The burdens and joys of living life under the control of one element

As I grow older, I have been increasingly aware of how much my life has been lived in the shadow of the Fire element, and one of its innermost manifestations, the Small Intestine.  One of the joys of learning about the elements over the 40-odd years I have been doing this is to realise how far our own element colours deeply every aspect of our life.  Whenever I turn my attention to something that happened to me during this life of mine I am increasingly aware of how everything I have experienced, either done myself or had done to me, reflects the overarching influence of the Small Intestine’s power over me.  It has a power I cannot escape, even though at times I would wish it to be otherwise, particularly since learning about how it influences those under its control.

 

Being the kind of person I am, moulded by the Small Intestine’s characteristic hold upon me, I am constantly questioning everything I do, and questioning it in order to see whether I can do better, whether, in particular I can act more kindly and generously to those around me.  This starts of course with my nearest and dearest, but spreads out to everybody I am in contact with.  For this official, right at the heart of the Fire element, and closest to its companion the Heart, has the task of checking that only the purest of feelings and actions pass through it on their way to the Heart.  If it gets things wrong, there is always a risk that polluted material will be passed on to the Heart, the supreme commander of body and soul.

 

I am particularly conscious of how much the Small Intestine influences what I do in my work as a five element acupuncturist, for here what I have offered my patients has been shaped to a great extent by the relationships I have learnt to set up with them, and it is my Small Intestine which controls how I develop these.  Perhaps I am conscious of this because it is the Fire element above all the other elements whose major concern is the importance it pays to the relationships it enters into with all it meets.  And the good relationship between patient and practitioner is one of the cornerstones of five element practice.  Fire is acutely aware of all the delicate intricacies involved in maintaining a good relationship of this kind.  Of its four officials, this is true of none more so than the Small Intestine because of its closeness to the Heart, with its need to protect the Heart.  Therefore I see it as both a blessing and a curse to have the Small Intestine as my dominant official, for it demands a great deal of me in terms of what I have had to learn about my approach to my patients.

 

Whatever a practitioner’s element, however, the challenges each element presents to the practitioners under its control differ, and all have their difficulties.  I have mentioned Fire’s challenges.  What of Wood’s and Metal’s, or Earth’s and Water’s?  Each challenge will be shaped by the demands an element places upon those under its control and will differ according to this.  This means that each practitioner has to draw together their own insights into how their own element relates to the elements of the people they meet, especially, of course, their patients, for these insights are gained only from looking through the filter their own element places between them and the world around them. 

 

I will therefore always see the Wood element, for example, through the filter of my Fire element, just as somebody who is of the Earth element will always see their patients through Earth’s filter, and so on.  Even if I am with a patient of my own Fire element, the filter through which I see this patient will reflect my specific relationship to this element.  We must never forget that as unique human beings we are unique representatives of the elements within us. This is what I have called our personal elemental DNA.

 

There is therefore no short-cut to understanding our patients and communicating with them unless we first spend time looking within ourselves and recognizing how the elements within us function.  At the very centre of them is our individual guardian element, which moulds the whole family of elements within us to its shape.

  

New year thoughts about my legacy

Every life has a legacy, something each of us leaves behind as testimony that we have lived.  Some, those of the most famous and well-known amongst us, leave what many would call proud, fulfilling legacies.  Others, the less well-known or the completely unknown, leave much more humble, more private legacies, which only they or those nearest to them acknowledge.  At the start of a new year and the renewal of life which this betokens, I like to think of what my own legacy will be, before steering myself in new directions.

 

In my last blog, the last of the year 2024, I wrote of my decision to call a halt to my travels to China.  In many ways this represented a momentous step, because it brought with it the recognition of an ending, with an acceptance that I felt that I was now physically too frail to travel, even though, as my children insist, luckily I am apparently not yet too frail of mind.  In fact quite the reverse.  My mind seems to be more active than ever, ferreting away at new thoughts as it always has done.  

