect when we look at another person. Without exception, they describe his face as looking blank and his eyes as staring past them as though he was not seeing them. From a five element perspective he is indeed not seeing them as you or I would. Instead he is looking at something inside himself, as though listening to some command from within himself which is driving him to action. It would be accurate to say that the connecting links between himself and the world have become stretched almost to breaking-point, but not totally severed until the moment when he turned the gun on himself and broke this connection. He is literally in a world of his own, in which what is going on in such a devastatingly disturbed way has now become divorced from any semblance of reality against which he can measure what he is doing.

The point at which a state of possession so alters a person’s ability to function normally that their behaviour becomes visibly disturbed varies from person to person. People may continue to function surprisingly normally until something causes a collapse. Up to this point, possession can be said to provide a form of safety valve for the internal chaos within, but if there is no release over time, this valve may blow, as it did in Derek Bird’s case, where the apparent trigger appears to have been his fear of going to prison for failure to pay his taxes. Fortunately in most cases it does not manifest in such an extreme fashion, and can also appear in very mild form which can only be detected by the most acute observer. I have for example recognised it in well-known people on TV.

Possession could therefore be said to have developed as one of society’s ways of coping. It is only when this coping mechanism fails that we see the kind of actions which we have witnessed this week. As a five element acupuncturist I always feel that I am fortunate in having a treatment at my fingertips which I can offer to help patients release the build-up of pressure such as that apparently experienced by Derrick Bird and, by this means, hope to re-establish a proper connection to the everyday world. If treatment is successful in doing this, people are then better able face up to whatever deep-seated problems have led to such despair. I see the dragon treatment therefore as offering a kind of rebirth.

The Wood element in full flow

I saw an excellent example of the Wood element last night on BBC TV. In a programme on BBC2 called “Mary Queen of Shops”, the presenter, Mary Portas, had been asked to help a woman who runs an independent bakery in London now under threat from the local supermarkets armed with their much larger selection of specialist bakeries. Mary’s task is to try and identify what could be called a shop’s unique selling point, and encourage the owner to change their approach. You can watch the programme for yourselves on BBC iplayer, and you can see that, although the owner originally asked for help, she is determined from the start to prove that she knows better than Mary. So the whole hour-length programme shows the battle which arises between Mary’s attempts to guide the owner towards the necessary changes and the shop-owners’s steely determination not to change anything she has been doing “for 26 years”, the leitmotiv of everything she said. It seems obvious that the shop-owner and the presenter are both Wood people, neither happy to cede ground to the other, and both quite enjoying the ensuing fight. As a counterbalance to this, there is also the baker himself, who is sidelined by the two battling women, but I think is soft Earth, just getting on with things in the middle and trying not to get involved.

It is amusing and rather sad to watch, because of what it shows of human frailty and Wood’s inability to “see” when it is out of control, as this woman so definitely is during the programme. You could say that she made the wrong decisions and was a bad planner, first in contacting Mary Portas for help and then not planning for the effect of this help. But it teaches us more about Wood in an hour than we would learn in a year’s study of what is written about the element.

These are the kind of TV programmes which any five element acupuncturist or student should be watching, ones in which people are under stress and show all those unbalanced sides of themselves which place their elements in starker relief than normal.

Five element acupuncture comes full circle

A few days ago I gave a seminar for five element acupuncturists in the Netherlands. It was a fruitful experience for me because I was talking to a group of acupuncturists who have learnt their five element skills from a practitioner, Koos van Kooten, who in turn came to our courses at SOFEA. He has moved on, developing his own insights and his own approach, and has drawn in his wake an increasing number of Dutch practitioners devoted to deepening their five element knowledge. All this is very satisfying to me, and provides just the kind of justification for my work at SOFEA which warms my heart.

Amongst his group was an acupuncturist, Mei Long, who trained originally in China and who told me that, after much exploration of different branches of acupuncture, she had come across five element acupuncture, and recognised it immediately as representing a calling for her. As part of this calling, she had felt driven to get in touch with a well-established contact of hers in the world of acupuncture in China, who still has links to acupuncture's traditional roots and wishes to strengthen them, a rare thing in modern China. As a result of her approach he has asked her to run a week’s course on five element acupuncture for acupuncturists in Guangxi College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in China.

