Enjoying the ridiculous (yet again)

Here’s another amusing advertisement which I saw on my walk through London, to add to the one I wrote about in my blog of 2 June. 


Apparently you can buy “Invisible Personal Clothing”.  My mind boggled at the thought of all those people walking around naked in invisible clothes, like the Emperor in his New Clothes.  And apparently being prepared to pay for the privilege of doing this!

A testimony to how much the practice of five element acupuncture is helping one of my Chinese students

The following is taken from an email from Caroline in Chengdu, who translates my blog for her fellow practitioners:


“From the day on which I was helped by FEA, I’ve decided to learn FEA well and help more people. Because I have experienced the magic of FEA myself, which successfully helped me solve my family problem, I never had any problem of believing in FEA. I believe that the principle on which it is based is truth. And if I cannot cure people, the problem lies in me, not the principles of FEA. So I gave up learning to become a better herbalist, I just focused on FEA. It was not an easy change to make, but I struggled on. After one year of practising, I can now feel that I’m much more relaxed, hence I can pay more attention to my patient, and think less about the element. I learned how to have a better relationship with my patient, and learned a lot from them about how to become a better acupuncturist and a better person. And the more patients I see, the more information I can put in my library (of examples of elements), that’s how I find myself getting a deeper understanding of the elements compared to one year ago. There is still a long long way to go, but I’m not in a hurry, it's a lifetime of learning, and I know that my patients will help me, thanks to all of them!


And translating your blogs helped me a lot too! Other people may just glance over it or read it once, while I will think every sentence over and over just to get a deeper understanding and find a better way to translate it. So after translating your blog, I can almost recite it! The whole process is like chewing your teachings and digesting it and making it mine. People may think my translating helped them, but honestly I think I’m the one who gain most.


I’ll keep learning because it is such a happy and rewarding thing!”  

 

 

A Chinese acupuncturist’s observations of the Fire element

I am always very heartened to receive clear evidence of how much my students over in China have learnt during our seminars together, and how seriously and enthusiastically they are continuing their studies of five element acupuncture by themselves.  This email from a student, Caroline, is proof of the depth of her understanding of the elements, although with a slight misunderstanding.  She starts by seeing Fire through slightly rosier glasses than the other elements, but then realises that this is a distortion, and corrects this by herself. 


I give my reply to her at the end of her email below.


"Dear Nora
I have two patients recently, who make me think a lot about Fire. They came to me a couple of months ago, both with family problems, one of them was even trying to get divorce with her husband. What impressed me the most was how they hate their husband! I was very confused about their elements at first, but recently I changed both of their diagnosis into Fire, because they both smile when talking about sad things, and their scorched smell. Now I’m getting positive feedback from both of them.

Now here comes my question. When we mention about Fire, we always think about all the good words, love, joy, kindness, forgiveness, and so on. However I could hardly feel the words from them sometimes, but the word “hate”. Then I realized that the obverse of love is hate, when the element is imbalanced, it can turn to the opposite, for example, a hopeful Wood person can be hopeless; a devoted Earth person can become rather selfish; a Metal person who keeps pursuing self-value can feel completely worthless; a brave Water person can become a coward, so fearful to move forward, or a person who always has fear in his/her heart can lose the ability of estimating risks and may put himself/herself into danger by taking too many adventures. I suddenly had a picture before me that although Fire can go out quietly with nothing to give anymore, the raging flame can burn so fierce and almost destroy everything. So I think it is possible that if some Fire people are very imbalanced, they may get so resentful to hurt people they have problem with.

