My legacy lives on

When I decided, reluctantly, that my age was forcing me to accept that my time of teaching in China had to come to an end, I did not think that I would be continuing my teaching of five element acupuncture to Chinese students here in this country.  But two of my students, Yiwen and Shurui, were determined to pursue me to England, and persuaded Guy Caplan and me to offer a group a seminar in this country to replace what they felt was a great loss in China.  And with surprisingly little input from our side, but obviously enormous effort on theirs, it came to pass that I found myself once more welcoming a group of about 40 Chinese five element students and practitioners to London in March.

 

They planned to spend 10 days in this country, with the principal aim being a three-day seminar run by Guy and me at his clinic at Westminster University in central London.  The remainder of the time would be dedicated to sightseeing in London and the surrounding area.  Slotted into this was also a day at the Acupuncture Academy in Leamington Spa where Guy teaches.

 

I made the inspired decision to welcome the group with a slap-up tea at the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square, and won’t forget for a long time my joyful reunion with them on its steps as they poured out of the coach bringing them into London, greeting each other with hugs and kisses.  Quite a few of them had not seen me in person before, so I went from table to table introducing myself and acquainting myself with the different members of the group.  It was a lovely start to what became a highly successful visit to this country, and one which we will be repeating in October.

 

I enjoyed slotting back easily into the procedure of teaching in English and waiting for the Mandarin translation, as I had learnt to do over my ten or more years in China.  It was good for me to be able to continue to hand over my many years of practical five element experience in person in this way, and always with Guy’s support.  I am happy that he is continuing to carry on my work in China, his next seminar coming up in May over there.

 I can’t wait for October to come round, when I will welcome with joy another group of my Chinese five element students. 

My farewell thanks to China

I was asked by Mei Long to write a note of welcome to the participants of a five element seminar she is giving in Beijing in July.  This is what I wrote for her:

On the last afternoon of my seminar in China in April, when we had planned our usual emotional photo-shoots and tearful goodbyes, I made a last-minute change of plan for myself.  I realised afterwards that this decision had, in a strange way, symbolized my personal legacy for my time in China. As part of the programme for our seminar, we had planned to treat a certain number of patients, and I was told that they had added one or two more stand-by people in case somebody didn’t turn up on the day.  In the event, by the last day there was just one person left on the list.  I had read her notes which told me that she was a long-time cancer sufferer, somebody who could definitely benefit from receiving treatment.  She must have been waiting all week on standby, hoping that she might be able to take one of the places, but assuming now that this was not going to happen.  I could imagine how she might be feeling having her hopes dashed, and it suddenly felt right to me that I should offer to see her privately during our last afternoon, leaving Guy and Mei to take over the final hours of the main seminar.

 

In the event this decision turned out to be a very moving experience for me, proving to be an excellent example of what my time in China has meant to me.  For after the patient left, looking transformed by her treatment, it summed up for me in a very moving way what the practice of five element acupuncture offered its patients at the highest level.  I left the seminar so happy that I had chosen to finish this last day in China on such a personally high note.  What was it about this one treatment which encapsulated so significantly what I had hoped to bring to China as my contribution to the return of this healing discipline to the country of its birth?  

 

There are many lessons about five element practice that my many visits to China over the past 14 years have taught me.  All have enriched my understanding of my own practice in often surprising ways.  Firstly, I became aware of the fact that to all Chinese, unlike to people in the West, the Dao, yin yang and the five elements, these simple but profound words which encompass the whole of Chinese thought, are totally familiar concepts.  There was therefore no need for me to start my introduction to five element practice at this most basic level, as it had been in the West, for everybody was already totally at ease with these concepts.  This made teaching an absolute delight from the very first day.  Then the groups mainly consisted of people who were already trained acupuncturists or in training to become acupuncturists, so that I had no need to spend time teaching them the anatomical locations of acupuncture points or how to palpate for them.

 

Another fundamental difference which made my work in China so rewarding was the speed at which everybody so quickly understood the new concepts underlying five element practice.  They were quick to learn how we diagnose the elements through our senses, and proved surprisingly skilful at training these senses.  Perhaps I was lucky that there were so few who doubted the truth of what I was teaching them, although there must have been some who did, but the vast majority of the many hundreds who came to our seminars over the years accepted almost without question that this was a profound healing technique.  As I often told them, I was so grateful that their ancestors, the ancient Chinese, had created such a simple way of restoring health and balance to human beings.

 

The need to help practitioners with a diagnosis of their own element, which I see as an essential part of five element practice, meant that we also had gradually to devise a method of diagnosing the many hundreds of people who came to our seminars.  This taught me that looking at the different elements in small groups, as we did, proved to be an excellent way of diagnosing the elements, as the qualities of the different elements emerged most clearly when groups of the same element were observed together.  This was another important new lesson which my visits to China taught me. 

