19. The elements and their emotions

I have written about the elements in each of my books.  The different observations made in each come from different periods of my life and are therefore based on different levels of this understanding as it deepens year on year.  Inevitably there will be a considerable overlap between what I write here and what I have written elsewhere, but also, inevitably, a different emphasis which my increased understanding gives me. 

As practitioners we each bring into the practice room our own perceptions of how the elements manifest, insights which we have gained from however many years of practice we had had.  Each of us will also have a particular affinity with one or other element, not necessarily, as some people assume, always our own.  Our lives may, for example, have been affected by people of one element, whose influence then colours our perception of that particular element for all time.  We should use the insights this gives us to help us when we encounter that particular element in our patients.   It is also always significant which elements members of our family represent.  And how we select our friends, as well as telling us a lot about ourselves and the needs we are satisfying by these selections, can also turn into a further lesson in the different elements and their interactions with one another upon which we can draw for our practice.

We make all sorts of assumptions about other people, since we usually see them from our own perspective.  It requires great insight and humility to try to step out from under the shadows each of us cast around ourselves and try to move into the sphere of another person.  Unfortunately we often delude ourselves that we understand another’s viewpoint whereas we are simply using our own viewpoint from which to judge theirs.  We must learn never to assume that we know anything about anybody else until we have proof from them that they are as we think they are.  This is the secret of being a good therapist, and also, of course, of being a good parent, partner or friend.  

It is the elements with which we have no particular affinity which can cause us the most trouble, and these we have to work hard at understanding if we are not to let this handicap our work.  We have to learn ways of bridging the gulf this places between ourselves and people of this element, for bridge it in some way we must.  This is where the hardest work for us lies, because we have to try and shed as much of our emotional clothing as we can, and then attempt to put on that of the other elements.  Experience obviously helps us here, because each time we encounter another element we add a little something to our understanding, like another little piece of cloth to this element’s coat which we try to put on, so that it begins to fit us a little better and we feel a little bit more at ease in wearing it.  It is worth thinking in these terms, as we add each experience of another element to our stock, because the aim is to start experiencing an element from the inside, rather than looking at it from the outside, as though we are looking at animals in the zoo.

Of course, since we are made of all the elements, there is always a part of us which resonates with each element we encounter, even though we may not be aware of it or pay it much attention.  The work we have to do here is to track this part down in ourselves and observe each element in action in us as a way of understanding it more from within ourselves.  We must take every opportunity to study them in others and then try to see how far our understanding of them resonates with something inside ourselves.  The easiest way to do this is to think of times in our life when we have experienced the emotions of another element.

Here we immediately encounter a problem, for the words with which we label an emotion, which we know in five element terms as anger, joy, sympathy, grief and fear, are so much more limited than the wide range of emotional attributes they are intended to convey.  The whole spectrum of human emotions, with all their variety and depth, has to be contained within the five simple words we give to these five emotional groupings, and this gives each a far wider and deeper meaning than the words as we use them every day.  In addition, they may well have taken on meanings in common speech which can be very narrow, or have been loaded with all kinds of connotations which may not be helpful in an acupuncture context.

If we look at these everyday descriptions of the five emotions, two, those of joy and sympathy, appear to evoke positive responses within us, one, anger, tends to evoke a negative response and two, fear and grief, evoke more puzzling responses.  Joy and sympathy appear to describe attributes we would all like to be able to express.  We may well think that these are expressions of positive aspects of human behaviour, the one that of being a vehicle for happiness, the other that of showing an ability to support our fellow human beings.  Anger, on the other hand, has a bad press, more often than not being regarded as something reprehensible, an emotion to which we should not allow free rein within ourselves, with connotations of something out of control.  Grief comes out more on the positive side, as being an appropriate expression of loss, if there has been loss, but can develop negative overtones if it persists beyond the point at which others think we should have come to terms with our loss or even when there is no feeling of loss at all, where some expression would be considered only natural.

Fear, too, appears to look both ways, its positive side appearing when it is an appropriate response to danger, its negative side when it persists even when the person experiencing it is not exposed to risk.  The common denominator in the last two cases, those of grief and fear, is that they appear to have a more clearly perceptible appropriate and inappropriate aspect to them which are fairly evenly balanced so that neither has attained the pariah status of anger, which appears to lean too heavily towards the inappropriate, nor the apparently favoured positions of joy and sympathy. 

