Further burdens upon Inner Fire

There are an almost unlimited number of outside pressures upon us exhorting us to be what we call politically correct (pc).  Those of one aspect of the Fire element, Inner Fire, like me, are particularly burdened here, since it is my Small Intestine which has constantly to find a way of dealing with these pressures.

I wrote in a previous blog (26 May 2013) about one of these pressures.  There are many others I have to deal with during the course of a day, but none so tiring, because so apparently insignificant, as what happened this morning.  This may seem to be a frivolous example of the Small Intestine at work, but, like everything our guardian element insists that we do, is also a very significant illustration of that official’s work.  So any practitioner reading this should take note, because it is only through understanding the load each official  bears as it attempts to do its work for the good of the whole that we learn to help our patients.

So to this morning’s tiny incident:  I feel very strongly that I must support my two small local newsagents, one at each end of a long street, at the centre of which, and closest to where I live, is a Tesco’s.  (This comes under the politically correct heading no 1, which is “Support your local shops”.)  I have a weekly subscription to the Guardian/Observer newspapers. (This comes under politically correct heading no 2, which is “Keep buying newspapers to save them from the threat of the internet”). 

The problem arises if 1) it is the weekend, as today, or 2) I am in a hurry, also as today, when it would, of course, be far easier just to pop into the Tesco’s just over the road.  At the weekend, one newsagent opens late on a Saturday and is closed altogether on a Sunday, and the other only opens for a few hours on a Sunday morning, so I have to remember to get there before it closes.  So today I set off virtuously on my long walk to one newsagent, forgetting that it was Saturday and not yet open, turned to walk back towards the other end of the long street, passing the doors to Tesco’s on the way.  I spent (or at least my Small Intestine spent) the 100 yards or so of this walk towards Tesco’s debating whether I would or would not succumb to laziness and pick up my Guardian there, or whether I should continue for another 5 – 10 minutes up to the other newsagent.  Giving myself the excuse that I was in a hurry, I gave in and popped into Tesco’s.  Each time I look at today’s Guardian now I feel a slight twinge of guilt.

To some people, this dilemma, which acts itself out surprisingly often, is a ridiculous waste of energy, but try to tell that to the Small Intestine. If it feels something is wrong - here supermarket chains crushing small shopkeepers - it has to do something about it, even at the cost of all the apparently unnecessary heart-searching that it has to do (and remember the Small Intestine's function is to advise the Heart to do what is right).

During the course of a day, there are many other similar examples of the dilemmas I am faced with.  These include things such as: should I buy a pint of milk from the little café I like to support but at a higher price than from Waitrose, which, as part of John Lewis, is an acceptable supermarket to buy from;  or does my little dishwasher use more water than if I wash my plates by hand;  or should I avoid walking past my usual Big Issue seller because I have just bought a copy from another one further up the road, and will he therefore think I have abandoned him?

Not to mention, should I buy my books from my small local bookshop, rather than Amazon, or, a further dilemma, through the Guardian bookshop?  Which needs my support more, the local bookshop or the Guardian?  Or should I not buy the book at all, but order it from my local library, which also badly needs my support?  (These come under pc headings nos 3 and 4, Support your local bookshop, and Support your local library.)

Oh, the burden upon my Small Intestine of trying to do what is right! 

The rewards of teaching in China

Mei has just forwarded me the following heart-warming email from one of our Chinese students.  I am passing on the flavour of what this practitioner said in her own words below:

“Today I treated a CV/GV block, and up the pulses raised! And our heart, me and my patient, was on the wings of joy. Really I can’t believe this, that the illness which has made him suffering for years will be indeed conquered by this tiny little needle?

He was very satisfied and his wife even moved to tears. Thank you so much for bringing our old treasure back to home!  Such a huge contribution.”

It is lovely for me to see our students over there putting into practice what they have learnt from us, and, as they often tell us, helping so many of their patients to a happier, healthier life.  It is such rewarding, worthwhile work.  Although I hardly need any more encouragement than I already have, this lovely feedback is further confirmation that what we are teaching falls on very fertile ground. 

I am looking forward with delight to my next visit to China, which this time will be to Beijing for a week at the end of September, where a group of very keen acupuncturists awaits Guy and me.  And after that, in November, back to our 5^th visit to Nanning, to see how all those many students who have already attended previous seminars there are doing in their practices all around China.

