Why I decided to call a person's dominant element a "guardian element"

One of the basic principles of five element acupuncture is that each person has one dominant element out of the five, which shapes their life both physically, in terms of the colour of their skin, the sound of their voice, and the smell on their bodies, and emotionally, in terms of their dominant emotional response to life.  I see this element as a positive force, when a person is living a balanced life, or becoming a negative force when a person starts losing that balance.

 

It was one day as I was sitting in the classroom at my Leamington college,in the final year of my three year’s training there, that the phrase “guardian element” popped into my mind.  I realised that I regarded this element as a protective force, and that it echoed  the familiar phrase “guardian angel”.  I remember mentioning the term to the person teaching the class I was in, and she told me that she thought it was a lovely phrase.  From that day onwards I started to use the term, firstly privately to myself, then increasingly adding it to my thoughts until it has become one of the hallmarks of my teaching. I like to think of this element as being a positive, protective force on which we concentrate the focus of our treatment. The aim of  treatment is always to restore the  dominant element to a state of balance.

 

Additionally, there is a subtext here which concerns the individual official, either the yin or the yang official which are paired together to form the element. For each of us, one of the two officials is the dominant one.  In my case, Fire is my guardian element, and the Inner Fire aspect is  its dominant aspect.  The Small Intestine can therefore be called my guardian official.  It is the protector of its  companion yang official, the Heart,   

 

It is difficult enough to diagnose the dominant element, let alone try and diagnose which of its two officials is the dominant official.  This is something which I should have paid greater attention to over the many years of my practice.  This is because a guardian official, either yin or yang, should demand  more focused treatment than its less important companion official.  Treating a particular official gives a particular emphasis to treatment.

Another example of the serendipity of life

 

I have just read the most beautiful book by the Irish writer, Andrew O’Hagan, called On Friendship which fell into my hands at just the right time, as I have found books often do to me.  In one of its eight brief chapters, he writes sadly about the threat to pubs and cafés, writing that “I fantasize that the pub and the café might again become the crucibles of friendship!”  I love acknowledging that the many good friendships  I have made over my morning coffees in local cafés since I moved to  an area of London filled to the brim with cafes and interesting people sitting in them, have become good crucibles of friendship, as they surely have.

 

The book is a beautifully written paean to the power of friendship in all its forms, and has made me reassess the role of my friends in my life, a role they have increasingly had to assume since I suffered my recent bout of ill-health.  I am not somebody who enjoys being helped by other people, feeling that this makes me a burden to them.  And I realise now, particularly after reading this book, that I am more of a burden when I try to shrug off my friends’ loving attempts to help me as I struggle along.   This book has helped me see how precious my friendships are, and how stupid and ineffectual of me to deny my friends’ help, instead of welcoming it.

 

Reading this book has taught me a lot about myself, and I hope at the same time it has made my friends’ attempts to help me somewhat easier.

My legacy lives on and on through my books

 

I’m so pleased to be able to write that my Chinese publishers have let me know that they have now published 150,000 of my books in Mandarin. As you can imagine,  I’m delighted. 

The bulk of sales is understandably taken up by my Handbook of Five Element Practice, a practical guide which formed the first introduction to the practice of five element acupuncture on its return to its country of origin over a decade ago.

 

Since then, seven of my eight English books have been published in Mandarin translations with the eighth, the translation of my ‘Blogging a Five Element Life'   now with the publisher, ready to appear in the autumn, to complete the whole series of my books.

I am currently editing another book which is drawing together more of my writings,  which I will  call ‘A Five Element Companion’. I am doing this in tandem with a continuing series of videos that I started several years ago. This is to form another video subscription series about my work introducing five element acupuncture to a Chinese world.   Tong You San He is working on these videos at the moment, editing them and translating them for a Chinese audience. 

The past decade has taught us through experience that setting up a five element practice in China is very different to what we are used to in this country.   Likewise, Chinese patients' expectations of receiving five element treatment differ very markedly from those of English patients. Guy Caplan and I are recording a series of videos to provide helpful hints for those wishing to start up a five element practice in China. 

 

 

My legacy lives on

When I decided, reluctantly, that my age was forcing me to accept that my time of teaching in China had to come to an end, I did not think that I would be continuing my teaching of five element acupuncture to Chinese students here in this country.  But two of my students, Yiwen and Shurui, were determined to pursue me to England, and persuaded Guy Caplan and me to offer a group a seminar in this country to replace what they felt was a great loss in China.  And with surprisingly little input from our side, but obviously enormous effort on theirs, it came to pass that I found myself once more welcoming a group of about 40 Chinese five element students and practitioners to London in March.

 

They planned to spend 10 days in this country, with the principal aim being a three-day seminar run by Guy and me at his clinic at Westminster University in central London.  The remainder of the time would be dedicated to sightseeing in London and the surrounding area.  Slotted into this was also a day at the Acupuncture Academy in Leamington Spa where Guy teaches.

 

I made the inspired decision to welcome the group with a slap-up tea at the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square, and won’t forget for a long time my joyful reunion with them on its steps as they poured out of the coach bringing them into London, greeting each other with hugs and kisses.  Quite a few of them had not seen me in person before, so I went from table to table introducing myself and acquainting myself with the different members of the group.  It was a lovely start to what became a highly successful visit to this country, and one which we will be repeating in October.

 

I enjoyed slotting back easily into the procedure of teaching in English and waiting for the Mandarin translation, as I had learnt to do over my ten or more years in China.  It was good for me to be able to continue to hand over my many years of practical five element experience in person in this way, and always with Guy’s support.  I am happy that he is continuing to carry on my work in China, his next seminar coming up in May over there.

 I can’t wait for October to come round, when I will welcome with joy another group of my Chinese five element students. 

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.