All these perceptions are misleading in acupuncture terms, and have to be revised if we are to view the five emotional categories in their proper contexts.  Each emotional category has to be seen in neutral terms so that we do not load it with any preconceptions such as those I have mentioned.   Joy and sympathy can therefore be understood to be just as much expressions of inappropriate as appropriate emotions depending upon the context, and we must not shy away from seeing their negative overtones nor from seeing the correspondingly positive overtones of anger.  All emotions have to be viewed as ranging over the widest gamut of human expression, from the most unbalanced to the most balanced.  Thus to express joy where joy is inappropriate is just as much an expression of imbalance as to express anger or fear where there is no occasion for either.  To forget this is to distort our perception of balance or imbalance and thus our interpretation of the aspect of a patient which may be calling out for treatment.  It is unfortunately an understandable human reaction for a practitioner to respond to a patient’s smile more positively than to a patient’s frown, though both may be evidence of imbalance.

When thinking about the different emotions the elements display, we also need to understand that since each of us is composed of a unique combination of all the five elements, and each element expresses every one of the five emotions, there are in effect 25 possible expressions of the different emotions.  The five principal categories which tradition associates with a particular element, which are joy for Fire, sympathy for Earth, grief for Metal, fear for Water and anger for Wood, are therefore modified when it is not a Fire person expressing joy or a Water person expressing fear.  When a Metal person expresses joy or fear, those expressions of joy or fear will be shaded by grief, Metal’s dominant emotion, and therefore will express themselves in a different way from a Wood person expressing joy or fear, or a Fire or Water person expressing joy or fear.

It is therefore not simply a matter of observing joy or fear expressed to their fullest in Fire or Water people, but of having experience of observing these emotions in people who are not Fire or Water.  We have to begin to differentiate the type of joy or fear being shown, however much this may be buried beneath the dominant emotion of another element.  Fire or Water will show these two emotions in their purest form, since they pour out straight from the organs controlled by these two elements, whereas joy shown by an Earth person or fear shown by a Metal person will be modified by the patina of sympathy or thoughtfulness Earth throws over all it does and the patina of grief which Metal shows in all it does.  In other words they will show an Earth- or Metal-type joy or fear, which will be quite different from joy or fear expressed in pure form by Fire or Water.

In trying to gain a foothold in the tricky world of interpreting the emotional signatures of an element, we therefore have to look carefully at all the different possible nuances of emotional expression.  We have to bring to this all the knowledge of the elements we have accumulated so far to help point us in one of the five directions.  We can do this in retrospect, as it were, by looking carefully at a person whose element we are sure of, and observing how they express the emotions of the other four elements, not just their own.  How, for example, does a Metal person express their anger or their sympathy, or a Wood person their grief or their fear?  Such an exercise is a very useful way of expanding our library of pointers to the different elements.

 

 

18. Diagnostic pointers to the different elements: Part 2: Earth, Metal and Water

I have said that Earth wants to involve other people.  We must always think of this element as needing to be at the centre of things, of drawing things, particularly people, towards it, its favourite position being that of being surrounded by others.  Earth’s eyes present us with an appeal, they ask us for something, they beseech to be looked after in some way.  Translated into the needs of one of its officials, the Stomach, we see that all Earth people demand to be fed at all levels, and only when they have been given the physical or emotional food they want can they turn their attention to feeding others.  At the physical level it is when Earth has opened its mouth to guide food into it that it has enough energy to feed others.  Apart from Earth’s appealing eyes, the mouth is therefore where this element imprints itself most strongly upon the face.  A very good example of this is what I call the Marilyn Monroe pout, with the lips slightly open, a mouth demanding to be fed, almost like a baby bird’s. Something of the neediness which lies behind this look is there, too, in Princess Diana’s appealing expression during her famous TV interview.  Earth’s eyes and mouth together therefore demand something of the people Earth comes into contact with. 

Again it is worth trying to mimic Marilyn Monroe’s mouth.  If I do this, I feel as though my face is saying, “gimme, gimme, please”, a kind of pleading to be looked after.  Obviously Marilyn Monroe exaggerated this trademark expression of hers, for this was where her charm and her marketability lay, so it is emphasized to a greater extent than would occur in a more everyday world, rather than that of a film-star’s, but if properly observed on our part, this will lead us surprisingly unerringly to a five element diagnosis.

