A Five Element Legacy

Nora Franglen

• Publisher: Singing Dragon
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780857013583
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Acupuncture

Explore Nora Franglen's insights derived from decades of practice as a five element acupuncturist in this new collection. Covering tips on patient care and the patient-practitioner relationship to advice on a deeper understanding of the elements, of the healing practice, and of humanity's links to nature, the book also touches on the spiritual aspects of the work and the need for self-awareness in the practitioner.

For acupuncturists and Chinese medicine practitioners, or anyone interested in the healing arts, this book is full of useful guidance.

PART 1

A LIFETIME OF
FIVE ELEMENT
ACUPUNCTURE

CHAPTER 1

BECOMING A FIVE ELEMENT
ACUPUNCTURIST

In all the 35 or more years of my practice as a five element acupuncturist I have never for a moment doubted the profound truth of the fundamental principles underlying that practice, the knowledge that the ancient Chinese concepts of the Dao, yin yang and the five elements were symbols not only for the great forces guiding the universe, but at a much more human level also the energies pouring through us from that universe and creating each one of us, body and soul. When I sat in class on the first day of my acupuncture training, and, appropriately for me personally, heard about the Fire element, with at its centre the Heart official, I remember saying to myself exultingly, ‘Yes!’, for I seemed for the first time to have heard a language spoken, that of the elements, which explained life to me in a way I could immediately understand.

The three years of my undergraduate training have remained for me a highlight of my life, a time of the greatest discovery, not only of those universal forces flowing through me, which helped explain my amazing reaction to my first treatment, but how these forces could be channelled into offering patients the ability to lead fulfilling lives, true to their individual destinies. I learnt that they could also become so overburdened by stresses too strong for them to deal with by themselves that they could succumb to disease of body or soul. I learnt that the acupuncture needle in the hands of a caring practitioner could become an instrument of healing, offering a therapy devised some thousands of years earlier in ancient China and still miraculously in practice today based on the same ancient principles. These three years were to be dedicated to helping me take my place amongst the ranks of thousands of acupuncturists stretching far back in time. I felt this was an awesome inheritance that I was privileged to share.

It has taken me many years of my own attempts at teaching the principles of five element acupuncture truly to recognise what an extraordinary teacher JR Worsley was, and how inspired he was to work his way from being a novice practitioner in the early 1960s to formulating the principles on which the current huge edifice of five element acupuncture was gradually built up over the years. I regard the course I followed in the 1980s as being a remarkable example of how to distil down to their essentials very complex concepts. Even now, after all these years, I can fault no single aspect of the training I received. In the simplest, most comprehensive way possible we learnt about the elements and their officials, slowly, one after the other. We were given to understand that the qualities of these elements had been handed down since time immemorial in one of the oldest of Chinese medical and philosophical texts, the Neijing Suwen. We learnt to observe the workings of the elements in nature, our assignments taking us outside to observe nature at work during the different seasons, our senses instructed to see, smell, hear and feel what before they might have been too dull to perceive. And, of course, we were helped to see our fellow human beings in different ways, gradually teaching ourselves to recognise the workings of the different elements within each one of us.

This is when I first encountered the concept that for some reason we cannot fathom, so mysterious it is, that each human being has a particularly close relationship to one element. This fact can be seen as constituting the basis of our individuality as human beings, giving to each of us the specific characteristics of one particular element. This mark of individuality singles our species out from any other, except perhaps to a much lesser degree some domestic animals, who any animal lover will say show traces of individual characteristics. JR Worsley called this the element of the causative factor of disease, abbreviated for many years to its two initials, the CF. As its name suggests, this dominant element is the first to weaken under sustained stress, and allow disease to invade. Implicit, though, is the understanding that when it is in balance this particular element is also a power for good, leading us smoothly forward in life towards a future defined by this element. I rather audaciously renamed it the guardian element, a term which echoes that of ‘guardian angel’. I see it as something which hovers over us to protect and guide us, and it is my strong belief that this element does indeed take on the role of guardian. Initially I called it this quietly to myself, then I started using the name in my teaching and in my writing, so that now I realise it has been adopted quite generally by other five element practitioners.

This element shapes each of our lives, in a profound sense endowing us with the gift of a personal, unique destiny. Somebody for whom Metal is the dominant element, for example, has their life marked at each point by the characteristic desires and needs of the Metal element. This Metal person’s approach to life will differ at a profound level from that of a Fire or a Wood person, each element giving the life it dominates its characteristic qualities. Some characteristics of the other four elements which cluster around it in different degrees of importance will also modify this element’s influence to some extent, since we are formed of all five elements. The result of this unique intermingling of the strengths of each element within us will eventually imprint each of us with a unique template of elemental influences, making us who we are and unlike any other. I have called this unique elemental imprint the equivalent in element terms of a unique genetic imprint.