 

And the new thought with which I woke at three this morning with it fully-formed is that it was time that I wrote about the importance of acknowledging that the five element legacy I inherited from my apprenticeship with JR Worsley was to be seen as forming part, not of a fixed, immutable tradition, to be adhered to in every one of its aspects, but of a living, evolving tradition of which each five element acupuncturist forms part and to which each contributes in their own way. The five-element tree has a large trunk with its roots embedded deep in the Chinese past, and with branches spreading over generations of acupuncturists in the millennia since then.  Each of us current five element acupuncturists is then a bud on one of these branches.  

 

This is therefore a living and hence evolving tradition.  And no tradition, whether in the world of healing or elsewhere, can survive unless it has fresh life breathed into it.  During my own training I was myself witness to how the tradition I was inheriting from JR Worsley was in the process of changing, with two very clear examples of this taking place before my eyes during my training.

 

The first example occurred during my final undergraduate year when we started treating our own patients under supervision.  My patient, who my supervisor confirmed was a Fire patient (Outer Fire, V/VI), had the following pulse picture:  weak Fire V/VI pulses, stronger Wood VII/VIII pulses, weak Metal pulses IX/X, stronger Earth pulses XI/XII.  I was told to tonify both Fire and Metal, using the following points (VI3, V9  and X11, IX9) in the same treatment.  There was no discussion at all about whether I should only be treating Fire.  In other words, it was then accepted practice in JR’s college that we should take from whatever element was stronger to treat the weaker element, rather than only treating the dominant element, in this case Fire.

 

Very soon the practice of treating off the dominant element was discontinued, and in all the years of my observing patients with JR he never recommended treating anything but this element (except, of course, for specific treatments for clearing different energy blocks).

 

The second example comes from my searching in the famous Red Book, JR’s Traditional Chinese Acupuncture, Volume 1: Meridians and Points, for the points called Dragons which I needed to learn to clear what we call possession.  Three series of points are listed, one for External Dragons and two for Internal Dragons.  Again, in all the years of observing patients with JR the series of points listed for treating Internal Dragons in the Red Book for “Dragons with depression” was never taught to us or used.  I always regretted that in the many years I sat in class listening to JR that I did not ask him when we should use the first of these two series of points, since he always chose the second ,“without depression”.  Is the unused series of points merely a residue of the past which JR no longer thought was of value for us to learn in the world of today?  If so, it is a subtle reminder that traditions have to evolve to survive. 

 

This confirms to me the need to accept that through my own practice, I, too, have added a further bud to the great five-element tree, through my decision at the end of my postgraduate training with JR to start thinking of the controlling element as a guardian element, and giving it this name, initially just for myself.  For did not JR always ask us to visualize how each of our patients would be if they lived their life in balance and harmony with their particular element?  That made me think of this element as sheltering us and giving our life meaning – in other words acting as guardian to us.

And I remember that I was drawn to using this term because it so closely echoes the familiar phrase “guardian angel”.

 

 

 

Changing the direction of my life

I made the life-changing decision to call a halt to my travels to China during my very last seminar there in April. I had been mulling over the need to do this for the previous year, coming to accept that in my 88^th year, a year of great significance in Chinese numerology, it was surely time to hand over my work to others and retire gracefully, or perhaps not so gracefully, from my Chinese ventures of the last 15 years. Fortunately I have two such successors already to hand, Guy Caplan, who has been steadfastly at my side ever since enrolling all those many years ago as a student at SOFEA, and Mei Long, who had so fortuitously come into my life, just as the door to my five element teaching in this country appeared to close.  It was at a teaching day in the Netherlands that she and I first met each other, leading immediately to my invitation to teach five element acupuncture in China through my introduction to Professor Liu Lihong.

Now that I feel that five element acupuncture is so firmly established in China as a discipline of traditional Chinese medicine in its own right, I am no longer fearful that handing my work over in person to others is going to bring a halt to its continuing spread over there.  And I am reassured that all the modern methods of transmitting information fit very neatly into what I will continue to offer in person through my online recordings and teaching.  Over the past years I have recorded many video series for my Chinese students to watch, and I will continue to do this from my home.  I very much enjoy sitting on my sofa and using my iPad to record myself talking about many aspects of the more than 40 years of my five element practice.  I will also continue to interact with my students through the many online platforms now available to us, such as Zoom.

