Never rely on a damaged Kindle: a footnote to my blog of 28 March All About Books

I will never, ever, again only take a Kindle with me on holiday, with no back-up from what I call real books, as I stupidly did.  When I took the Kindle out on my first evening in China, I found that it had been damaged in transit inside my cabin bag.  And that was that!

Although my Chinese hosts took it to a Kindle store to try and get it repaired, it was beyond help.  This meant that I was left for 2 weeks without a book to read.   At some level this may have been good for my soul, because it forced me to do a lot of thinking and a lot of planning of lessons for my Chinese students.  Luckily, too, I had taken some of my Mandarin studies with me and that helped save my sanity when I woke, as I inevitably did, at 5 am in the hotel room.

But it was a warning to me never again to rely only upon electronic books.  

Written before my return to London after my second visit to China

My second trip to China is now nearing its end and sitting here in the hotel room in Nanning, just gently thinking things through, I’m trying to summarize what I have taught my students and what the whole experience has taught me.

I have been listening to Mandarin spoken at full tilt and in great quantities by everybody around me, interspersed only with the pauses as the important parts were translated into English for me.  I found it interesting to note that more and more of the few simple words I had learnt at my classes in London seemed to leap out of the sentences at me, like carp leaping out of the lake I visited here.  And just for that moment the speech appeared to slow down as I recognised a word with some meaning I could attach to it, only for the remainder of the sentence to become submerged attain in an unintelligible jumble of sounds.  Although this was often confusing, as giving me only tiny glimpses of meaning, it was comforting to know that I had indeed started to learn something of the speech I heard around me.  But what a long way to go before I can engage in any real dialogue here!

At a more serious level, I come away delighted that the students have learnt so much more than at my first visit, and that we have put together some solid structures for future learning.  It is intended that I go over there twice a year, and Mei, who set in motion the whole train of five element acupuncture on its journey back to China, will probably go a further twice a year, as well as accompanying me.  Her next visit is scheduled for July, so the students will get more time to consolidate what they have just learnt before I return with her in the autumn.

The number of my students has increased by a further 5 or so, making abut 20 dedicated five element students.  There are now two main groups, one based here in Nanning and the other in Chengdu, with a lone student hoisting the five element flag in Beijing.  We will organize the website forum they have set up for me a little better, and they are arranging regular monthly meetings where they will help each other with their patients.

I call them my students, but they are all either fully practising acupuncturists or nearing qualification, so that their basic acupuncture knowledge is well established.  If anything they have a much more solid foundation than comparable practitioners here in the UK, since they are blessed from birth with a deep understanding of the elements as forming an integral part of their life, so that we already speak the same language.  This is so different from the UK, where I well remember one student, after about six months’ training, asking, “But how do we know that there really things like elements?”  Here, by contrast, the elements represent the symbols through which life expresses itself.

By the last few days of this fortnight, students had learnt some very fundamental components of five element practice, such as different needling and moxibustion techniques, how to carry out an AE drain, how to clear possession and treat a husband/wife imbalance.  Most important of all, I gave them a clear schedule of how to structure the first four treatments so that they feel confident that they know what to do at the start.

We saw together some 30 patients, and I treated at least another 25, because I gave each of the students a treatment.  I felt it was important for them to experience an AE drain and their element source points for themselves, as many of them had not had any five element treatment before.  Scheduling these treatments amidst the teaching sessions was a logistical puzzle which taxed my Small Intestine’s ability to sort to its limit, but I managed the last three treatments on almost the last day.  In doing this I only changed the element I had decided upon for one of the students, and I can only hope I am right with the others as I fly away to leave them to receive further treatment from their peers.

Each day was filled with treating patients, helping students treat patients, or helping them learn some of the five element skills they will need, such as testing for Akabane imbalance and learning how to apply moxa cones to salt for CV 8.  This proved to be an unexpected very local problem, because the climate is so damp and they usually only use rock salt, that not only did the grains of salt stick together in a tight mass but the thick grains allowed the heat through too quickly so that I’m afraid I may have burnt the first person’s umbilicus without realising it.  Being Chinese, she never complained of the pain and probably went away thinking that the pain was a necessary part of treatment.  After this we found some thinner grains of salt, and Wendy devised a way of putting rice grains in a little muslin bag to dry the salt out.

As usual, I learnt much from devising ways of teaching in such a limited and challenging timeframe.

All about books

I am off to Heathrow in a few hours for my second trip to China, and packed in my trunk are various books I am taking with me as gifts.  They make an interesting bunch, each with its own history and its own special destination.

Gift no 1:  This is for Liu Lihong, who is my host in China.  It is a copy of Elisabeth Rochat de la Vallée’s 100 Notions-Clés de la Médecine Chinoise (100 Key Concepts of Chinese Medicine), signed by Elisabeth a few days ago, specially for Liu Lihong.  As you can see, it is in French and I don’t think that Liu Lihong reads French, and therefore with it I have packed some part of the translation into English which I am doing for the edition which Sandra Hill will be publishing for Monkey Press.  I am two/thirds of the way through the book, and hope to have completed it by the end of the year, when I can hand it over to be tweaked into shape for publishing.  This is a book after Liu Lihong’s heart, as he seems to be as interested as Elisabeth is in everything which delves deeply into the classical texts.