Before that I will be visiting Berlin for the first time, to look at patients with two acupuncturists there (as well as taking a peek at the new Picasso collection in the Berggruen Museum).  And then in August on to Toulouse to meet Dr Marie-Christine Lavier, the daughter of Jacques Lavier, JR’s teacher, to hear what she has to tell me about her father, and to take further steps towards publishing my translation of one of her father’s books which Singing Dragon Press are interested in.

A busy, but happy summer and autumn ahead!

 

My approach to pulse-taking

I have been privileged to receive from Peter Eckman a draft of his latest book which is about pulses and is about to be published, like my books, by Singing Dragon Press.  I love its title, The Compleat Acupuncturist: a guide to constitutional and conditional pulse diagnosis, an echo of Isaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653).  The book discusses in great detail the many, many different ways in which pulses are taken and the many, many different ways in which they are interpreted. 

This has set me thinking about my own approach to pulse-taking, best summed up, I feel, by something I said to those attending my last SOFEA clinical seminar.  In effect I told them, a bit tongue in cheek, to “forget the pulses”.  This is something I often find myself saying to practitioners in an attempt to remove some of the unnecessary burden they feel when trying to interpret pulses.  I suggest, instead, that they should concentrate on looking at the patient as a whole whose pulses are only one of many manifestations of the elements.  I always labour the point that the extreme subtlety of what these 12 pulses are telling us makes their interpretation an art which has to be honed over many years, and like all arts is a skill that is never perfected.

My approach is based upon what I was taught as an undergraduate at Leamington, where the importance of pulse-taking was never over-emphasized.  We were told simply to take as many pulses as we could (100 a month, if I remember correctly), and gradually learn to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the different pulses in relation to one another.  The aim was mainly to detect energy blocks, such as Entry-Exit blocks or those occurring in a Husband-Wife imbalance.  It was firmly drilled into us that pulses never told us what the Guardian Element (CF) was, because even if treatment was directed at the right element, it might well be this element’s pulses which showed the least response to treatment because of its role in shepherding the other elements into balance.

The famous 27 pulse qualities were only mentioned once by JR, almost as an aside, when, as part of what was apparently considered necessary to complete the syllabus, he raced through the different pulse qualities in about 15 minutes with obvious disinterest, ending with telling us, “and that’s all you need to know about the 27 pulses qualities”.  This appeared to be a doorway through which he did not think it necessary for us to pass.

Another occasion with JR had a much more profound effect on me.  I told him at one point that sometimes I felt that I couldn’t interpret anything my fingers were trying to tell me.  He said, “I know what you mean.  I will feel the same, and then perhaps a month later I will realise that my pulse-taking has moved to another level.”

These words of his hover over my fingers as I take pulses even now.  I never wait too long to try and interpret what I feel, and can even find myself talking as I take them, almost as if I want to allow my mind to do its thinking through words so that it sets my spirit free just to feel.  And then I try to add what I am feeling to what my other senses are telling me to help me interpret the signals the patients is sending me through everything they do or say.

What worries me about approaches to pulse-taking is that pulses represent one of the few aspects of five element practice where we ask for a physical response from a patient’s body.  All the other forms of diagnosis are much more ephemeral.  We can’t physically touch a smell, a sound of voice, a colour or an emotion, but we can certainly physically touch a hand to feel a pulse.  And the physical appears to provide a reassuring refuge to which we can retreat if our other senses confuse us and prove too elusive.  I have decided that this is the reason why all novice practitioners (and quite a few experienced practitioners, too!) immediately reach for the hands of the patient lying there on the couch, rather than paying attention to the patient as a whole, as though needing to anchor themselves immediately in the physical.  Sometimes I feel, rather wickedly, that this is a bit like a drowning person grasping a lifebuoy.

Except in the case of blocks, where I always try to add other information to what my fingers may be telling me, pulses play an almost subsidiary role compared with what I learn from the total picture presented by the patient.  So Peter and I, both trained in the same school, but he, unlike me, having received much more extensive training in other disciplines, have arrived at somewhat different points on the scale of the importance we attribute to what our fingers can tell us.  I am nonetheless fascinated by all those other approaches his new book covers, but which I know I may only ever appreciate in theory, not in practice.

