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.