This person turned out to be Liu Lihong, whose name I had come across whilst looking at the work of Arnaud Versluys. Liu Lihong is said to be “at the forefront of a Chinese renaissance movement that aims at reviving the depth and the core values of Classical Chinese Medicine”. This is where things come full circle, for JR Worsley said to an acupuncturist friend of mine, Sarah Matheson, some years ago that “the Chinese will be asking us to bring five element acupuncture back to China”, and it appears that they have indeed at last come calling.

New thoughts on aggressive energy

I have just been asked a question by a student doing a research project on what we call aggressive energy in five element acupuncture. I had written something in my Handbook about the fact that there are two ways of draining aggressive energy, one through the Associated Effect (back shu) points, as five element acupuncturists do, and another by using a dispersal technique on all needling. This was something I had heard in a lecture by Peter Eckman, author of In the Footsteps of the Yellow Emperor, many years ago. In other words, five element acupuncture mainly disperses excess energy through its initial AE drain, whilst other forms of acupuncture disperse energy over a longer period of time by leaving needles in at every treatment.

This set me thinking about this a little more than I had done before (it shows how teaching helps us learn something new each time!). I realised that the fundamental difference between the two systems of approach must stem from a deeper fundamental difference than that of simply being a matter of a difference in technique. In five element acupuncture, apart from specific protocols, such as the AE drain or treating the dragons (what we call possession treatment), dispersing energy (which we call sedation) is much more rarely used than boosting energy (which we call tonification). In the last 15 years of my observing JR Worsley’s selection of treatments, I cannot remember a single occasion when he suggested we sedate a patient’s guardian element, although sedation is a technique taught all five element students as a matter of course. I have a feeling that as his attention concentrated more and more upon treating the spirit within the body, as I felt it did over my time with him, so he understood more clearly that the element’s spirit, which bears so much of the weight of the other elements upon it, is weakened as a result rather than enjoying the luxury of excess energy. Since five element acupuncture addresses the guardian element predominantly at every treatment in an attempt to strengthen it, it is therefore unlikely, seen from a five element perspective, that this element will have any excess energy left to disperse to other elements.

What does happen though, I find, is that an apparently excess pulse on the guardian element will collapse completely after the AE drain and show its true weakness. Apparent initial overexuberance of energy can often mask a level of deep depletion in this way. This may well explain the fact that I have only had to sedate the guardian element in the case of one patient over the past 10 years. The remainder of my practice has concentrated on tonifying, on strengthening, this element’s energy.

Future teaching plans

I am just back from the TCM Kongress in Rothenburg (www.tcm-kongress.de), always a powerful experience for many reasons, not least the sheer number of hours during which people talk of potentially very different approaches to acupuncture, each well-researched, well-documented and, no doubt, well-practised, and each looking at their practice from a slightly different perspective. It would be easy to be overwhelmed by what is on offer, but I have learnt over the years to recognise the range of new ideas I will feel able to assimilate into my practice, and concentrate only on these. What is often most valuable are the connections I form with other participants, and this year was no exception. I took part in a meeting organised by Sonja Köllner (sonjakollner@yahoo.de) with the aim of bringing together any five element acupuncturists coming to the conference, particularly those from Germany. It was encouraging to hear of all the different ways in which they had learnt their five element approach. As a result of all this, I have now agreed to run a two-day seminar in Hamburg arranged by Barbara Moeller, at which I will be helped by Henrik Mathisen, who is making plans to start a five element course in Oslo.

So, enriched and re-invigorated, I return to London determined also to plan more SOFEA seminars on the elements both here in London and in Hove, with Sarah Matheson. We are now planning our autumn seminar programme, and details will soon be appearing on the SOFEA website www.sofea.co.uk. Anybody wanting to join us in our latest explorations of the elements should contact me on info@sofea.co.uk or Sarah Matheson on mathesonsa@gmail.com.

How life seems to challenge the particular needs of our guardian element

I have just received the following very interesting communication:

“I was wondering about something these last few days, after talking to several women who to me seemed to have the Earth element strongly expressing itself. (I don't go out of my way to analyze but thoughts of the elements do float around in my mind on many occasions.) At some stage they have all expressed a lack of nurturing from their mothers (without my asking) and though they are all different people with different parents and upbringings, I was wondering why this aspect seems to run so strongly through them all. Is it perhaps that this element has certain needs which the parents (specifically mothers?) don't gauge or respond to and it then expresses itself in this way subsequently? I think a person's guardian element would not be based on his parents’ actions; the person would most likely view those actions in a particular way depending on his guardian element. Is this reasonable?” Sujata


We are moving here into esoteric areas involving questions relating to our personal destinies and how they act themselves out in the context of our lives. If our element is the elemental equivalent of our genetic inheritance, which is the only way I can see it, since every pore in us is imprinted with its shading, then what is its relationship to our parents’ elements, and is there indeed any relationship? I think all I write here can only be speculative, but if, as I believe, there is a pattern to life, then the elemental circle to which we have been assigned at the moment of conception forms part of this pattern, as does our parents’ choice of partners which will create the elemental pool out of which we ourselves emerge.

