22 - 36 The fear of not diagnosing the "right" element

A wise young man told me something very important.  He said, "We grow when we are challenged", and I often think that there is no greater challenge for a five element acupuncturist, amongst the many challenges we face, than that of learning how to deal with the natural fear we all have of not getting our diagnosis of a patient's element "right".  We each have to learn to deal with this particular fear in our own way, but what it requires of us is honesty and humility, which can be characteristics some of us may find difficult to accept as forming a necessary part of a five element acupuncturist's role.  I have observed many reactions to my students' finding that the element that they think is "obviously" Fire turns out instead to be Wood or Metal.  Their reaction is sometimes disbelief, or a need to cast doubt on even the most experienced practitioner's diagnosis rather than accept that their practice requires so much of them. In extreme cases, students or practitioners have felt compelled to move away from five element acupuncture to practising other forms of acupuncture which do not rely so heavily on our subjective senses and emotional antennae to diagnose our patients.

I have said many times that five element practitioners have to learn to accept that they are themselves, as JR Worsley so beautifully put it, instruments of nature.  Rather than relying on physical equipment to give us our diagnostic information we have to rely on ourselves, on our eyes, ears, noses and emotional antennae.  I have always found this a quite lovely aspect of my work, but some people are daunted by the need to put themselves at the forefront of practice in this way.  No physical instrument can diagnose a patient's element;  only our own senses and feelings can do that.

 

And we are all fallible human beings, each with our own particular emotional hang-ups, each of us hoping against hope that we will get that most difficult aspect of any five element practice, the accurate diagnosis of our patient's element, right.  But we must learn to say to ourselves that, if we don't get it right to start with, it does not matter, because elements are elusive things, which often hide themselves behind other elements, having learnt that life often forces them to put on masks in order to survive.

 

We have to accept that a five element practice requires us to come to terms with not getting our diagnosis right immediately, and that once we acknowledge that this is so, we will, as my young friend said, grow as a result of meeting this challenge.