When we move on to Metal, the facial movements of eye and mouth grow much calmer and are stilled.  Metal stands back, observes and judges.  Its eyes and mouth demand nothing of us;  they are not primarily concerned with trying to set up a relationship with us.  The eyes do not appeal, but remain detached, requiring space from which to watch the world and weigh up how it judges it.  Our eyes are therefore not drawn to Metal’s mouth, as we might be with Wood or Earth, for it is not asking anything of us.  Instead we focus strongly on the eyes, the most observant of all the elements’ eyes. They observe, but they also have an added quality which is as though in looking at us they are at the same time looking past us, or perhaps, more accurately, looking beyond us.  They echo Metal’s emotion, grief, a longing for what it has not been given, for what it has not achieved or failed to achieve, as though in that look there lies buried all Metal’s longing for those aspects of life towards which it tries to reach out, but which, sadly, often elude it.  Being the element most acquainted with the transitory nature of things, Metal has the most serious eyes of all.

With Water we move from the comparative stillness of Metal’s face to a more mobile expression, as Water’s face reflects all the anxious messages this element sends out in its quest to survive.  It wants to reassure itself that it is safe, that it will survive the harshness of winter come what may. Its eyes have none of the stillness of Metal’s eyes or the forcefulness behind Wood’s gaze.  Instead they seem to flicker and dart around, as though constantly on the move, ready to perceive danger and avoid it.  When we are unsure of what is going on, we will all tend to look nervously around.  This is Water’s fall-back position, and the anxious look which their eyes often take on can express itself in the different ways Water has learnt to protect itself.  One look is the rather unsettled and unsettling one akin to that of a rather frightened animal, with the eyes darting from side to side.  The converse can also be true of Water.  It can take on a very fixed stare, but not the challenging, direct look with which Wood may look at us, but a more rigid gaze, as if the face has become a frozen mask.  If we draw in our breath as though in fear and hold ourselves still for a few moments, we can feel our whole body, including our face, becoming rigid, until we let our breath out and relax.  This is how I imagine Water must react whenever it feels trapped in what is to it a frightening situation.  And Water will find frightening some situations which other elements allow to pass harmlessly by.

It is the nature of each element to have an exaggerated relationship with the emotional sphere which is its home ground.  For Water, here, it is any situation which might cause it anxiety or fear, for Earth any situation in which it feels it has lost its comforting position at the centre of things, for Metal any situation in which it it not given the space or time to detach itself and observe from afar, and finally for Fire, any situation in which its desire to relate warmly to other is threatened.  It is one of the ironies of life that what causes distress to one element, as does uncertainty here for the Water element, may instead be stimulating for another.  Fire, for example, might respond enthusiastically to some uncertain situations, enjoying the freedom to explore them which they present.  Thus each element has specific challenges and specific fears which another element will be indifferent to.  This, of course, is what makes for the rich diversity of human interactions.

It therefore helps us in our efforts to diagnose our patients’ elements to note how different parts of the face are emphasized for different elements.  If we find that our eyes appear to be drawn to the mouth, this may be one way of perceiving Earth. The lips of a Wood mouth may remain firmly, if not tightly, closed until they open to talk. And it is to the eyes rather than the mouths of Fire, Metal and Water that we appear to look more closely, Fire’s eyes because they are trying to draw us into a relationship with them, Metal’s eyes because they seem to be looking beyond us and we wonder what they see, and Water’s eyes because they can constantly dart around as though startled. 

If all else fails, therefore, and we are not at all sure which element our patient is, then we should see whether the rather basic signposts I have listed above help us in our diagnosis.  I have found them to be a remarkably accurate way of supplementing what my senses are unable to tell me.  Each practitioner will of course add their own pointers to this list.  Maybe they will notice a characteristic way of walking, talking, holding a hand out for pulses to be taken or settling on the treatment couch.  Since everything we do is the work of the elements within us, every part of body and soul will be showing characteristic pointers to our guardian element.  We just need to be patient enough and give ourselves the time needed to develop our own individual stock of these diagnostic pointers.