But it is surprising (or not so surprising, if you believe in patterns) to see how often a Metal person suffers some great loss during their life, even though they were assigned to the Metal element long before the loss occurred, and an Earth person, as Sujata so acutely observes, will have a parent, usually a mother, who shows signs of being unable to nurture their Earth child long after the Earth element has imprinted itself upon that child. To answer Sujata’s question, I think that the dominant elemental need, which in the examples I have given above are Metal’s need for respect and Earth’s need for nourishment, is within us from conception, but the fates in their wisdom add events in our lifetime which bear down hard upon these needs, as though deliberately focusing attention upon them. From one viewpoint these events can seem to be conspiring to draw out our element’s particular task in life, and thus offer us an opportunity to overcome the handicaps these tasks can place upon us. In Metal’s case this would be to learn to live with loss and not be diminished by it, in Earth’s to learn to nourish itself.

Footnote on the Earth and Metal elements: I am reminded of something Anna Freud, Freud’s daughter, a child psychoanalyst, once said to me: “Mothers who smother and fathers who are absent are the most difficult things for children to cope with.” Smothering with love, though ostensibly a way of giving something to a child, also deprives that child not only of air, but of the possibility of feeding itself. Watch a baby being pressed too close to a mother’s nipple and struggling to breathe or swallow, and you will get a vivid image of the harm smothering can do. The harm absence can do is much easier to visualize.

We must allow the elements to surprise us

It is only human to long for a time when we are so secure in our knowledge of something that we no longer need to think about it because it has become so self-evident. I think most of us would like this to be true of our understanding of the elements. We would like to be able to place each in a tightly sealed box, labelled Wood or Water, and think no more about it. It would be comforting to think that, locked in these boxes, are all the different signs, sensory and emotional, by which we recognise Wood or Water in people, and that there is nothing out there in the world at large to cast a different light upon what these boxes contain. In this way we would have built up for ourselves fixed templates by which we learn to recognise the elements: such and such a tone of voice represents Wood’s voice, such and such an emotion imprints itself upon all Water people.

Unfortunately things are not as simple as that. We cannot capture the essence of an element so easily. It will slip past such clear-cut categorizations, often surprising us by showing us characteristics we might well have thought belonged to another element, almost as though forcing us to re-adjust our thinking. This is why I say being a five element acupuncturist is not for the faint-hearted, because it requires courage to adapt to the challenges of recognising that each of us is much too complex to be boxed into the black-and-white categories traditionally ascribed to an element. Rather than being daunted by the difficulties we have in tracing the elements, we should instead be pleased with their capacity constantly to surprise us.

Compassion

I was preparing for a seminar I am about to give and decided I wanted to talk about the qualities needed to be a good practitioner. At the head of the list I wrote the word compassion. Surely that was self-evidently the most important quality? And then I paused, for what did I really mean by the word? I had used it, I felt, almost glibly, as though it was something we all took for granted.

The word itself comes from the Latin, meaning “feeling with”, and I think at some level we would all, especially therapists of any kind, like to think that we can do this, and that our compassion comes from our ability to feel what another is feeling, and thus share in that person’s experience. But in my view this is not strictly true. I believe that none of us can truly understand what another person is feeling about anything, because we are who we are and they are who they are. Depending on the amount of insight we have, though, we can make a stab at understanding some part of another’s experience, particularly those which resonate with ours. It is, however, arrogant and, in a therapeutic context, unwise, to assume that we understand the whole.

If, as I believe, we can only think ourselves into how another is feeling to the extent that their experience is in some way akin to something we, too, have experienced, then true compassion is understanding how our own experience can only partly mirror that of our patients. It must extend to accepting that there will be areas of another’s life which we cannot really enter into, but which we can acknowledge by allowing that other person the time and space to express what they are feeling without distorting the reality of their feelings. This is a more difficult task than it appears, as I know from many years of trying to help students work their way towards an appropriate approach to others’ distresses.

