22 - 35 Thinking back on what I learnt from SOFEA's Earth seminar yesterday

Having just held a seminar focusing on the Earth element, I like to look back and think about why I like running these seminars so much and what I learn from them.  They are not just occasions for me and Guy Caplan, my co-worker, to impart the knowledge we have gained from our many years of practice.  If this was so, it would merely be a one-way process, much as though we were standing in front of a class of students teaching them something.  But it is much more than that for me, for it is an opportunity to link up with five element acupuncturists and students, both in person and now online, as we open up the occasion to a large group of about 100 people watching us in Beijing.

What I most cherish is the feeling of belonging to a community again after these years of Covid lockdown, to a five element community which spreads far and wide around the world, and offers more and more patients the chance to transform their lives. In my last blog, I said that our treatments are "making it possible for our patients to fulfil whatever destiny fate has laid down for them" as expressed through their element.  And this is how I view all that I do.  My writings and teaching give me the opportunity to open people's minds and hearts to the potential which resides within their own and others' elements.  However tired I often feel at the end of a day's teaching, I always wake the next morning with a lighter heart and the warm feeling of another job well done, something to be nurtured, particularly in these dark days.

 

I dedicate this blog to all who came in person to the seminar and to all in China who participated in our day online.

 

And now on to a day on the next element in our series, Metal, on Monday 28 November.  Make a note in your diaries if you want to join us for another happy day immersed in the elements.  You can look at our website www.sofea.co.uk for details of how to book a place.

22 - 34 What do we hope five element acupuncture can offer our patients?

There are many reasons why we find our way to a calling such as five element acupuncture, probably as many reasons as there are acupuncturists.  I have often written about my own surprising journey towards my first day sitting in JR Worsley's Leamington College hearing the magical words, the Fire element and the Heart.  That journey had started a year earlier at an encounter with an acupuncturist at a party and the subsequent overwhelming effects of the treatment I received.  So my understanding of why I eventually decided to follow the same route as my acupuncturist and study at the college he had studied at was quite clear.  My treatment had transformed my life and I wanted to be able to offer the same transformation to any future patients I might treat.

 I have always had a strong belief that each of us owes it to those around us and to the world in general to leave this world in a slightly better place than when we first entered it.  We need to feel that we have added something by our presence.  It is as though we are each given a task to do.  In five element terms I like to see this task as expressing itself through the needs and aspirations of our guardian element.  I have therefore come to see each successful treatment as in some small way forming one step along this path for each of my patients.

 

These thoughts, which have been mulling within me for many years, were originally sparked by something JR Worsley said during my undergraduate training all those years ago, and have stayed with me ever since.  He said that we should visualize how our patients would be if their element was able to express itself fully in the most creative and harmonious way.  By strengthening this element and helping it to greater balance, we are therefore making it possible for our patients to fulfil whatever destiny fate has laid down for them, as expressed through this element.  

 

I like to think that each patient leaving our practice in greater harmony within themselves is adding a tiny but important bit to the sum total of human experience, and, with it, I hope, human happiness.