22-13 Do I think our guardian element changes during our lifetime?

Many people ask themselves whether our guardian element (CF or dominant element) changes during our lifetime.  I, too, have thought carefully about this for many years, as I have noticed that people, particularly acupuncturists, seem to like to change their own element for another one, often perhaps because they may think it has a better press.  As with all my thoughts about the elements, I always start with myself, because that's the person I know best, having had a lifetime in which to study my own particular element.  

I have often thought how fortunate it was for the direction of that part of my life which was spurred into activity when I encountered the elements for the first time that whatever power or force which controls our individual destinies should have placed me firmly into the little corner of the five element circle housing the Heart and the Small Intestine, and in particular into the welcoming arms of the Small Intestine.  For it is this official, with its intense, unending curiosity and inability to be satisfied with anything until it has probed it to its very core, which made it inevitable that I would never allow my thoughts about the elements to harden into fixed ideas.  Instead, I like to ferret away at every new idea I have, and amend it or discard it if my ever-inquisitive mind feels that is necessary.

 

Looking back at the whole of my now very long life, I can never remember a time when I was not trying to sort out the world and its people, particularly my family in my early years.  In fact they would joke that I was always telling them, "Don't you think you ought to....", as I tried to direct their behaviour in a direction I thought was best for them.  And that is still my first reaction to any situation, as my Small Intestine very quickly (and it is probably the quickest thinker of all the officials) decides what it thinks should be done, and immediately wants to put this into action.   

 

From the evidence of my own life, therefore, I can see no change in how I have approached my life from my earliest days to now in my ripe old age which would indicate that the Small Intestine is not my spiritual home.  Nor have I seen any sign of any similar changes in all the hundreds if not thousands of patients who I have treated or observed over nearly half a century of practice.  

 

Do I therefore think our element changes during our lifetime?  To this I give an emphatic answer, "No, I don't."

 

But then other people may well disagree with me - which is fine.