When I first started to learn Five Element Acupuncture (including almost like every other student in China), Fire was considered as the “perfect” element--- easy to be with, humorous, kind-hearted, passionate, and so on, so if we met some one who could not fit into these words, we might think this one could never be Fire. But as I saw more Fire people, I gradually realized that most Fire people who came for treatment, as you’d told us, were people who were “lack of Fire”. And the feeling being with them was exactly as you’d written in your book KEEPERS OF THE SOUL, “There is an expectation of the sun’s presence throughout our summers, and then a disappointment when it fails to appear. We experience a lack of something that should be there that is not, a feeling no other season evokes in quite the same way…”

And I started to see some sides which were not so “perfect” (and no element is perfect, each element has its advantages and defects ). I could remember one sultry summer afternoon, when I left my clinic it was still sunny, but after less than ten minutes, the weather changed so quickly and started to rain heavily, I got wet in the rain and suddenly felt cold. And I thought, well, this kind of weather was very common in the summer, so, were Fire people like this? In your book KEEPERS OF THE SOUL, you described Fire as “the most volatile of all elements”, which reminded me of my mother, whom I thought may be the Fire element, who could be very strictly scolding us, then the next second smiling at other people, just like the changeable weather in the summer.

I’m not sure if it is right to understand Fire this way. I will try my best to continue observing my Fire patients and friends to develop a deeper and comprehensive understanding of Fire.

Caroline”


Here is my reply:


“Dear Caroline
I am very impressed by how much work you are doing to deepen your understanding of the elements.  I would emphasize, though, that there is no “perfect “element, as you yourself say.  As you realise, all elements can offer all the good things they are able to offer when they are balanced, and hide them when they are out of balance.  In other words, they all have their negative and their positive sides to them, and that definitely includes Fire.


I think you are right to think that the negative sides of Fire are a lack of all the “love, joy and kindness” which you mention as being its positive qualities.  But I don’t think I would describe the negative qualities using such a strong word as “hate”.   It’s much more that they appear as an inability to show love, joy or kindness.  It is true that when there is a lack of Fire, “the raging flame can burn so fiercely and almost destroy everything”.  That is when the negative qualities can hurt other people rather than bring them warmth and joy.


I think you are developing a very good understanding of the Fire element, as well as of the other elements, so carry on continuing to look for the traces of the different elements as you treat more and more people.


Much love
Nora”

Seen today

I walked past the Radisson Hotel in central London today, and saw on the window of its restaurant the words “Scoff and Barter”.  I looked at the sign three times to make sure that I wasn’t misreading it.


For non-English speakers whose English may need a little bit of help to understand these two words, “to scoff” is to laugh at, and “to barter” is to bargain about the price of something to get it reduced.  Does the hotel really expect its guests to mock and to barter at the prices it charges them?


At least the sign caught my eye, so perhaps that, rather than its meaning, was the purpose.

Returning the spirit to acupuncture in China

(Article submitted to the Acupuncturist, the newsletter of the British Acupuncture Council)


We are used to thinking of the transmission of traditional Chinese medicine as being a form of one-way traffic passing from East to West, but somewhat to my initial surprise, I have become a key factor in its journey in the opposite direction, from West to East.  Specifically, it has become my task to take the first steps in helping five element acupuncture build a bridge back to its land of birth, China.


Over the years China has made many different, often contradictory attempts to try to integrate its traditional form of medicine within the framework of Western medicine or to find ways of making Western medicine fit within it.  It has never been quite clear whether it should view it as a powerful indigenous medical system on a par with, or even superior to, Western medicine, or as a more primitive branch of medicine which Western medicine had in many ways superseded.  This uncertainty has hovered over China’s at times almost schizophrenic approach to its traditional medicine, and is one of the reasons for the confusion which this still causes, not only in China but to practitioners of Chinese medicine round the world.   In other words, can Chinese traditional medicine be viewed as a stand-alone, intellectually coherent form of medicine based on more than 2000 years of continuous practice, or has the appearance of Western medicine in the past 100 years or so demoted it to an inferior, ancillary role?


It will be obvious from my writings and my teachings that I am utterly convinced of the former, but sadly I am not sure how far my view is shared by many of its practitioners either in China or the rest of the world.