All our own hang-ups come to the fore here. We may find what a patient is saying disturbing for some personal reason and therefore want to coat it quickly in a layer of platitudes, by far the worst being those terribly trite and meaningless phrases such as “I feel for you”, or “I feel your pain”. At some unconscious level within ourselves, perhaps, we may be hoping that this will effectively silence our patients. Or we may interrupt them with intrusive questions which don’t allow them time to tell us what they want to talk about in the way they want to say it, but instead direct them where we want them to go.

I believe true compassion, therefore, is the ability to allow another person to express their deepest feelings to us whilst we acknowledge that these feelings will always be unique to them. It is indeed a rare gift to be able to do this, and one we need to nurture carefully. For a five element acupuncturist what is important here is that, if we give our patients the emotional space in which they feel free to express what they are feeling in the way they want to, the elements, instead of retreating into the shadows in the face of a lack of understanding, will emerge in ever clearer outlines, as though they dare to show their true faces only to compassionate eyes.

The election leadership debates and the elements

I am using the TV debates between the three leaders to further my diagnostic skills. We have here three people who interestingly appear to be of three different elements. Since I don’t know them personally, this diagnosis is obviously made on the basis of what I see and hear on TV and the radio, but here goes. Gordon Brown - Water, David Cameron – Earth and Nick Clegg – Fire (possibly Inner Fire, but I am not quite sure about that).

Gordon Brown (Water): we have here a person who we really can describe as “still waters run deep”, showing hesitation and fear except when confronted with the life and death situation of the bank collapses, where his will to survive surfaced strongly enough to pull the whole world in his wake, like an unstoppable torrent of water. But in a situation where interaction with others (the studio audience and the millions out there looking in) is required, his need to push through obstacles translates into a bullying, lecturing manner uncomfortable to watch and listen to. Of the three leaders, he is the most hampered by what can, in different circumstances, become his element’s qualities, single-mindedness, hard ambition and unyielding determination to get his way.

I think his skin colour looks bluish-black and he undoubtedly has a groaning voice, with that quality of never being able to stop himself of water in full flow.

Compare this with David Cameron (Earth), who has much softer edges, a more all-encompassing approach to those around him, obviously never happier than when he is surrounded by a group of people. I can’t remember ever seeing him doing his campaigning without this circle of people in the midst of which he stands at ease, enjoying his central role and thriving as soon as he is in the limelight. This is so unlike Brown who seems to shrink as he approaches people, and tends to move towards each person in a straight line, shaking their hands and then moving quickly on to the next, as though pushing each aside as he moves on. His attempts to draw the Conservative party into a more compassionate role, evidence of Earth's emotion, sympathy, sits uneasily with the much more hard-hearted conventional role of the Conservatives, and draws it closer to Labour, thus confusing the electorate.

I think Cameron’s skin has that overall yellowish colour of Earth, and his voice the undulations and soothing articulations of a singing tone.

And then finally we have Nick Clegg (Fire), beautifully positioned between the two others, with his Fire energy exuding warmth and humour, and with an ability to relate easily to anybody he is talking to, which includes both the studio audience, the TV audience out there and the crucial one-to-one encounters with television interviewers in which Fire’s love of such close interactions comes to the fore. He had no problem looking straight at the questioners in the TV debates, because this is the only way Fire can relate, addressing each of them directly and so successfully that the other two leaders were forced to try to copy him in the second debate, predictably somewhat uneasily. Cameron had to keep on reminding himself to stare straight at the camera, and Brown was even less successful in maintaining such direct eye contact. Clegg was (literally) in his element in these situations, revelling in just those kind of personal interactions, with the added advantage of the ability to see the humourous even in such an emotionally charged situation, including laughing at himself. This makes him appear more human, and forms a bridge to the listener, a quality Tony Blair (also Fire) had in abundance. It is no coincidence, then, that Clegg is being compared with Blair, as they have many of the Fire-like qualities which make for easy leadership.

It will be fascinating to see whether Water (Brown) can douse Fire (Clegg) sufficiently to come out on top. This was, after all, the essence of the relationship between Blair and Brown for many years, with Blair’s Fire either constantly vapourizing Brown’s Water or being extinguished by it, as neither overcame the other. Or will Cameron’s Earth prove strong enough beneath his feet to swallow up Brown’s Water and prove insufficient foundation on which Clegg’s Fire can thrive.

And, much more importantly, will the country as a whole want the optimism of Fire to lift them out of this economic depression and take them into the unknown rather than stick with the known?