I had proof from my own treatment that the philosophical basis of five element acupuncture was valid and true. My Fire element had responded immediately and powerfully to treatment aimed at strengthening it. I felt that I was ‘more myself’. As many of my patients have since told me after successful treatment, I felt that I now ‘knew who I was’. Being convinced from evidence in myself that each of us had a dominant element, as students we then had the difficult task of honing senses which had become atrophied over the years. We had to practise looking at the colour of people’s skin, smelling their bodies (smelling our own after some stressful physical exercise was a good way to start), listening to their voices, and trying to perceive their emotional needs. All the time we were encouraged to delve deep within ourselves to see the workings of our own element, once this had been diagnosed through our own treatment, hopefully by the most experienced five element acupuncturist of them all, JR Worsley, as many of our students were. I, too, was fortunate to have such a diagnosis during my training, which confirmed my original acupuncturist’s diagnosis.

By the time we left the Leamington college after our three years there, we were ready to practise and help others, so straightforward and focused on only the essentials had been our training. During this time I had gone through many periods of self-doubt. ‘What makes me think that I am qualified to help others?’ ‘Have I sufficient emotional maturity to deal appropriately with other people’s problems?’ At a more basic level, ‘Do I have the manual dexterity to manipulate the needles appropriately?’ and, more pertinently, and perhaps most importantly for me personally, ‘Will I be able to cope with inflicting any pain my needling might cause?’ After yet another clumsy attempt at shaping a small moxa cone to the required size, I well remember my tutor telling me that I had to improve this skill quickly if she was to pass me fit to go into the final, clinical year when we were to start treating patients.

I am not naturally very dexterous with my fingers, so I still find it ironic that I have spent the last more than 35 years of my life using them as sensitive instruments of healing. What I did find during my training, though, was that I was absolutely fascinated, and remain it to this day, by the truths lying behind what I was learning. Manual dexterity, or the lack of it in my case, was as nothing compared with the thrill of gradually working out ways to relate to a patient, beginning to perceive the imprint of an element in them, and then helping restore them to health.

Here the first practice diagnosis I carried out at the start of my second year became a catalyst for a change in my approach to what I was doing. As I left the volunteer patient’s home on that day after my few hours with her I remember the joyful feeling inside me of at last seeing my life heading in such a worthwhile direction. For somehow I found that I had developed the skill, or perhaps had it already in embryonic form inside me, to enable me to ask the right questions in the right way, and to listen to the answers in the right way so that this woman had felt safe enough to reveal all kinds of things about her life which she said that she had told nobody about before. I acknowledged that my moxa rolling skills left a lot to be desired, and even now I think they are not as good as 35 years’ practice should have made them, but my ability to empathise seemed to make up for this.

There was also the beautiful moment during my time with this volunteer patient when I began to see clear signs of the Wood element peeping through what she said and how she was saying it. I realised that I had started to direct my questions in a certain way, attempting to see whether this could confirm the direction towards the Wood element which my questioning seemed to be taking me. And I hoped that it wasn’t too soon in the development of my sensory skills for me to think that her voice had the kind of forceful edge which I had been taught was one of Wood’s characteristics. I was not yet skilled enough, though, to manage to perceive any particular skin colour or smell any particular smell.

This first encounter with a real live volunteer patient at the start of the second year of my course set me truly on the way, and was a turning point in my training. It became the first time that I realised that I had at last found myself a calling worthy of its name, and that I might begin to be worthy of this calling. Up till then, to the surprise of all the other students in my class, I had not really had a sufficiently high opinion of myself to consider myself to be the right kind of person to be an acupuncturist. Unlike all my fellow students, I found, I had decided to start the course because I was fascinated to learn more about something that had so profoundly altered me. Rather oddly perhaps, actually becoming a practising acupuncturist had been far from my mind. The other students did not seem to share my doubts that they might not be suited for this calling. So to find myself in my second year only then beginning to see where this course was leading me was both a great surprise and a relief. Perhaps after all this was a calling that I was more suited to than I had originally thought.

My progress through the different stages of my learning, from undergraduate through to postgraduate level, was at each phase accompanied by some welcome affirmation of my own qualities that helped me gain increasing confidence in my abilities as acupuncturist. The most heart-warming and overwhelming of these was JR Worsley saying to my advanced training class: ‘Watch Nora with her patients. That is how you should do it.’ The clapping in the classroom as I returned to it after being observed through a two-way screen handling a very distraught patient of mine stays with me to this day, as a reminder of one of the most moving experiences of my life as an acupuncturist. I felt then that my feet were firmly on a path towards a rewarding future.

CHAPTER 2

THE DIFFERENT PHASES OF
MY ACUPUNCTURE LIFE

If I look back at what I have so far achieved in that large part of my life dedicated to acupuncture, what I am most aware of is the extraordinary conjunction of what at first seemed to me to be quite fortuitous happenings which have accompanied the whole of my time in acupuncture, and which taken together have pointed me almost inexorably in the direction of becoming an acupuncturist, and then tethered me firmly there, as though bound to something from which I could no longer free myself, and certainly no longer wished to free myself.