 (See also my other two blogs on pulse-taking: The mystery of pulses, 22 October 2010, and Using our two hands, 24 February 2012)

 

 

 

One of the burdens of being Inner Fire

Oh, the ridiculous unnecessary pressures my Small Intestine official can put me under!  

Yesterday I travelled by train to Salisbury, not something requiring much mental exertions, one would think.  But with every train journey I take comes the moment as I walk along the platform when I have to decide whether I want to head for the carriage with the quiet zone, and opt for a journey theoretically free of people talking loudly on their mobiles, or just sit in an ordinary carriage and suffer.  As everybody now probably knows, I absolutely hate mobile phones, however necessary they have become, not only because of the complete disregard for other people their owners show, but also because they are increasingly cutting people physically off from contact with one another - ironically, because they are intended to do just the opposite.   So do I suffer a journey interrupted by the endless pinging of mobile phones, and forced to listen to conversations I have absolutely no interest in, or do I sit in a carriage in peaceful silence? 

 

Except it is rarely silent, I have found.  What usually happens is that somebody, finding that there are more seats available here than elsewhere, plonks themselves down without seeing where they are sitting, and immediately switches on their phone.  Then there comes the moment when I look round to see if any other occupant is as annoyed as I am, which they, surprisingly, rarely are.  So I am forced yet again to gesture to the signs on the window, to be greeted usually, not by an apology, but by irritation, with the speaker either hurriedly grabbing his/her bags to go to another carriage or walking through the carriage to the area beyond the door still talking loudly.

 

And this may happen not once but twice during a journey.  And if it doesn’t happen, then at every station along the route, as new passengers come, in I tense myself for another such encounter.  What an utter waste of my energy!  Wouldn’t it be far better for me, plagued as I am with bad hearing, just to turn off both hearing aids and sit in utter silence wherever I choose?  But I know that when I take my next train journey, I will go through the same rigmarole.

 

It is on occasions like this that I would love to be any other element than Inner Fire, so that I could allow my poor Small Intestine simply to relax and enjoy the journey, rather wasting so much time sorting things out in such an unsatisfactory way.  But sadly, I often think, it can never truly relax, as it sifts and sorts, sifts and sorts, to protect the Heart.

 

 

 

 

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.

Two humbling experiences

I have been very humbled by two experiences I have had in the last month or so, one as I left China, and the other on my return.  Both are heart-warming reminders to me of how fortunate I am to do what I do. 

My Chinese experience came on the last day of my stay in Nanning.  My host, Liu Lihong, wanted to find out how each of the 60 students who had attended our two weeks of seminars had found them.  So we asked each one in turn to tell us.  What astounded me, and I hope pleased Liu Lihong, was the group’s unanimous expression of overwhelming delight in what they had learnt and how amazed they were at the compassion and understanding we showed the many patients whose treatments they observed.  This was a facet of practice apparently totally new to them, and opened a fresh window for them onto the importance of developing a warm patient/practitioner relationship.   

My other example, from the other side of the world here in London, illustrates just this important aspect of our practice.  It comes in an email from the practitioner who has been telling me of her experience in treating a terminally ill cancer patient over the last few months of his life, and how profound an effect this has had on her (see my two previous blogs on 27 Feb and 25 March).

Although she was sad to have to report her patient’s death, she sees her time with him in the most positive light.  With her permission, I give below her description of what the experience has meant to her:

“The past months since his diagnosis in January this year have been a real roller coaster for him, both physically and emotionally. Things took a dramatic turn for the worse last Wednesday and I feel so relieved that his suffering and strife were not prolonged further and that he is now truly at peace.

I feel very privileged to have been invited into this person's life. His very obvious Wood CF was very refreshing to me, though not without its challenges to his nearest and dearest.  His thirst for information about his treatments and acupuncture as a whole was a delight and not at all threatening to me - he was extremely open to the whole Chinese medicine ethos and it could be said that he was rather unorthodox in his beliefs and actions, and extremely proud of the fact he was too!

His openness, honesty and need for straight talking could have easily come across as slightly abrasive, but for me it made the whole subject of cancer and death very accessible. At a time when some would feel the need to avoid or skirt around what is a very difficult subject, I felt able to talk candidly to him without fear of overstepping the mark or holding back, in order to say what needed to be said.