 

A very significant moment in the return of five element acupuncture to its country of birth was the meeting between Mei Long and me at a seminar I gave in the Netherlands at which Mei for the first time heard me talk about five element acupuncture.  This was the catalyst which led to her contacting Professor Liu Lihong to tell him about what she had learned, and for both of us very soon being invited to China for our first five element seminar in Nanning in 2011.  This led directly to what has become today the very large and vibrant groups of Chinese five element practitioners, with firm roots now spread throughout China.  You, who are coming to this seminar with Mei, are some of these practitioners and students.

I am sure that you will be relieved to be able to listen in your native language to what Mei will be teaching you, rather than having to listen all the time to me talking in English and waiting for the translators to help you understand what I am saying!

 

I send you all my love and best wishes for your future five element practice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Off to China on Monday 4 September 2023 for our first post-Covid seminar!

I have been told that 500 (or to be more accurate, 482!) Chinese acupuncturists are waiting to greet us on the first day of our five element seminar in Beijing on Wednesday 6 September.  I gather that they have had to move the seminar to a larger hotel because of the number of participants.  As usual, I will be accompanied from London by my good friend and colleague, Guy Caplan, and we will be joined by Mei Long, who is the third member of our teacher group, once we are there.

For this seminar, we will be helping diagnose the elements of as many undiagnosed attendees as possible.  I have been told that probably some 350 of them may be either new to our courses or have not formed part of any of our diagnostic procedures at earlier seminars.  As I have blogged before, we have worked out what I consider to be as effective a way as possible of diagnosing as many people in the time available.  And we always emphasize that the diagnoses are provisional, and require confirmation from the effects of treatment.  That is something everybody accepts and feels quite happy with.

 

I will also be carrying out a full TD (traditional diagnosis) in front of the seminar group on one volunteer patient.  Previously we have interacted with patients at a necessarily much more superficial level, because we thought it was more important to help them with their diagnosis of the elements rather than with the techniques needed to carry out a good TD. So I am giving myself as much time as I need to get to know this patient, bearing in mind that all my questions and all the patient's answers will have to be translated into Mandarin, which will inevitably slow the TD down.  Guy and Mei will be focusing on helping participants with their sensory and practical skills, as well as joining me in seeing and treating further class patients  

 

It has been more than 3 years since we have all seen each other, so this will be a lovely reunion with the many good friends we have made over there.  I look forward to reporting back on what I have learnt from my time in Beijing at the end of what I calculate will be my 17th visit to China. 

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. 

Getting my videos to an English-speaking audience

After just under a year of hard work, 90% from Gye Bennetts in Australia and 10% from me here in London, we have now got my first course about five element acupuncture up and running on the Web of Knowledge website.  It is entitled. The Handbook of Five Element Practice, and is the first of two which we have planned - with maybe more in the future.  Getting my videos out there has been a labour of love from Gye, and has resulted in people in the English-speaking world at long last having access to some of the many videos I have recorded for my Chinese acupuncture students.  And I have just been delighted to receive some very complementary comments from two of the very early subscribers to our course, both of which have made me feel how worthwhile this venture has been.

 

I think my aim in talking and writing about five element acupuncture over all the many years I have been doing this has always at heart been the desire to inspire others to follow the path I took those many years ago, in the hope that what I say will reduce some of the fears which people often harbour around the study of this lovely discipline.  I think this fear is mainly based on the fact that five element practitioners have to call upon their own understanding of human behaviour, and rely, not upon books, but upon their own senses to help them diagnose where a patient's problems lie. The world is now still very much a knowledge-based place, and particularly prioritizes knowledge which relies upon book learning, with too little attention paid to what is now the scientifically proven fact that all that we observe is based on subjective criteria, since the observer always forms part of the observation he/she makes.  There is nothing that can be described as objectively proven, as would have been the assumption in years past, when for a time science with its apparently objective criteria ruled the world.

 

Now that each of us has to place ourselves at the forefront of what we observe, five element acupuncture, which has always recognized this, has come into its own, but represents a challenge precisely because of this.  So anything I can say which reassures those learning this discipline will, I hope, add to students' and practitioners' confidence in what they do.  Hence my delight in receiving the following accolade from one of the first people to download our course:

 

"Thank you, I feel so much more relaxed about five element acupuncture now. You really filled in the blanks for me and gave me direction of how and where to start, so important. I am so grateful!"

 

Thank you, Debra from Canada.

 

  

Announcement of my first Net of Knowledge course: Nora Franglen: The Handbook of Five Element Practice

I am happy to announce that my first course of videos about five element acupuncture, with the title: Nora Franglen: the Handbook of Five Element Practice, is now available on the Net of Knowledge online platform.  The course is available through the Net of Knowledge website, as well as through the following websites for different areas around the world:

For the UK and Ireland:                      CPD-Cert

For Europe generally:                         Acupuncture World

For Germany:                                     Acupuncture World DE

For the US:                                         Lhasa OMS

For Canada:                                        Eastern Currents

For Australia and New Zealand:         China Books

For India:                                             Institute of Acupuncture & Natural Medicine

 

You can also see a short promotional video of the course using the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0cGWyvtSDs

 

This will be the first time that the English-speaking world can listen to some of the many videos which I have recorded for my Chinese students in the past few years. They have until now only been available in China.

