In my last blog, the last of the year 2024, I wrote of my decision to call a halt to my travels to China. In many ways this represented a momentous step, because it brought with it the recognition of an ending, with an acceptance that I felt that I was now physically too frail to travel, even though, as my children insist, luckily I am apparently not yet too frail of mind. In fact quite the reverse. My mind seems to be more active than ever, ferreting away at new thoughts as it always has done.
And the new thought with which I woke at three this morning with it fully-formed is that it was time that I wrote about the importance of acknowledging that the five element legacy I inherited from my apprenticeship with JR Worsley was to be seen as forming part, not of a fixed, immutable tradition, to be adhered to in every one of its aspects, but of a living, evolving tradition of which each five element acupuncturist forms part and to which each contributes in their own way. The five-element tree has a large trunk with its roots embedded deep in the Chinese past, and with branches spreading over generations of acupuncturists in the millennia since then. Each of us current five element acupuncturists is then a bud on one of these branches.
This is therefore a living and hence evolving tradition. And no tradition, whether in the world of healing or elsewhere, can survive unless it has fresh life breathed into it. During my own training I was myself witness to how the tradition I was inheriting from JR Worsley was in the process of changing, with two very clear examples of this taking place before my eyes during my training.
The first example occurred during my final undergraduate year when we started treating our own patients under supervision. My patient, who my supervisor confirmed was a Fire patient (Outer Fire, V/VI), had the following pulse picture: weak Fire V/VI pulses, stronger Wood VII/VIII pulses, weak Metal pulses IX/X, stronger Earth pulses XI/XII. I was told to tonify both Earth and Metal, using the following points (VI3, V9 and X11, IX3) in the same treatment. There was no discussion at all about whether I should only be treating Fire. In other words, it was then accepted practice in JR’s college that we should take from whatever element was stronger to treat the weaker element, rather than only treating the dominant element, in this case Fire.
Very soon the practice of treating off the dominant element was discontinued, and in all the years of my observing patients with JR he never recommended treating anything but this element (except, of course, for specific treatments for clearing different energy blocks).
The second example comes from my searching in the famous Red Book, JR’s Traditional Chinese Acupuncture, Volume 1: Meridians and Points, for the points called Dragons which I needed to learn to clear what we call possession. Three series of points are listed, one for External Dragons and two for Internal Dragons. Again, in all the years of observing patients with JR the series of points listed for treating Internal Dragons in the Red Book for “Dragons with depression” was never taught to us or used. I always regretted that in the many years I sat in class listening to JR that I did not ask him when we should use the first of these two series of points, since he always chose the second ,“without depression”. Is the unused series of points merely a residue of the past which JR no longer thought was of value for us to learn in the world of today? If so, it is a subtle reminder that traditions have to evolve to survive.
This confirms to me the need to accept that through my own practice, I, too, have added a further bud to the great five-element tree, through my decision at the end of my postgraduate training with JR to start thinking of the controlling element as a guardian element, and giving it this name, initially just for myself. For did not JR always ask us to visualize how each of our patients would be if they lived their life in balance and harmony with their particular element? That made me think of this element as sheltering us and giving our life meaning – in other words acting as guardian to us.
And I remember that I was drawn to using this term because it so closely echoes the familiar phrase “guardian angel”.