You have often said, Nora, how you learn so much from your patients. My relationship with this patient has been a very emotional, memorable and powerful lesson - but most of all, very humbling indeed.”

As with my patient Martine, about whom I wrote in the last chapter of my Pattern of Things, experiences such as those this practitioner had to learn to deal with touch us at the deepest level.  They leave us much changed, and by this change open us up to greater understanding of the needs of our patients. 

Both these experiences, from different parts of the world, remind me once again of the common thread which runs through all of us.  Whatever tribe, race, country or continent we come from, the five great fingers of the elements hold each of us in their grasp, shaping the deepest aspects of ourselves and giving us a common humanity.

The end of self-publishing my books is now in sight!

I am having an interesting and challenging time at the moment re-reading my four books with a completely fresh eye.

It is more than 10 years since I wrote the Simple Guide, 9 years since my Handbook appeared, 7 years since the Keepers of the Soul and 4 years since I followed this up with the Pattern of Things.  And now there is my fifth publication, the Teach Yourself Five Element Acupuncture for Acupuncturists, which is hovering out there, so far unattached and unpublished in an English edition, but already photocopied in its Mandarin version for my Chinese students.

The reason for all this activity is because I have just signed with Singing Dragon Press for them to publish all my books (www.singingdragon.com).  I hesitated for a little while (but only a short while) before deciding, because I felt that I might to some extent lose the freedom I now have to do exactly what I want with my writing. But with some relief signed last week, persuaded, among other things, not only by the respect Jessica Kingsley, the publisher, has shown me, but, as she so succinctly said, the fact that I now no longer have to pack up and post my books myself!

In fact the feeling of freedom this signing has given me has been surprisingly releasing, as if a burden has been taken from me.  To my relief, only one of my books requires major re-editing, and that is the Handbook, and this is mainly because we are going to add my Teach Yourself Five Element Acupuncture to it as an appendix.  This has allowed me to look carefully at the whole structure of the book again, in particular re-writing the sections on point selection and, for good measure, adding a list of my favourite points.

When I have done this, I will have time to think ahead to what I want to write next.  Is it perhaps time to draw my blogs together into a book?

I hope, too, I will also soon have time to get down to doing something more frivolous, which is designing my long-announced, long-delayed coffee shop blog.  In the past two weeks I have found another café that I like and another one, which would be horrified to find itself called a café rather than a coffee-shop, that I disliked, so full was it of beautiful people in designer jeans and designer trainers and designer-looking faces.  It’s the little, unpretentious, privately-owned cafés that would never need to call themselves coffee-shops that I really like, and whose owners never fail to welcome me as a long-standing friend.

 

Mei, Guy and me with Liu Lihong and our students in Nanning April 2013

Here is the photo of all our lovely students in front of the Tong You San He Centre in Nanning.  I hope you can see what a happy group we all made - and this was just on our first day! 

Back from my fourth visit to Nanning

What to say about this fourth visit?  Each has been so different and each has added a further layer to the foundation of five element acupuncture which we are gradually building on Chinese soil.  We have now reached the point where some of our first students are themselves feeling confident enough to start giving some simple introductory classes to new groups of acupuncturists. Altogether we had a total of just over 60 students, of whom about 25 had come to previous seminars.  I will try and download the group photo of all of us in front of the Nanning Centre.

This was the first time I had two other tutors with me, Mei Long and Guy Caplan.  I was happy to hand over the more structured teaching of five element clinical skills to Guy, which left Mei and me more time to concentrate on looking after the many people who wanted treatment.

Mei had already sent over her translation of my Teach Yourself Five Element Acupuncture manual.  This was printed during our visit, and copies given to each class member.  The manual contains 16 lessons based upon my Handbook of Five Element Practice, and offers a step-by-step introduction to five element diagnosis and treatment protocols.  This will be a great help for those students who have no access whatsoever to any five element teaching apart from their brief few weeks with us.

We have decided that at our next seminar in the autumn we will concentrate on the group of practitioners who are already practising five element acupuncture to help them become more confident in their skills.  It is intended that this group will form the basis of a future five element teaching team spread across China, the declared aim of Liu Lihong, our host and the director of the Nanning Centre.