 

 

17. Diagnostic pointers to the different elements: Part 1: Wood and Fire

When I first started my studies, I think I was very optimistic about how easily I would perceive the sensory signatures which we learnt were the main pointers to diagnosing the elements.  I, imagined that by the end of our three-year course I would be well on the way to assessing these accurately.  I was to find, however, that this was far from the case, so far, indeed, that it was only after quite a few years of practice that I at long last began to understand what Wood’s rancid smell was, or honed my  assessment of Earth’s colour.  And just when I thought I had “got” one manifestation, I would find all my previous learning confounded by discovering that my patient’s rather bright red face was nothing at all to do with Fire, but was either Wood or Earth out of balance.  In the case of Wood, I eventually worked out that it was its imbalance which was throwing its child, Fire, out of balance and creating the red colour, and in the case of Earth, the red was coming from problems handed down to it by its mother.  Fire, I have found, never imprints a constant high red colour on those of its element.  Its reddish tinges come and go, as it flickers, but they never remain a steady imprint.

Now that I have recognised for myself how difficult it is accurately to perceive the elements’ sensory signals, I realise how important it is for those new to five element acupuncture not to rely too heavily on sensory impressions which may well be leading them astray.  Instead, I try to emphasize all the many other ways the elements reveal themselves, and share with them the observations I have accumulated over the years to help fill out what I lack in sensory awareness.  For example, I have now developed for myself a list of the small variations in facial expression which help me pinpoint an element more clearly.  I give these below as an aide for others.

I have become increasingly aware of the importance of the face as a whole in helping us diagnose the significance of different elements.  It is the part of the body upon which all the elements with their numerous meridians trace their passage, and it therefore has the greatest concentration of elemental influences of any part of the body.  The head, of course, also houses that important part of us, our brain, which controls all our actions and all our thoughts. This small segment of the body therefore shows most obviously about how the different elements shape us than any other part.

It is likely that it will be the eyes, the face’s most significant moving feature, which we look at first, since it through eye-contact that we usually greet each other.  And it is through our eyes that we allow ourselves to reveal who we really are, recognized by us when we call them the windows of the soul.  They will show the nature of the contact we wish to make with the world outside us.  For five element acupuncturists it is therefore important to learn to differentiate the ways in which the different elements look at us.  Conversely, the first moment when we, as practitioners, look at our patient becomes very important, because it will also reveal who we are to our patients.  The expressions on our faces will help define the nature of the future relationship between us, and particularly how much empathy and understanding the patient feels we show them, and how far they feel they can trust us.  The glances we exchange can then be seen as the first step both in a five element diagnosis and in setting up a good patient-practitioner relationship.   

The nature of the different needs of each element will express itself in the way our patients look at us and what their look appears to be demanding of us.  Over the years I have made many observations about the different forms of eye-contact the elements make. Each element sends out different signals when it looks at another person, and the very marked differences from element to element are useful aids in helping with our diagnosis.  We will also see that with some elements it is not only the eyes to which we seem to be paying the most attention, but other parts of the face may be emphasized as well, such as the mouth or the jaw.

It is good to remind ourselves here of what each element wants from its contacts with others.  There are many ways of defining these differences, but in very general terms I see Wood as wanting to shape things, Fire as wanting to share things, Earth as wanting to involve others, Metal as wanting to observe and Water as wanting to make sure.

If we take the Wood element first, we can see that its need to shape things represents an attempt to give everything a structure.  It is as though it tries to enclose things within some kind of a box, a container, and its way of talking reflects this.  I have many times described Wood’s speech as telling, informing us of something rather than communicating.  Telling can be seen as an attempt to impose a fixed point of view upon the person or persons being talked to, or, more pertinently, being talked at.  It is another way of describing speech which boxes words in, giving them a fixed structure.  It does not represent a discussion about what that view might be, but is a firm conclusion, an emphatic statement that “this is so”.  At some level it brooks no disagreement, with little or no attempt by the speaker to remain open to argument.  The succinct phrase “Brexit means Brexit”, declared by Britain’s current Prime Minister, Theresa May, I think definitely a Wood person, is a famous illustration of this level of rigid thinking.  This is very much Wood’s way.  Speech, emerging as it does from deep within us, from our soul if you like, must inevitably colour the way in which these windows of our soul, our eyes, look out at us.  Wood’s eyes will be mirroring the firmness of speech, looking very directly at us, as though trying to convince us by the fixedness of their expression that we should accept the world just as it sees it.  Indeed, Wood’s eyes may look so piercingly at us that we may be inclined to look away.  They have a direct, often challenging look as though demanding a response from us.  Later, we will contrast this with Water’s so different look, which tells us quite the reverse, for it constantly asks a question, often a fearful one, its eyes, more uneasy than Wood’s, fixed anxiously upon us or darting here and there.

