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.