Through a series of what could seem to have been coincidences, but I regard now as clearly defined steps along a path which has guided me throughout my long association with acupuncture, I was led to meet Professor Liu Lihong at the Rothenburg conference in Germany a few years ago, together with his very good friend and translator, Heiner Fruehauf.  Liu Lihong is described as being “arguably the most important Chinese medicine scholar of the younger generation in present-day China.  His controversial book Sikao zhongyi (Contemplating Chinese Medicine) became an instant bestseller when it was first published in 2003.  Since then, it has attracted a larger and wider circle of readers than any other Chinese medicine book in modern times.  His book represents the first treatise written in the People’s Republic of China that dares to openly discuss the shortcomings of the government-sponsored system of TCM education in China, which informed the evolution of TCM around the globe.”


I was then invited by him to give a seminar on five element acupuncture to acupuncturists at his research institute in Nanning in South China in November 2011, the first of five seminars I have given there to a growing number of acupuncturists.  At my last visit in April, Professor Liu, who is himself a scholar of the classics, when introducing me to the class of 70 acupuncturists, said, “The seed of five element acupuncture is a very pure seed.  I think it originates directly from our original classic Lingshu, “Rooted in Spirit” (Chapter 8 of Lingshu), or “Discourse on the law of needling” (Chapter 72 of Suwen). That is to say it fits easily within the Neijing. It is therefore not created from nothing.  It has its origin in the far-distant past and has a long history.  The seed which underlies its practice is very pure.  For many good reasons, this seed has now returned to its homeland and started to germinate.  In Nora’s words, its roots have started to penetrate downwards.”


I have been invited to give a keynote lecture on “Returning the spirit to acupuncture in China” at the BAcC conference on 26 September 2014, when I will be describing in greater detail the process by which the roots of five element acupuncture are being encouraged to grow steadily stronger in China.

 

 

The spacing of treatments: an art in itself

I have just spent a happy few days in Berlin with two very dedicated German five element acupuncturists, Christian and Thomas.  This was very stimulating, both culturally, because I saw more of Berlin on this, my second visit, and from an acupuncture point of view, as it always is. 


It was during a day spent looking at patients together that I was made aware once more of the importance of the question of the spacing of treatments as representing an essential, but often overlooked, aspect of how we help our patients.


I don’t think that we pay enough attention to this in the normal course of events.  At the start of a patient’s treatment I expect we all tend to give them a number of weekly treatments, normally something like six or so, and then we tend to space treatments more widely from once every 2-3 weeks to monthly and eventually to once a season and less.  It is what happens as we move further on in treatment that problems can arise.  I was made aware of this again by one of the questions I was asked.  How was the practitioner to deal with a patient who, he said, “insisted” on weekly treatments whilst also maintaining that treatment was not helping him in any way. 


We have various ways of assessing the effect of treatment.  There are our own observations as to whether we notice any changes or not, and then there are the patient’s own assessments of how treatment is going.  Usually these two sets of observations will coincide.  Problems only start when the two differ, as for example if the practitioner notices how much better the patient looks, or the changes he/she is making to their life, and yet the patient him/herself says that there has been no change at all.  We cannot try to persuade the patient by saying things like, “but you seem to be walking better” or, “you have not been talking about your family problems as much”, because that is denying the patient the right to make their own assessment of what they consider constitutes improvement.  On the other hand, we may be concerned that the patient is choosing not to acknowledge that there have been changes for other reasons.  These may include such things as a fear that we are “giving up” on them, or, more subtly, as part of some kind of a hidden power struggle between the patient and us.  Some people can be unconsciously reluctant to accept the help of others.


How do we as acupuncturists get over this difficulty?  If the relationship between our patient and us has been well-grounded from the start, there should be no problem, as the patient’s strengthened energies give them sufficient support gradually to do without our help.  But if something in this relationship has tilted it towards over-dependence on us or otherwise distorted it, it may become more difficult to hand control back to the patient.  We may, for example, allow our patients to contact us too often between treatments by phone or now increasingly by email, something I was guilty of in the early days of my practice, because I felt I always had to be there to help my patients whenever they needed me.   This can make it all too easy to blur the necessary lines of separation between patient and practitioner which make a healthy relationship possible.   