Gift no 2:  This is for Liu Lihong’s father, who was a university teacher of English, and with whom I converse in English through sign language and the written word, as he is very deaf (and I am not much better!).  Since this is the 200^th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth, I thought one of Dickens’ books would be an appropriate present, and have chosen a lovely bound edition of Great Expectations.

Gift no 3:  This is for my students.  It is a secondhand copy of what we called JR Worsley’s Red Book, his book on Points and Meridians, the bible we all used, and still use, for our point location and selection.  The hardback edition has been out of print for some time, but I was fortunate to find a nearly pristine copy in the States, and just as fortunate to find a very cooperative bookseller who was happy to speed its passage across from the States in time to reach me just a few days ago.  JR signed my own copy 25 years ago, and I have photocopied his signature and pasted it to the front page of the students’ copy as visible evidence of the line of transmission stretching from JR to them, something very dear to all their hearts.

And then, in a much humbler place, I will be taking my own Kindle, reluctantly bought and even more reluctantly taken with me instead of the paper-bound books I love, but because I read so quickly and so much, and because the weight of books is always a factor when travelling, it proved a sensible buy last time I went to China.  But how pleased I was when I got back to put it aside and reach again for a proper book!

Something to make you laugh

Sometimes I just come across something which makes me laugh.  As I like sharing my laughter as an antidote to all the serious stuff I write about and to counter so much misery in the world outside, here is what set me smiling.

This morning, I saw the following book in the window of my favourite bookshop, Daunts of Marylebone High Street:  Moby Duck:  The True Story of 28,000 Bath Toys Lost at Sea  by Donovan Hohn.  Anybody with the inspiration to give a book this title deserves a read, if only for its title’s sake.

(All the non-English speakers reading this blog need to look up the reference to Herman Melville’s 19^th century American classic Moby Dick about a whale here.)

I hope Daunts leave the book in their window for some time so that I can glimpse it and smile each time I pass by.

Let our patients surprise us!

It always pleases me to find how energized I feel after a day’s clinical seminar, and the one just past is no exception.  We had participants from Berlin, Dublin and the Netherlands as well as our usual core from England, something, with my own half-European background, that I really enjoy.  And since quite a few had met each other before at other seminars I had given, there was the usual happy buzz of people catching up with one another.

The most important thing for me is the enthusiasm and receptiveness I can sense in the room, and the real keenness in all of us, me included, to learn more from the two patients participants had brought for diagnosis and treatment.

These seminars also provide a kind of a moving benchmark for me, as I realize that my years of practice have taught me more than I sometimes recognise.  I can see that some of the signs of the elements I observe in patients are not as obvious to some of the class as they are to me.  And this always reminds me of the many, many times I took patients to see JR, and he would say “Fire” or “Wood” or “Water”, and at first I simply could not see this.  It was only gradually that I came to realise that what at the time I thought in an over-simplistic way were the signatures of Fire or Wood or Water had to expand and change to accommodate what JR was teaching me.

Looking back I recognize, too, that this was really the only way to learn – through what I got wrong, not through what I got right, something he always told us, as our faces fell at yet another new and often initially puzzling insight into the mysteries of an element.

The words imprinted on our five element hearts should be, “Humility, humility and yet more humility”.  We should never be arrogant enough to think that we know all the deep secrets the elements hide within another human being.  We should just be delighted, as I always am, that our learning is never finished, and that tomorrow’s patient may open yet another new gate on to the landscape of the elements.

Preparing for my next trip to China

I am now preparing for my second visit to China at the end of this month where I will again be holding a two-week teaching seminar in Nanning.  It is exciting to be going back so soon to see how far my students have moved on in their five element studies, and to give further encouragement to their enthusiastic response to my first visit.

Through a dedicated website they have set up I have been sending them lessons at regular intervals which they are downloading with great diligence and in great numbers.  I am therefore hopeful that I will find that they feel more confident about putting their newly acquired five element skills into practice in their own clinics.

On a happy note, too, I have been given an update on the sales of the Mandarin version of my Handbook of Five Element Practice.  To my surprise and delight, the first print run was for 5000 copies of which 4,500 have already been sold.  The book is now being reprinted.  It’s lovely to think of 4,500 people scattered around China all immersed in their five element studies!

The case for marking points before needling

I remember clearly being told by J R Worsley as a student that the most important reason for marking a point before needling is so that you know exactly where not to needle the next time when your first needle has not found the point.  I always liked that.  It made me more relaxed about my point location, because it somehow assumed that more than one needling would quite often be needed before we actually got the point.  I also remember him telling us that it didn’t matter how often we needled before we found a point.  The important thing was to find it eventually rather than worrying how long it took us to find it.  It is quite common for me to needle two or three times even now, and I don’t find this at all odd.  Instead, I am rather surprised when my needle accurately finds this infinitesimally small location first time.