There was an inevitability to the progression from my presence at a party where I met a five element acupunc-turist, to deciding to have some treatment from him, a treatment which I was told was for body and spirit. And it was to the word spirit I was drawn. It resonated with some unexpressed need deep inside me, and beckoned me with little resistance on to the treatment couch and my first encounter with the needles.

I was surprised that my acupuncturist was so interested in finding out the details of my life, with all its troubles and joys. Instead of needles in my ear, which I had come to expect from seeing acupuncture on TV, they were gently inserted into my back (an Aggressive Energy drain, of course), followed by some more on my hands before I was free to leave. And this is where I can see with hindsight that that part of my life which was from then on to be lived in the company of acupuncture was blessed from the very start, for I was granted the effects of a first treatment that not many of those I have since treated over the years have been given, an overwhelming, totally unexpected reaction which set my life without warning on a completely new path. For I woke the next morning a completely different person. Something had happened inside me, something I could not explain to myself, but which I knew without any shadow of doubt had changed me in some profound way. It was good for me that I was able to experience in myself confirmation of the efficacy of acupuncture. I had no preconceptions of what treatment might do for me, and I needed some such startling proof in order to jolt me so abruptly and turn my life into quite a new direction.

So what exactly did I experience and how did it convince me that here was something, to me then inexplicable, which I felt I had to get to the bottom of and understand? I was, after all, a doctor’s daughter, with my whole life till then steeped in the world of Western medicine, the world of the rational and the scientific. I could find no explanation in this world for the changes I experienced the day after my first treatment. And the very words I used to describe these changes were themselves alien and unfamiliar to me. I told myself that a completely different person had awoken the following morning, somebody I could hardly recognise. It was as though this person had suddenly found herself in a new landscape, one in which she felt as though roots grew out of the ground attaching her to the soil beneath her feet. I remember wanting to take my shoes off and walk on the grass. I felt that I now belonged to a different world, one which I knew I was part of, as though before I had become detached from it and unaware of my connections to it.

I was not then, and never have been, a fanciful person. Thoughts such as these did not come easily to me, and, though almost overwhelmed by the power of the images chasing through my brain, I knew that I was experiencing something profound and true. I felt compelled to follow where this new path seemed to be pointing, so I enrolled swiftly into an acupuncture course in Leamington, for no other reason than because this was where my acupuncturist had studied. And again, the original blessing of encountering acupuncture laid another hand of welcome upon me, for I soon realised that this college was the only place to give me what I so earnestly sought – a new understanding of life and, with it, a new vocation. It led me into the world of the five elements, one imbued with the spirit of JR Worsley, its founder, whom I eventually came to regard as my master. That I should have found myself on the first day of my course walking into a building then dedicated in its entirety to a study of the five elements and their application to the healing of the sick in spirit and body proved yet another fortunate step by offering me a calling which satisfied a great need in me to fulfil myself.

Once having experienced such profound changes in myself, I could not hold myself back from seeking to offer to as many people as I could what I had myself experienced. It was fortunate that the time of my enrolment coincided with what I later came to realise was the late flowering of five element acupuncture’s influence in acupuncture education in this country, overlapping as it did with the last years when JR Worsley was still in charge and taught at his college. After qualification there then came the period of my training which I regard as its highlight, my postgraduate work, where I was privileged to sit at the feet of JR Worsley, and to form part of the last postgraduate cohort passing through his hands before his resignation from his Leamington college. I finished my Masters course with him at exactly the time at which his association with the college he had founded came to an abrupt, unhappy end. This was when the hand of modern Chinese acupuncture started to reach over to this country, and to cast its shadow over the traditional forms of acupuncture which were so far being taught here. Amongst other things its effect was to have a negative influence on the British acupuncture establishment’s opinion of five element acupuncture. JR Worsley decided to resign from his college because he could not accept the introduction of this form of modern Chinese acupuncture into its training, something he strongly felt would dilute the purity of the five element principles that he had put together so skillfully for many years.

These developments in the world of acupuncture therefore placed my beloved five element acupuncture almost on a collision course with what appeared to have become the consensus of acupuncture opinion in this country at the time. The acupuncture world seemed almost uncritically to welcome the principles of modern Chinese acupuncture, which then started to flood into this country and around the world, and persuaded many to turn away from the traditional form of acupuncture which I practised, consigning it to an inferior role and often removing it altogether from the curriculum of acupuncture colleges. Having understood, as I had learnt to do, that five element acupuncture was a complete discipline in itself, I could not accept a judgement that denied it its rightful place.

This ushered in my decision to fight for the survival of five element acupuncture by founding my own college, the School of Five Element Acupuncture (SOFEA), with active support and encouragement from JR Worsley, leading, on the one hand, to 12 years of rewarding work guiding my students through their three years of study, whilst, with my other hand, fighting off those, often from other acupuncture colleges apparently threatened by my unequivocal support for five element acupuncture, wh...