 

I must also record my thanks here to Gye Bennetts, my good Australian five element friend, without whom I would never have thought of adapting my videos to fit the Net of Knowledge template. Gye did all the hard work of getting our course up and running. Having completed this course, he is now working away at editing a more advanced course of my videos.

 

I am often asked how I recorded the more than 100 videos I have sent over the ether to China to encourage my students there in their five element studies, whilst Covid has prevented us from meeting at our twice-yearly seminars in Beijing.  I often just have a topic in mind, something that has cropped up through a question I have been asked, or something that is part of a set of videos focusing on one or other aspect of five element practice.  I then set up my i-Pad in front of me as I sit on my sofa, check that I have pressed the Record button (sometimes I forget to do this!), and launch myself into what I can feel is often the unknown.  I may find that my first thoughts are muddled and don't lead me where I want to go, so I have to press Delete and start again. I am often only satisfied with what I am saying after two or three attempts, eventually finishing with a video lasting at the most 8 -10 minutes.

 

Once I am in the flow, though, I find the thoughts, and the words to express them, come, as they do when I am teaching in front of a class.  I have often told people that I seem to do most of my thinking as I talk.  So what you will see if you decide to subscribe to this Net of Knowledge course is watching me thinking my thoughts out loud, with not a note in sight.

 

 

22 - 35 Thinking back on what I learnt from SOFEA's Earth seminar yesterday

Having just held a seminar focusing on the Earth element, I like to look back and think about why I like running these seminars so much and what I learn from them.  They are not just occasions for me and Guy Caplan, my co-worker, to impart the knowledge we have gained from our many years of practice.  If this was so, it would merely be a one-way process, much as though we were standing in front of a class of students teaching them something.  But it is much more than that for me, for it is an opportunity to link up with five element acupuncturists and students, both in person and now online, as we open up the occasion to a large group of about 100 people watching us in Beijing.

What I most cherish is the feeling of belonging to a community again after these years of Covid lockdown, to a five element community which spreads far and wide around the world, and offers more and more patients the chance to transform their lives. In my last blog, I said that our treatments are "making it possible for our patients to fulfil whatever destiny fate has laid down for them" as expressed through their element.  And this is how I view all that I do.  My writings and teaching give me the opportunity to open people's minds and hearts to the potential which resides within their own and others' elements.  However tired I often feel at the end of a day's teaching, I always wake the next morning with a lighter heart and the warm feeling of another job well done, something to be nurtured, particularly in these dark days.

 

I dedicate this blog to all who came in person to the seminar and to all in China who participated in our day online.

 

And now on to a day on the next element in our series, Metal, on Monday 28 November.  Make a note in your diaries if you want to join us for another happy day immersed in the elements.  You can look at our website www.sofea.co.uk for details of how to book a place.

22 - 20 Two important lessons JR Worsley taught me

Two important lessons JR Worsley taught me many years ago have stood me, and all those people I have passed them on to, in good stead.  They are both deceptively simple lessons, but are profound in their reach.

 

The first was when I had just started my School of Five Element Acupuncture, SOFEA, and was feeling rather overwhelmed by the task I had taken on without thinking through many of its consequences.  I remember telling JR that I thought I had been foolhardy in accepting the responsibility of teaching others when I had only been in practice myself for so few years.  And he said, "Remember, Nora, you know more than they do."  And indeed I must have done, although I hadn't put it to myself in those terms.  After all, I had then had more than 6 years' experience both learning about and practising five element acupuncture, first as a student and then as a practitioner, and the students I was expecting to teach had absolutely none.

 

So this is the advice I pass on to other prospective teachers.  As long as you never claim to know more than you do, then each person has the right, and, as I often say, the duty, to pass on the little or the great amount of their own learning to those that have less than they do.

 

I found the second piece of advice  a little more surprising, but it was even more illuminating.  I told JR that I was having problems feeling the pulses and trying to diagnose their relative weaknesses and strengths.  And he said, "I know what you mean;  that happens to me, too.  Perhaps for a month or so I am uncertain of my pulse readings, and then I realise that this is because I've moved up a further level in my pulse diagnosis."  I wasn't convinced that the same applied to me at my much lower level of practice, but it was a comfort to hear JR say that he also had doubts about his own proficiency at various points in his life.

 

Both these lessons have comforted me throughout the many years of my practice and teaching.  I hope that they encourage others in their practice as they have encouraged me in mine.