If you are not sure where the AEPs (back shu points) are (and we all know how difficult backs can be), then, to be on the safe side when you are doing an AE drain, place needles down the Inner Bladder line not just where you think the yin AEPs are, but on points above and below these.  In this way you cover all eventualities.  It’s far better to accept that locating points on the back is always difficult than to pretend that it’s easy and miss the points for something as important as an AE drain.

Marking points is also important for another reason.  It is good to get a view of the line of the meridian, rather than thinking of individual points in isolation.  If you mark some part of the meridian line to help you orientate yourself, this provides you with a grid which can be seen when you stand back from the body.  You will find that a wrong location often leaps out at you when seen from a distance in this way.  For example, the three important upper Outer Bladder points, III 37 – 39 (42 - 44), can then be seen to be too low or too high, or it will become obvious that IV 24 (Ki 24) is marked at the wrong level, often too high on the chest in women, possibly because practitioners hesitate to ask their female patients to undo their bras to find this point.

Of course people reading this may say that we should not needle through points marked with a pen from a hygiene point of view, (though does anybody actually know anyone of the many thousands of patients where points have become infected through doing this?).   Nonetheless, good practice in this country at least dictates that points should be marked with a small circle and the needle placed inside the circle.  They can also be marked with a surgical pen, although these markings are difficult to remove and this should certainly not be done on the face.

We should always be prepared to use whatever aids we can to find points accurately and not be ashamed to do so.  I certainly am not, and will continue to mark all points.  I find it also concentrates my mind, as though the mere act of marking the point is already focusing my energy at that one spot.  

David Hockney: a lovely example of the Fire element

I have just watched a warm interview with David Hockney, the painter, on BBC television, and smiled throughout.  I wonder whether it is only a Fire person who could paint such delightfully joyous paintings, with their ridiculous-seeming purple trunks and bright red branches. Somehow he even manages to make winter a joyous season.

Somewhat flippantly, this has made me wonder whether we can indeed diagnose artists through their artistic creations.  I doubt, for example, whether a Metal person could see nature in the prime colours Hockney does, preferring instead, I would think, subtler autumnal shadings.

A wise saying to make us think

I read this today in the Guardian newspaper: 

“The radical Brazilian educator Paulo Freire once asked, “What can we do today so that tomorrow we can do what we are unable to do today?”

This is such an acute question, and really made me think.  Surely the purpose of each day should be to do something that makes tomorrow different and better.

Using our two hands

I have recently been thinking about the question of why some branches of acupuncture have taught their acupuncturists to use two hands to needle and to take pulses, and why others prefer just one.  In five element acupuncture, or at least certainly how I was taught all those years back at JR Worsley’s college in Leamington, we use both hands in both cases.  Thinking about why this should be so, I decided to observe myself closely during my own practice to see how I felt about what I now do so automatically, and why I find great satisfaction in using both hands.

It isn’t just because this is the way I was taught, although of course the comfort of an old habit is part of this.  The main reason, I think, is because it feels good to me to enclose the needle in both hands as I guide it to the points.  In doing this, I also maintain a comfortable contact with my patient’s body.  In taking pulses, too, both of my hands take my patient’s hand and hold it against my body.  I am using both hands to convey as sensitive and warm a touch as I can.

Pulse-taking and needling done in this way encompass something much more than just making physical contact to obtain some diagnostic information. It is possible to approach the skin with a needle without any of our fingers actually making contact with our patient’s body, and pulses can be taken in a purely physical way, as we know from our visits to a doctor’s surgery.  Here there is no intention to convey anything through touch itself, which is so different from the importance five element acupuncture places on conveying warmth and comfort through our hands.  As I observe the one-handed way of taking pulses or needling it always feels to me as if practitioners are holding the other hand well away from their patient as though to distance themselves from what they are doing.

Our hands can and should be able to convey protection, love or respect, still anger and calm fear, the five dominant emotions our treatments are trying to restore to balance.  And they should continue to do this whenever we touch our patient’s body, whether to take pulses or to needle or simply to make warm contact.

So each time I needle or take a pulse I am offering something which, though apparently purely physical in nature, becomes something much deeper if coming from my heart.  Anybody hoping to make closer contact with the elements in their patients, and at the moment practising one-handed acupuncture, may consider taking their courage literally in both hands, and decide to learn to use both as a further expression of their care for their patients.

At a slightly different level, I shudder internally as I watch people needling a II-III (SI-Bl) block or a X-XI (Co-St) block on points around the eyes without tethering the patient’s head with both hands, and making sure exactly where the eyeball is.  What if the patient jolts their head, I think – and it can happen! And the reason I have heard practitioners give for not needling these points is precisely this fear. Using both hands reassures both patients and practitioners.

We are given two hands with which to embrace people, to cook with, to use a computer with, to drive a car with, why then do we cut ourselves so unnecessarily in half when we needle and take pulses?