Developing a support network for aspiring five element practitioners

I am sometimes ashamed to think how many years it has taken me to understand the inevitable difficulties faced by five element students now compared with what I realise was my own highly privileged training.  In my last blog I listed how I was given the priceless benefit of a full seven years' support under the supervision of experienced five element practitioners, peaking with many years' interaction with the master himself, JR Worsley.  In the very different circumstances faced by those training today, particularly for all my many enthusiastic Chinese students, I am trying to do all I can to help students gain as much knowledge and experience as they can with what is now on offer for them.  

Luckily there are many new methods of online transmission which to some extent replace former teaching models by transferring what would originally have been conventional classroom study to the internet.  These online seminars now help our Chinese students fill the vacuum left by our absence from China during these past years of Covid.  Of course they do not offer the personal communications so important for the development of good five element practice, but they do make it possible to encourage students to continue their exploration of five element acupuncture.  

 

The current lack of classroom teaching has made me all the more aware of the need for each practitioner to develop their own personal support network, so that they have people they can turn to to discuss problems encountered in their practice.  It is especially important that they regularly invite fellow practitioners into their practice as often as is practicable so that they can benefit from others' insights into their patients.  Having another practitioner in the practice room often reveals quite different aspects of our patients as they respond to the presence of another person.  

 

We sometimes forget that it is all too easy to develop such close relationships with our patients over time that they can have the effect of lulling us into situations which don't demand much of either patient or practitioner.  There is then a risk that the practice room becomes too comfortable a place, and our work fails to challenge us as it should continue to do.   We need to regard each treatment as a challenge, a way of exploring our patient's needs at an ever-deeper level.  Instead, we may be tempted to take the easy way out, simply sit back and greet our patient as we would a friend, with no attempt to move treatment on in a further direction.  Whilst our personal friendships tend to stay very much at one level, treating our patients, on the other hand, should always develop, since every treatment we give changes something in our patient and moves them, we hope, to greater balance.  The person coming into our practice room today will therefore be a little different from the person who left us last time.  And our relationship to our patients must allow for this, something which we may tend to forget.

 

Gaining a different insight into our patient as a result of the presence of another practitioner is therefore often helpful in jolting us out of the complacency which familiarity with our patients can induce in us.  Forming part of a group of five element practitioners which meets regularly, online if face-to-face is geographically impossible, provides essential support which can help mitigate the inevitable stresses which our work with patients places upon us.

The need to find our own support network

It has been increasingly clear to me how fortunate I was to receive my training as a five element acupuncturist when I did.  I was unaware of this at the time, and actually for a fairly long time afterwards, because I assumed for a long time that all acupuncture students benefited from the same training structure as I did.  I regarded this as the norm, eventually transposing this almost lock, stock and barrel to form the foundation of my own acupuncture college, the School of Five Element Acupuncture, SOFEA.  Having recognized the deep benefits of my own training at JR Worsley's Leamington College, I saw no reason whatsoever in exploring new approaches to teaching which differed from the way I had so expertly been taught.  I therefore passed through my own college's first few years without recognizing the need for deeper enquiry into the nature of the training I was offering my own students.

 

But gradually the increasing demands upon acupuncture education which the development of more stringent accreditation requirements made upon all acupuncture colleges also penetrated what I now consider my almost naive approach to setting up my own acupuncture college.  The acupuncture world as a whole was moving from being an outlier in the world of medical education to forming part of the mainstream, with all the requirements for more standardized education methods this entailed.  Whereas my own training at JR's Leamington college had a very practical emphasis, concentrating almost entirely on observing and treating as many patients as possible, often up to 20 on a clinical day, I was now expected to adapt the curriculum to conform with a less practical, more theoretical approach, more akin to a conventional university course, and therefore much less patient-orientated.

 

In the many years since then I have become aware of exactly what I and my fellow students gained and what many students of five element acupuncture throughout the world now search vainly for.  I had available to me teachers who were above all experienced practising acupuncturists, and a course which offered me the chance to steep myself in treating one patient after another under their expert supervision, over a period of something like seven years.  This covered the initial three years of my undergraduate training, plus four more years of postgraduate training, very fortunately mainly under the personal supervision of JR Worsley.  Since this included many visits not only to my own practice to be observed treating my own patients, but also many days of benefiting from observing the practice of those more experienced than me, all this combined to give me what I now realise was my own personal support network as I felt my way into being a competent five element acupuncturist.

 

When I compare this now to what a similarly enthusiastic novice five element acupuncturist is offered today in whatever country they live, I realise sadly what this novice acupuncturist has perhaps lost and which I am now trying in my small way to make up for in the way in which I teach.  This blog forms part of this, because I feel that in articulating what I see as the inevitable deficiencies of current five element training I may be able make good something of what we appear to have lost.  

 

I have often expressed my sadness at the increasing lack of experienced five element teachers.  I know that many of the older band of five element acupuncturists feel either that they no longer fit into the structure of the few acupuncture training colleges in this country, since these now feel obliged only to offer five element instruction when it is combined with modern Chinese TCM acupuncture.  Others appear to feel that there is no longer a place for them where their belief in a pure approach to five element practice is required.  Where this does not appear to be the case, luckily, is increasingly amongst the many hundreds of Chinese acupuncturists I have taught over the past ten years of my visits to China.  As of now, though, there are too few experienced Chinese five element practitioners to cover the needs of this vast territory, with just a few who have graduated to teaching concentrated in the larger cities, such as Beijing and Chengdu, whilst one or two are scattered in lonely exile in more far-flung places.  But it is precisely the needs of these hundreds of devoted five element practitioners that I am trying to address.

 

My next blog will discuss how I have had to develop my teaching methods to help support this large Chinese contingent of devoted five element practitioners.