We must never forget that our aim must always be to reach a point where we step back and treatment is no longer needed, the point where patients are now able to maintain balance by themselves.  If we are having difficulties with working out how gradually to space out treatments for patients we can see require less treatment, we should examine our relationship with them to see if we have encouraged on over-reliance on us, and, if so, start gently to take steps to encourage the patient to greater independence.   Of course, as with everything relating to our patients, our approach to each one will be different, and must be adapted to their individual needs.  With one patient treatments may remain weekly for much longer than with another.  At each stage we have to assess whether our relationship to our patient is adapting flexibly to that patient’s needs, and not depend upon a fixed formula for the spacing of appointments.

 

The Chinese learn to hug each other

Today’s newspaper yielded yet another interesting snippet.  An article from the New York Times International Weekly had the intriguing title “Chinese unwind with a hug and a song”.  Apparently the Chinese are “finally learning to hug each other” - although, from my own experience in China, they already know how to hug with great enjoyment.


Or perhaps it is just that I have met those who have spent time looking at the elements, and have had their interest in emotional responses stimulated by being told to observe what each element offers.  Most Chinese, this article appears to indicate, “have been slow to embrace the embrace”.  Liu Lihong told the class I was teaching that “we need more Fire here”.  In the case of hugs, it is probably more Earth that is needed, since I think hugging is much more a response to one of the Earth element’s needs, which is to draw people close to them.


The article said that “recently it seems like everyone is hugging.  Friends are hugging. Family members are hugging…. The tables are turning….. Schools are now conducting classes in emotional intelligence.  For homework, children have been assigned to hug their parents.”


This trend towards learning to be unafraid to show emotions may be part of the reason why my Chinese five-element students are so keen to learn all about the emotional manifestations of the elements, and enjoy doing exercises which help train them in learning to detect emotions both in themselves and in their patients.

A new plan to counter antibiotic-resistant infections - opening ward windows!

We all know the dangers caused by the over-use of antibiotics, and the resistance to them which encourages the spread of disease.  There is an article in today’s Observer newspaper which epitomizes for me how far our modern treatment of illness has divorced us from the natural world.  It starts with the strong statement:  “Wards in British hospitals need to be redesigned to provide defences against the spread of deadly, antibiotic-resistant superbugs. That is the stark warning of scientists, who said last week that the danger now posed by drug-resistant infections had reached crisis level.”


So what are the proposals these same scientists put forward to help our hospitals do this?  Among these, believe it or not, is one that hospital wards should have “large, openable windows”.  …”We are talking about returning hospital wards to the type we had 100 years ago.”….


This sent me back to look at a chapter in my book Keepers of the Soul in which I discuss what I call “the medicalized society” we now live in.  And I wrote, with rare prescience,.”…we show as little regard for the environment in which all these terrifying interventions take place, the frightening machines, the lack of natural air, even the ban on plants and flowers in the hospital wards of the most sick, as if such harmless, natural and beautiful things bring with them a greater chance of disease than dealing with the high incidence of hospital-induced infections.”


Let us hope that the design of new hospitals will now include windows which open to allow nature inside to help patients’ lungs breathe and bugs to escape.  

A patient's comments

Over the years I have become used to patients telling me things after treatment such as “now I feel more myself again”, or “I know now who I am”.  Yesterday I had another heart-warming example of five element acupuncture’s ability to reach to the very heart of our needs as human beings when a five element acupuncturist colleague of min, Audley Burnett, told me how moved he had been when a patient described the effect of treatment in these words:  “I feel as if I’ve come into myself.


I think that is such a lovely way of saying what we would all want to feel:  that we have “come into ourselves”.  And how moving that what five element acupuncture can do is help our patients achieve that.  In so doing it also helps its practitioners achieve much the same thing, but by a different route, that of the therapist.  When I feel a treatment I have given has helped my patient, I feel more fully myself.