Wood also very clearly shapes other parts of the face, lending firm outlines to areas like the jaw and the neck and tightness to the mouth.  To help us with a diagnosis, I have found that it is always good to try and replicate an element’s particular expression or movement.  So here, with Wood, we should try to tighten our own jaw and neck muscles, and feel how our mouth starts to be pulled down out of shape.  Such tightness is not natural to me, and if I do this it makes me feel very odd, as if at any moment I might burst out with anger.  “Goodness,” I think to myself, “Is this how Wood often feels?  And, if so, how much pent-up emotion there must be which is forcing the facial muscles to adopt such a rigid mask.”

Fire’s eyes, on the other hand, are not trying to impose a view of the world upon those it looks at.  Instead, they try to engage in a two-way process;  in effect with each person looked at they are attempting to set up a relationship, an offering to the other person.  This is the need behind Fire’s frequent attempts to break into a smile, for smiling at somebody is one of the simplest ways of drawing a person towards you.  The eyes will make very direct contact, as Fire tries to assess whether the person looked at is, put very crudely, friend or foe.  If friend, and it feels safe with them (remember the Heart Protector forms part of Fire and is there to guard the Heart), it will very quickly allow its mouth to break into an easy smile.  If foe, then Fire’s eyes will become more wary and anxious as it tries to work out why the warmth it is offering is being rejected, and even if it feels it has to smile, this will only be a hesitant and tentative shadow of its normally warm smile.  And rejection, for Fire, is the worst thing for the Heart buried in its midst to bear.

 

With Wood, we saw that the lips may clamp shut, causing the jaw and neck muscles to tighten.  Here with Fire, something like the opposite will happen.  If Fire feels safe enough to smile warmly at somebody, its mouth will relax and the lips will curl up at the side.  At the same time, the smiling eyes will form quite clear creases at the side.  These smile lines are one of the most distinctive features of Fire’s face, and will persist long after the need for smiling has passed.  I have checked this out on myself and then on many other Fire faces.  From myself I know that I so enjoy the sensation of being able to smile at somebody, and the glow and warmth this gives to my Heart, that I want this to continue as long as possible.  It is as though I allow myself to go on smiling, long after the need for the smile has passed, because it makes me feel so good.  Having observed this in all Fire people to a greater or lesser extent, and incidentally also having decided that I am rather an extreme example because of my rather selfish enjoyment in smiling, it has become, for me, one of the most reliable indicators to help me diagnose the Fire element.  All elements smile when they are happy, or want to pretend they are happy, but only in Fire do the smile lines around the eyes stay in place long after the smile has faded.   I love warming my own Heart up by smiling, often doing this when I am on my own as my own personal comfort blanket.

 

In my next blog I will look at Earth, Metal and Water.

 

 

 

16. The filter our element lays between us and the world

The more I try to teach people about the elements, the more I realize that over the years I have worked out my own personal, possibly rather idiosyncratic ways of interpreting the signals a patient’s elements are sending me, and using these as clear pointers to a particular element.  I imagine that all experienced five element acupuncturists must do the same.  And none of these pointers will be exactly those of other practitioners, because everything we do and experience is filtered not only through a filter which our guardian element places around us, but a filter with a unique focus reflecting our own unique nature.  Some of the impressions we receive from a patient may have some similarity with those others will experience, but we will each put our own interpretation upon them.

This is why as practitioners we should do all that we can to find out what our own element is, recognize its qualities, make allowances for its weaknesses, and take all these factors into account when dealing with our patients.  This is not an easy task, because we all have a tendency to think that the fault in some uneasy relationships with our patients lies in them not in us.  It is good to remind ourselves at intervals that this is not so.  Often it is the balance of the elements within us, particularly that of our guardian element, which is shaping our relationship to our patient, and perhaps distorting it in some way we are failing to recognize.

I was doing some cooking a few days ago, and poured the cooked spaghetti through a sieve to drain it.  As I was doing this, the thought came to me that each element, like my spaghetti, needs a filter through which life is sieved.  I only have one kitchen sieve, but each element has its own, with its own particular mesh allowing only certain things through.

When our energies become unbalanced, some of these meshes become blocked and can no longer filter what they should. Viewed in this way, treatment for the energy blocks with which any five element practitioner is familiar, such as those for a Husband/Wife imbalance or Entry/Exit blocks, can be seen as shaking the sieve in different ways to allow it to filter what has been blocking it.