Finally, a large group of Chinese five element practitioners, many my students of many years’ standing, will be coming to England in March, when Guy and I will be offering them a three-day seminar at the Calm Clinic at Westminster University before they set off for a tour of England.

 

And before that, in this part of the world too, Guy and I are holding another one of our regular SOFEA clinical seminars here in London, on Monday 24^th February 2025.  To book a place click:https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sofea-seminar-clinical-seminar-tickets-1071783927579

 

 

Learning the skills needed to detect change

One of the skills of being a five element acupuncturist is that of learning to detect the changes in our patients as a result of treatment.  When I was a novice practitioner I had to use quite crude criteria for assessing whether my treatment was helping a patient or not. The most widely used, I admit rather shamefully now, was asking my patients themselves to tell me whether things were changing for them.  Questions like, “How are you feeling now?”, or “ Has your sleep (or any other symptoms they have told us about) improved?”  I am ashamed now of asking such questions because I realise that patients often don’t know how to reply, as I didn’t when asked by one of my practitioners whether treatment was helping me.  I felt I needed to encourage her by giving some positive response which might not be true, unsure what kind of improvement I should be experiencing, and worried, too, that she might lose interest in helping me.

A patient should never be the one to judge whether their treatment is helping them.   We should Instead develop an ability to detect often the slightest physical or emotional change as a result of treatment.  It is these which I would probably not have recognized early on in my practice.  The changes are often very subtle:  our hand held more firmly during pulse-taking, or a slightly softer outline or less tension to a face. They may talk less or more, or seem no longer to be so preoccupied with some symptom or another.  Any change, however slight, is significant confirmation that the patient’s elements are welcoming the direction of the treatment they are receiving.   

 

The flipside to this is, of course, our growing awareness when treatment is having no effect at all.  This is again a skill we need to develop.   As the years pass I have become more quickly aware that nothing has changed, acting as a warning sign that I may need to change the emphasis of my treatment to another element.  It requires some courage to admit to ourselves that we are on the wrong track, sometimes even wrongly blaming the patient for not responding to treatment as we think they should.  But if somebody comes back week after week with no evident change in themselves or their condition, we must be prepared to query our diagnosis, and be brave enough to pause and take stock.

 

I have learnt to do this by telling the patient that I am not yet satisfied with the effect of treatment, and asking them how they feel.  This is often the point where a patient will admit, with relief, that they, too, do not feel the treatment has yet helped them.  I then ask them to allow me some more time, sometimes even by coming more frequently, so that I can re-assess the treatment.  None of my patients has ever refused to do this.  Very often this honesty between us helps put our relationship on a better footing, which in turn gives me the time to work towards finding the correct guardian element: a win-win situation for us both.

Devising a new way of diagnosing the elements

One of the effects of my visits to China over the past 14 years is that they have forced me to change my approach to diagnosing the elements.  In China we were asked to help diagnose many hundreds of five element students and practitioners at each of the seminars we ran there.  The main reason for this was that I always emphasize the importance of a five element practitioner being confident of their own element, since this colours their approach to their patients. The sheer number of people wanting our help to do this therefore inevitably made it essential for us to adapt the procedure for diagnosing the elements which I had until then accepted as being the only correct one, one that I had learnt during my training and have practised ever since.

 

In my own practice I had the luxury of giving each new patient and myself the time gradually to get to know each other, and thus to develop the good relationship necessary to help me towards a diagnosis of their element.  The initial interaction could be as long as two hours, with each subsequent treatment being at least one hour.  This gave me plenty of unhurried time to work my way towards a patient’s element.  In China, on the other hand, no such luxury was possible.  We were at the most three five element practitioners, and were expected to diagnose the elements of sometimes up to more than 300 people over a mere seven days.  We could only do this by devising a different approach to diagnosis, and this in turn changed my understanding of how the elements manifest themselves when seen in groups.  This led us to develop what I regard as an effective method of diagnosing the elements of large groups of people. 