I had felt rather discouraged about my Mandarin studies before I left for China, but to my surprise, I discovered that I must be learning more than I realise.  I could perceive sentence structures better, although I definitely haven’t yet got a large enough vocabulary to make myself understood.  I found myself, though, fumbling around for a few words, and, with much sign language and smiles, I managed occasionally to make myself understood.  So that is at least a tiny step forward.  Gratifyingly, many of the students are determined to learn more English so that they can talk to us, and certainly their English has much improved.  So I will go back to my Mandarin classes with greater enthusiasm now.

Finally, Guy and I had our own mini-adventure during an overnight stay in Chengdu on the way back.  We were caught up in the after-shock of the Sichuan earthquake as we had our breakfast on the 30^th floor of the hotel.  The restaurant shook violently for a moment or so, and the guests looked around at each other unsure what to do.  Eventually, a door to the emergency stairs was opened, and we started to climb down steep, narrow concrete steps in pitch darkness.  We were later told that the hotel staff should have told us just to wait for the tremors to stop, which is what those in Chengdu do, since they are used to these shocks and take no notice of them.

Luckily Guy had a torch on his i-phone and lighted the way for me as I stumbled down step after step from the 30^th to the 21^st floor.  There, to our amusement, we discovered that there had been no emergency in the rest of the hotel.  All was as normal, as we emerged onto the hotel corridor to find other guests going quietly about their business unaware of the adventure we had been through.  We went to our rooms, leaving behind the other people in our group presumably still stumbling on down the concrete well for a further 21 flights to the ground floor.

A cheery note on which to sign off before I leave for China again

I just have time to sign off for a couple of weeks with a slightly more frivolous blog.  As part of my never-ending search for new coffee houses in which to do my writing and reading, I have discovered in one week two contrasting places at opposite ends of the wide spectrum of those available all over London.  One is a very modest café in the Pentonville Road, the other, a very luxurious coffee house (the old-fashioned word “posh” comes to mind) in Regent Street.  However different they are from one another in price they have in common a warm atmosphere, pleasant service and good coffee.

First to Islington, to the Amana Café, at 110 Pentonville Road, where I had a peaceful espresso (my favourite drink, as much for its smell as for its taste) in a tiny little café with a few tables and some welcoming armchairs and with, I gather, its own bookshop upstairs.  And then, not long after this, I searched out the Café Royal at 68 Regent Street, part of the 5-star luxury hotel complex they have just opened there.  I was drawn to it before it opened by the beautiful display of Gugelhupf cakes lining the windows.  This is a cake which my Austrian mother always baked for us, and whose battered, much-used cake tin, with its curving sides and hole in the middle, I have only just handed over to a daughter-in-law, cake-making being one of the cooking skills I now feel I can at last discard with relief.

The version of the Gugelhupf we baked was made half of plain and half of chocolate cake mixture, so that it came out of the oven in a beautiful marbled pattern with its characteristic hole in the middle.  I shared with the Austrian manager of the café a few nostalgic memories of Viennese Kaffeehaüser (coffee houses), with their Stammtische (tables reserved for regular guests) and newspapers on wooden poles, which entranced me when I visited Vienna for the first time in my late teens.  It was my first encounter with one of these which bred in me my curious delight in such places which I indulge in now to my heart’s content in London.

I will include these two cafés in the new blog I have talked about writing for a long time, but never quite got round to actually doing anything about, except, recently, finding a name for it, LondoncoffeeshopsIhave known.  When I get back from China, I have arranged for Emily Benet to help me set the blog up properly.  Emily ran an excellent Blogging for Beginners workshop I went to (see her website www.emilybenet.blogspot.co.uk for details). I feel I now need a further push to expand my blogging skills, particularly as I am not quite sure how to include pictures in the blog, such as the row of succulent Gugelhupfs you can see if you look on Google.  I hope this new blog will give both my readers and me an extra spice of light relief from my five element blogs.

So off I fly again to China to a group of 60 students, of whom 40 are some of my old students and 20 are completely new to me.  It will be good to have Guy as well as Mei to share the teaching load, and also to share the joy I always feel when I am with my Chinese students, such is their enthusiasm.  I will resurface here after 21 April, warmed in body and soul, emotionally by the welcome I always receive and physically by the climate.  It is 29°C in Nanning today!