I think the concept of the elements as sieves with different-sized meshes is a further rather neat illustration to help me understand what I do.  

 

15. Don't shut the elements up into too small boxes

In our attempt to pin down some of the characteristics of the five elements to help us with our diagnostic skills, there is always a danger that we apply the very broad definitions we have learnt for each element in too rigid a way.  General descriptions, such as that Fire’s emotion is joy, or Earth’s colour is yellow, are all well and good as starting points to help us understand the differences between the elements, but we have to be careful not to regard them as fixed categories.  Instead we should see them as providing us with broad outlines into which we will gradually learn to fit our growing understanding of the elements.  In each of us as unique human beings they meld together to form something far less clear-cut.

Of the four sensory signatures of colour, sound, smell and emotion I always think the most accessible initially are the emotional signs.  The others are likely to be more difficult for us to detect, since our senses tend to become blunted as we grow.  Our emotional sensitivity, however, has to continue to be sufficiently acute throughout life to guide us through the intricacies of human relationships, and this is why we may often concentrate our diagnostic antennae more upon how a patient makes us feel emotionally than upon whether we can detect a specific smell or colour.  With time, of course, our other senses grow sharp enough to help us with our diagnosis, but even now, after 40 years of practice, I find that my first impression of a patient is based upon their emotional impact upon me.  Subsequently, I will draw upon information my other senses give me to add to this. 

At least that is true for me, but may not of course be the same for other five element practitioners.  One of my fellow students at our Leamington College, for example, had a very acute sense of smell, and used his ability to pinpoint a five element smell as the basis for his diagnosis.  Presumably painters must have an acute ability to see colour, and musicians an equally highly-developed sensitivity to sound.  I am neither a painter nor a musician, so I tend to fall back on what I feel is my most developed sensory skill, which is that of recognizing the emotional signals directed at me by my patients. 

Here, too, though, we must beware of relying too heavily upon boxing the elements into too rigid categories.  Something like this is always likely to happen as a result of being told that a particular emotion is assigned to each element.  If we take Wood, for example, whose emotion is described as anger, it becomes all too easy to think that any expression of anger must point to this element, whereas experience will gradually help us understand that each element can express anger in its own way, since every person, whatever their element, has a Liver and a Gall-Bladder, which are Wood’s organs within us.  For example, I am of the Fire element, but can all too often explode with anger, but for very different reasons from those which my Wood or Water friends will express.  Earth’s sense of fear differs from that of Water, Wood, Metal or Fire, just as Metal’s expression of joy differs from that of each of the other elements.

14. The impact an element makes upon us

I like to think of the impact an element makes on me to help me gauge its individual characteristics better.  Each has a different impact.  I think of the word “impact” as a good description of my reaction to a physical force.  We know that everything is formed of force fields.  You only have to move your hands slowly together with your eyes shut to feel the point at which the force field of one hand engages with that of the other, well before the hands physically touch.  In acupuncture terms, we call this force “qi”.  It is that which creates all life and which we manipulate with our needles to help restore health and balance.  It is therefore entirely appropriate that we should experience the approach and presence of another person each time as a kind of physical impact upon us.  If we add to this that extra dimension, that of the qi at the deeper, emotional and spiritual level, then the total impact a person makes upon us can be very striking, and, from a five element acupuncture point of view, very revealing indeed.

The following are some of my observations on how the different elements affect me, and some of the ways I have learnt to help me recognize their signatures, and use these as a help to diagnosis.

When I asked some Wood people what they want of their interaction with others, they all agreed that what they wanted was to “engage” with them.  This is an interesting word.   My dictionary gives it a very active meaning, which includes the sense of battling and grappling with, and is much used in military terminology.  It implies more than just interacting, for there is the sense within it of some kind of a struggle, or, at the very least, pressure from one side against the other.

Impact is a good word to use for the Wood element, because it has to do everything it does with a kind of a push behind it to get itself and all around it going.  To do this requires some effort.  It is not just the result of some smooth transition from a state of quiescence in winter moving towards the full-blow energy of nature at its height in summer.  The impetus necessary to get things moving in spring comes with a kind of a jerk, like the movement in the body requiring a push to set it in motion.