 

We modified our new approach to diagnosis slowly over the first few years of our Chinese seminars, and only developed it fully as the numbers in our seminars increased (from the initial 20 or so 14 years ago to the final 500).  To start with I kept the protocol I was familiar with in my own practice:  an hour or so quietly alone with each new patient.  This quite soon became impractical.  Initially I tried to adapt the interaction of a private diagnosis by talking to volunteer patients in front of the whole seminar as though pretending that this was in some way equivalent to a one-to-one interaction.  Apart from the fact that I always tried to avoid any very personal questions which might embarrass the person in front of the large audience, it also meant that we could diagnose far too few people.

    

I therefore had to start devising other ways of diagnosing, helped by the fact that those coming to the seminars had first to attend the preliminary seminars given by the growing group of what we call five element teachers (those Chinese practitioners who had attended many of our seminars and were themselves practising only five element acupuncture).  All attendees had therefore been given what they called a provisional diagnosis of their elements at these seminars.  This meant that we could subdivide the large group into five element groups, and use these subdivisions as a way of moving towards what could be called a group diagnosis.

 

What was so interesting was that I found that when there were several people of the same element together this seemed to exaggerate the characteristics of that element, making it appear in starker outlines.  It also revealed, again more clearly, the fact that one or more of the people who had been assigned to one element did not appear to belong to that element.  The differences between them emerged much more clearly when, for example, a Water person was amongst a group of mainly Wood people.  This became even more obvious when the very interesting element games Guy Caplan created for the different element groups showed very clearly the presence of one or more people who reacted quite differently to the instructions given to a group.  In other words, we learnt that groups of people of the same element acted in a similar way, as would be expected of that particular element.  For instance, Water huddled together, as did Earth but in a more comfortable way, Metal worked individually at the tasks Guy had set them, Fire was very conscious of being observed by video, and laughed at the camera recording their reaction, whereas Wood started to try and take individual control of the tasks, as though each wanted to be in charge.

 

The result of all these interactions between different groups of elements was that I became more than ever convinced of the truth underlying five element acupuncture,  which is that each person expresses their unique individuality through the prism of one of the elements.  And the elements appeared to reveal their characteristics even more markedly when viewed in groups.

 

 

  

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump: Learning more about the interaction of Fire and Wood

My readers know I like to use my interest in famous people as an excellent way of adding to my knowledge of the elements.  So over the years I have spent much time watching TV as a way of doing this.  One of the reasons is that famous figures show themselves in the merciless light of public scrutiny, and the high level of stress they are under reveals their elements more clearly.  Watching Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal fighting to win a match, for example, became for me an excellent way of seeing Water (Federer) or Wood (Nadal).

Of course, since none of the famous people I have written about are my patients, for if they were I could not write about them for reasons of patient confidentiality, I have no way of confirming whether my diagnosis of their elements is correct or not.  But at least my choices demonstrate some of the aspects of an element which lead me to a diagnosis.  Sometimes, of course, I may later change my diagnosis because somebody has shown some characteristic of a different element. 

 

So here goes with my latest attempt at diagnosing two elements and their relationship to one another which are very much in the public eye at the moment.  These are the two elements, Wood and Fire.  Watching how Donald Trump (Wood, I think) and Kamala Harris (Fire, I think) are dealing with each other makes for a surprisingly interesting lesson in the interaction of their two elements.  We have endlessly-smiling Kamala Harris confronting a very disgruntled Donald Trump who clearly doesn’t know how to deal with an opponent who is not frightened of him.  To support my diagnosis, I read the following in today’s Guardian newspaper: “Trump has only grown more infuriated as his poll lead evaporated as Harris opened up a clear, if narrow, lead.  Her tactic of mocking Trump more than arguing with him appears to have incensed him further.”  He is angry because she finds him laughable, and quite openly laughs at him.  It is interesting, too, to see that when he is not talking he looks very angry, with glaring eyes, tightly closed lips and rigid neck muscles.

 

I also use watching Kamala Harris as a further lesson in observing the difference between the two aspects of Fire, which I have called Inner and Outer Fire.  Inner Fire describes the Heart and the Small Intestine officials, Outer Fire the Three Heater and the Heart Protector (Pericardium).  These are two quite distinct aspects of the Fire element, distinct enough for me once to have asked JR Worsley whether there were six rather than five elements.  I like to think that he nodded, but that may have just been my imagination.

