We are increasingly screened from one another

I am aware that less and less people are looking me in the eyes as I walk along the street – which I often do now because I no longer drive a car and take public transport everywhere.  I have been thinking of this recently because watching Donald Trump on TV has made me aware of the very different kinds of ways people have of interacting with one another, and smiling is an important way of doing this.  It was the lack of warmth in Trump’s smile which first alerted me to this.  It set me thinking about how the different elements smile, and what they are conveying by their smile.  Each element, I decided, smiles in a distinct way, as the emotion which controls it dictates what its smile is intending to convey.  This led me on directly to the eyes, because it is through our eyes that we convey our emotions.

 

I then started looking at myself to help me gauge the emotional effect of my own smile on me and on others around me.  I have always known that I, a Fire person, love to smile; it is as though this opens a door into my soul, warming my heart.  I can feel the connection of my smiling mouth to my eyes, because they start to wrinkle, showing laugh lines around them long after my smile has faded.  

 

I have discovered that this is one of the tells for a Fire person, for in them the laugh lines around the eyes linger long after the cause for the laughter has disappeared.  I feel the effects for a surprisingly long time, as though the warmth my smile brings to my heart stays long beyond the cause of the smile. No other element leaves this signature mark of a lingering smile on its face.  I have therefore decided that my next object of study should be about how I feel in the presence of the smiles of the other four elements. 

 

Watching how people smile at each other has also made me aware that we increasingly screen ourselves from one another.  This is a result of the ubiquitous use of our smart phones, with their plastic screens.  Recently, whilst sitting in a café, I watched a mother with three young children. Each child had their own screen on some device in front of them, which they were looking at intently.  The mother, too, was looking at her smart phone.  During the time I observed them, which was a good half-hour, none of them exchanged a look or talked to another person, except to pass food and drink along.  They sat silently, engrossed in what they were watching.  What was interesting, but, to me, appalling, was that, in contrast to how we react in person-to-person exchanges, there was no change to the expressions on their faces.

We like to describe the eyes as being the windows of the soul.  It seemed to me that the screens between this family and the world they were contacting were closing these windows.    

Handwriting is good for the brain!

Here is a piece of serendipity, which adds to what I wrote in  my last blog:https://afiveelementcompanion.blogspot.com/2025/01/thoughts-on-writing-my-books.html

After posting my blog, I read a lovely but sad book review of Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience.  This bemoans the fact that “handwriting is disappearing”. Apparently more and more children throughout the world are no longer taught how to hand write, and in particular, how to move on to do joined-up writing (cursive).  This made me realise that all computer-generated writing is in stand-alone letters.  Soon nobody will be able not only to write personal letters but to read those of others, and particularly those of other ages.  

The book also emphasizes the importance of the brain activity involved in handwriting. Copying out notes in class by hand rather than using a computer-generated cut, copy and paste function forces the brain into greater activity as it has to work to select what it wants to copy.   

 

So I can understand a little better why I find handwriting such an essential part of my writing routine.  I am obviously using my brain more than I would be if I stayed at home typing on my computer – no bad thing at my age!
 

 

Thoughts on writing my books

I often ask myself why I started writing about my calling as a five element acupuncturist all those years ago.  I had apparently spent half my life with no inclination to write anything which was not connected first to my studies and then to whatever work I was doing.  I didn’t lift a pen to write about myself until one day I found myself writing about my first encounter with acupuncture and the effect my first five element treatment had had upon me.   Since then, some 40 years later, my pen has never been out of my hand.

 

I have to use a good old-fashioned fountain pen to write with, but oddly, even to me, I never write my first draft at home.  I can only write sitting inside or outside some café, with a cup of espresso coffee beside me and surrounded by people.  It is as though in some way I need to remain connected to other human beings as I write my thoughts about how the elements are reflected in them.  This is how I seem to be able to stimulate my thoughts.  In the pauses between writing, I look around and study my companions, observing closely their interactions or their lack of interaction with one another.  These observations move my thoughts in new directions even as I write. I then take my handwritten notes home with me to be worked on and edited on my word-processor, and sometimes to be deleted totally if they do not now represent what I want to say. 

 

I have been prompted to think about this writing procedure of mine by receiving an email from China yesterday, which listed the total number of my seven books in Mandarin published in the past 15 or so years of my visits there.  This comes to the surprising total of about 150,000 books sold.  I find this a very heart-warming testament to China's growing interest in five element acupuncture as representing a traditional medical discipline still as currently valid as it was when it first appeared there a few thousand years ago.

 

 

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.