The way such a jolt makes itself felt in us when we are in the presence of Wood is a little like a blow to the solar plexus, slight to strong depending on what action Wood wants to take, and what emphasis it wishes to give any action.  It has taken me a long time to work out a way of dealing with its strong needs.  I tend to go through an initial period of wanting to step away, as though shrinking from the push I feel coming towards me, then I experience a flicker, or more than a flicker, of irritation at feeling that I am being outmanoeuvred in some way, before I finally reach a more balanced stage of understanding, where I know that to help my Wood patient I have to stand firm and, as it were, counter-punch, however gently.  The force I feel behind Wood’s approach to me is far greater than I feel with all the other elements, except in a slightly different way for Water, and is totally absent in one element, Metal. 

Fire, maybe because it is my element, tends to make me relax since I am on familiar terrain and therefore no longer feel under any pressure to react.  It is as though I do not have to put on a mask of any kind, and can be who I really am.  As a practitioner this runs the risk of making things a little too cosy, with a tendency to overlook inevitable areas of tension, in case these disturb the comfortable atmosphere I and my patient are hoping to create for ourselves.  On the other hand, it may be just this atmosphere which makes it easier for a Fire patient to open up to their practitioner in the knowledge that what they reveal will not be misunderstood. 

As I know from my own experience, Fire needs to avoid by any means possible making other people feel vulnerable and judged.  It is also the element which will most quickly assume that any troubles it encounters are its own fault and the result of something it has done wrong.  Because I feel at ease with Fire, I am not as aware as people of other elements might be of the pressure it puts upon me, which makes me feel warm and comfortable.  I welcome its familiar impact, whilst this may well not be the case for people of other elements.  Because this is a very personal reaction I have to think hard and watch carefully how Fire’s interactions with other people unfold.

Earth, on the other hand, exerts strong pressure upon me, but this pressure is more in the nature of a counter-movement.  I am drawn towards Earth as though sucked in by some centrifugal force which I find difficult to resist.  I see this as an expression of Earth’s need to surround itself with others, as though cocooning itself within their protection.  Earth can exert a strong pull, akin to a sucking movement, as though gravity takes hold of me and I cannot escape its grasp.  I became aware for the first time of the pressure exerted by gravity on my body one day as I lay in the bath waiting for the bathwater to drain away.  I could feel my flesh being sucked down to the bottom of the bath, and I could hardly resist this sufficiently to stand up.  It was only through this experience that I understood the strength of gravity’s downwards pull, and by extension, the strength of the Earth element’s pull on those around it.  Where the impact for Wood is very much yang in nature, pushing hard at us away from itself, that of Earth, by contrast, is very much yin in nature, pulling hard at us but towards itself.

With Metal, though, we move almost into a vacuum, reflecting the space which Metal people seek to keep around them and without which they feel threatened and uneasy.  I feel something more insubstantial than a physical pull from Metal.  Instead what I feel is my own unease at being observed almost neutrally.  When we judge people we do this most successfully from a distance, as we stand back and watch.  Metal’s impact upon me is therefore not so much a physical one, as with the other elements, but rather an emotional one, often bringing with it the uneasy feeling that Metal knows something about me which may be to my detriment.  I feel that I am being observed with a cool and clinical eye.  And if I misread the signals Metal is sending me, and step too firmly into its space, it will cut off all connection with me and retreat out of sight.

Water, too, knows how to retreat if it feels under threat, but it retreats not, as Metal does, because its privacy and its need for solitude are being invaded, but because it feels threatened and endangered.  Again, unlike Metal, though, it will not only retreat and try to move away, but it may feel the need to do more to counter whatever is threatening it, and will gather its forces together to counterattack.  Then the apparent passivity which people may attribute to it may turn at the slightest hint of real danger into a truly terrifying attacking force, making the impact Water will have over us the fiercest, most overwhelming of all the elements, as though the placid waters of a pond are transformed within minutes into a devastating tsunami.  Often the onslaught which Water can unleash so suddenly may be ignored until it is too late to counter, which makes it all the deadlier for its very suddenness.  This gives to any attack by Water such a different quality from that of Wood, which comes full force towards us with no attempt at hiding its nature.  Water instead rears its head unexpectedly, and often, as with a tusunami, is only gradually perceived as it silently gathers its strength before inundating us.

Some of the images of the effect of the elements upon me may be difficult to reconcile with the apparently less extreme examples of civilized human behaviour which we encounter in our social interactions, but hidden within even the most apparently harmless human activities lie traces of what I have described above, though probably often well-disguised behind behaviour which is considered socially more acceptable.  Nature “raw in tooth and claw” is a true description of much that goes on under the surface of what would be considered normal, everyday behaviour.