 

The two Fire aspects have the same sensory signatures: a scorched smell, red colour and of course the laughing voice and joy which so seem to disturb Trump.  The way they present themselves, though, is very different.  I think Kamala Harris is Outer Fire, which is by far the easier of the two Fire aspects to be with.  She exudes the comforting warmth of the Three Heater.  Inner Fire, by contrast, is a much more prickly manifestation of Fire.  It houses the most important official of all, the Heart, and its yang official, the Small Intestine, has to be constantly alert for anything that may hurt the Heart.  This watchfulness makes for a much less easy person to be with.  I see none of this Inner Fire aspect in Kamala Harris, nor do I hear the hesitancy in her voice, characteristic of Inner Fire, as it tries to sort its thoughts out.  She is very articulate, speaking so easily and smoothly.

 

If either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris were my patients, I ask myself how I would treat them.  Since Fire is my own element, it might seem that I would find it easier to treat Kamala Harris, but that is often not the case when treating a patient of your own element.  And I think she is Outer rather than Inner Fire, which I am, so there might be some slight tension there for me to deal with.  Treating a patient of one’s own element can seem to be deceptively simple, but often is not, because with Fire patients I have to hold myself back from being irritated by those aspects in my patients which I find irritating in myself!  

 

Treating Trump, on the other hand, would require of me some of the light-heartedness Kamala Harris is showing towards him and quite obviously annoying him.  His Wood element seems very out of balance, as shown by his bouts of irrational anger, and I would need to be firmly in control in the practice room, laying down clear boundaries.  Perhaps by laughing, this is Kamala Harris’s way of laying down her boundaries, and doing so very effectively.  

 

Some people may think that I should not be trying to diagnose people from afar, but on the principle that a cat may look at a king, I think I have a right to do so, as this teaches me something new about the elements.

New thoughts about the Water element

These new thoughts were sparked by a comment I read recently about our new Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, that “the most frequent complaint about the Labour leader was that he was impossible to pin down.”  I had already thought that his element might be Water, primarily because of his voice was a very clear groaning, added to the fact that I wasn’t initially at all sure about his element.  I think this comment can point only to the Water element.  

One of the things my Chinese students taught me was that, when, as I often did, I would say about a patient, “I’m not sure what there element is“, the whole group would shout out “Water!”.  They had learnt that my initial reaction to being in the presence of Water often led to my indecision, which reflected the kind of hesitancy which Water seems always to arouse in me.  It seems that the fear which is Water’s emotion appears to transfer itself to me in the form of uncertainty.     

One other reason why my Chinese students are so sure about my response to Water is because the Water group among those attending our seminars over the years constitutes by far the largest element group of the five, so they have had amply opportunity to observe me diagnosing this element.   At one of our recent seminars, for example, of the 400 or more students who wanted us to help diagnose their elements at least 200 of them we eventually decided belonged to the Water group, whereas only 30 – 50 were spread over each of the other four elements.  This ratio remained surprisingly constant over the many seminars we held there.   

 

I would ask myself whether this was merely a coincidence, but if so, it was a surprising one.  There seemed to be no such emphasis towards Water in the groups we diagnosed in this country.  Could it possibly be that there was some specific environmental reason in China that could offer some explanation?  And, if so, did environmental factors enter into the equation as to which element we are born into?  Nobody can ever know why each of us is handed the gift (or sometimes the burden) of living our life under the influence of one particular element, though I have occasionally wondered why one member of a family is of a particular element which brings something essential to the family (perhaps warmth (Fire) or strength (Wood) or comfort (Earth) for example), which may be qualities needed by other members of the family,.  But then I have thought that this might just be one of my more fanciful ideas.  But what if the larger habitat into which we are born could indeed influence which element dominates in our life?  Could, therefore, the extreme cold which China suffers each winter be causing Water to dominate in this way?  And is it fanciful to wonder whether those born in very hot climates might have a greater affinity with the Fire element?

 

These are fascinating questions, ultimately impossible to answer, but I find it both exhilarating and disturbing to think that the element which our destiny seems to stamp upon us might have its origin in the climate of the place where we are born, or at least be partly due to this.  Are these just idle thoughts, or is there some truth hidden here, as explanation for the many Chinese to seem to owe allegiance to the Water element?