What I have learnt from my recent visit to China

I always find it reassuring to receive confirmation of the universal nature of human qualities.  This is something we usually take for granted in everyday life. Politicians, for example, assume that those they negotiate with experience the same feelings they do, and are as horrified by the same injustices acting themselves out in far-flung places in the world out there as other politicians are.  We think, too, that ordinary human folk, reading of tragedies such as the recent loss of the airliner or the ferry disaster, will be able to understand the sufferings of the bereaved at one remove.  Unthinkingly for the most part, we assume that what others round the globe experience as suffering or joy mirrors our own experiences of suffering or joy.


Since as a five element acupuncturist my working life revolves around attempts to understand just what makes my patients suffer or be joyful, I am made particularly aware of my assumption of the universality of human emotions when I go to China, from where I have just returned.  I wrote in a previous blog on 30 March, “We all want to be heard”, which was about what I was expecting to be the focus of our seminar over there.  I can now truly say that not only did the Chinese acupuncturists show that they did indeed hear what their patients wanted them to hear, but that their responses to their patients reflected an increasing understanding and ability to respond to their patients’ emotional needs.


There were about 70 acupuncturists at the seminar, of whom half were new to five element acupuncture.  It was heart-warming to see how well those who were now practising five element acupuncture had integrated into their practice what they had learnt before.  The comforting impression I returned with was a mixture not only of deep satisfaction at how many acupuncturists are now treating only with five element acupuncture, but – and this is perhaps the most surprising aspect of it all – how much easier I always find it handing on my knowledge to Chinese acupuncturists than I used to do to my English students.  As I told them in China, “you are all already halfway there compared with European (and presumably also American) students, because an understanding of the elements is deeply embedded in all of you from the day you are born, whilst non-Chinese students have to learn what is initially an alien language from scratch.”  I well remember an English student asking me at the end of her first year at SOFEA, “but how do you know that there are things called elements?”


It is therefore a continuing delight to me to see how much of what I want to convey to others about the wonder of the elements’ presence within all of us is understood by my Chinese listeners almost before I open my mouth to speak.  I notice how relaxed this makes me feel, as though I am wandering in a landscape with familiar landmarks, rather than the often difficult terrain I have had to negotiate over the years as my five element beliefs encountered the surprisingly sceptical opinions of my TCM colleagues.


I am very fortunate indeed to be accompanied on my visits to China by two very dedicated fellow five element acupuncturists, Mei Long and Guy Caplan, Mei from the Netherlands and Guy from here in London.  We have now been together over there twice as a group, and Mei and Guy have also taught there once more without me in November 2013 when I was recovering from my recent illness.  We act as a very unified group, each of us having slightly different roles which complement each other.  It helps that Mei is Chinese and can speak without requiring the help of a translator.  I’m sure this is a welcome relief from the inevitably interrupted communications which Guy and I make as we wait for our words to be translated.  Again we were lucky to have two very good translators to help us, Caroline and Nuha, both themselves acupuncturists, and I noticed this time how many of the group understood more English than they admitted to, laughing at my jokes before they were translated.  I think there is quite a lot of English study going on during our absences.


And there were many jokes.  We had a very happy time indeed, working hard and playing hard, too – many lovely meals out, some Karaoke evenings, and a festive atmosphere as though all of us were enjoying a holiday together.  And this is how I think the Chinese group view their time with us, as one long drawn-out holiday experience.  In a way, I do, too, returning refreshed and stimulated by the enthusiasm and warmth with which we are surrounded throughout our time there.


I am only just getting used to carrying my own bags, too.  In China, I was not allowed to carry anything at all, a small group waiting patiently for us in the hotel foyer every day at whatever time we emerged from our rooms, ready to grab my bags and lovingly accompany us the 100 yards or so to the centre where we taught.  I can’t remember the last time anybody helped me carry my bags in England!