 

 

 

13. The challenges of point selection

During our training we were introduced to the main principles of point selection, which I have always felt stood me in excellent stead, and have underpinned all my work both as practitioner and teacher since then.  Recently, though, I realised that I had taken for granted how much I had adapted these principles over the years of my practice, often without realising I was doing this.  This led me to expand what I had written in my Handbook of Five Element Acupuncture about point selection.  Originally I listed the points for only the first five treatments.  This I now extended to cover the first 15 treatments, because novice five element practitioners have told me that they would welcome further guidance.

As I looked through these treatments I began to realise how much I had adapted the point selection principles I am teaching now to take account of what I recognise to be the individual needs of my patients, so that in effect my point selection is often not truly in line with the very principles I was telling my students they should follow.  Looking in detail at each example of treatment selection, I realised that my choice of points obviously reflect my growing confidence as a practitioner.  So then I have moved on to look at how I actually decide upon a specific treatment, and what has led me to adopt an often more idiosyncratic approach to point selection.  I have taken to observing myself more closely in the practice room to try and work out the thought processes behind my selection of points for a specific patient at a specific time, and I realise that my selections have much to do with my assessment of how my patients present themselves.  As practitioners we become acutely aware of how a patient feels to us, of how the energies flowing from the patient towards us are impacting upon us, and how far this impact is resonating with what we have learnt about our responses to one or other element.

We are trained to observe our patients with all our emotional and sensory antennae on full alert, aware that we have to interpret what they are conveying to us in a remarkably short period of time between the few minutes of our initial interaction with them and the time when we lift a needle to treat.  JR Worsley would joke that you only need a few minutes to treat a patient:  one minute to decide which element is crying out for treatment, one to do the treatment and the last minute to say goodbye.  The less experienced practitioner amongst us will take far longer than this, but my own experience of more than 35 years’ practice tells me that it takes me an increasingly shorter time to decide what treatment to give.  Often I seem to register quickly that the patient may be showing signs of a Husband/Wife imbalance or there is a need for an AE drain.  I will also be quick to see when they look well and require only the slightest nudge to their element before I can send them on their way.  What I am aware of, therefore, is that I have lost much, if not all, of the worry any novice practitioner will have about trusting my senses to tell me a great deal surprisingly quickly about my patient’s needs, and this usually happens well before I have listened to what the patients have to say or have taken their pulses.  In other words, I allow my understanding of how the elements are manifesting themselves in my patients to lead me to assess quickly what impact they are having upon me, and then for me to decide what treatment is likely to be needed.

In the early years of their practice, five element practitioners need to learn the general principles which underpin point selection, but with practice each practitioner will gradually learn to allow themselves some latitude in how to apply them, as their understanding of their patients’ needs develops.  My mantra of “think elements, not points” has stayed true for me at every stage of my practice, but my experience has led me to see that “thinking elements” means that we become increasingly adept at assessing an element’s needs and thus adapting our point selection to satisfy those needs. This means that, as with all principles, we must allow ourselves a surprising degree of flexibility in adapting these principles to specific practice situations. Both as teachers and as students we have to accept that point selection, far from being a prescriptive science with rigid rules of application, is instead an art dependent on the practitioner’s ability to adapt these principles flexibly to fit a patient’s unique needs at any particular time.  Just as there is nothing rigidly fixed about how energy courses through all nature bringing life to each of us, so there must be nothing rigid in a five element practitioner’s approach to encouraging these elemental energies to greater balance through our choice of points to do this work.

As with the teaching of any skill, time and much patience is always needed for a practitioner to learn their craft and to gain enough experience to dare trust that their own level of understanding permits them to start “doing their own thing” in terms of their practice.  It has however always comforted me to know that none of my patients has ever reacted badly to any treatment I have given.  They may of course suffer the temporary discomfort caused by to the appearance of some block or other, which forms a necessary and natural part of each treatment, quickly dealt with.  The worst that can happen is for patients to experience no change at all, even after a succession of treatments, and I always see this as a failure on my part to assess their needs accurately.  Whatever points we select to treat our patients, we can be sure that a little bit of variety and possibly a bit of daring in our point selection can do no harm, and can incidentally also help to keep us on our toes.