Five Element Acupuncture

Five Element Foundations

At CTA, we offer students the opportunity to embrace a hugely rewarding and life-enriching learning experience, the traditional practice of Five Element Acupuncture.

Five element acupuncture is among acupuncture’s most sophisticated lineages, assessing and supporting each person’s unique balance in body, mind and spirit. This unique balance is expressed in a tendency to over-rely on one of our five elements, of fire, earth, metal, water and wood. These elements are reflected in oriental medicine in many ways; in the senses, the organ networks of the heart, spleen, lungs, kidneys and liver and in the channels of chi energy across the body (the meridians).

For each of us one of these five elements will be our constitutional Achilles heel that underpins our health and illness and becomes manifest in that backache, tiredness, infertility or depression. The elements are reflected in nature, in the seasons, landscape and climate. Many of us instinctively know which of these elements heal us most: Fire’s sun-warmed beaches in Summer, Earth’s nourishment at Harvest, Metal’s fresh mountain air of Autumn, Water’s natural spas in Winter or Wood’s quiet groves in Spring.

Five element acupuncture has been taught by CTA (The College of Traditional Acupuncture) since the 1970s. Professor JR Worsley brought the teachings he received in the far East to establish one of the longest established acupuncture teaching institutions in the Western World.

Five element acupuncture’s historical lineage is characterised by a particular attention to the Chinese medical classic the Huang Di Nei Jing (The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine) and by an emergence from South-East Asia’s off-shore islands of Taiwan and Japan.

Acupuncture lineages are wide and varied, and different dynasties have found more or less favour with both acupuncture as a whole (it was banned in 19th century China) and with styles of acupuncture (holistic acupuncture, treating mind, body and spirit, began to be marginalised during the cultural revolution of the 1950s).  Such vagaries of history have led, in part, to the themes of five element acupuncture being preserved in the off-shore islands at various points in Chinese history.

Today, this powerful lineage is playing its part as acupuncture has become a global medicine, participating in our wider debates about medicine, of healthcare access and individual empowerment.
 

Five Elements - One Medicine

Five element acupuncture has always retained the ancient wisdom that our health depends upon our relationship with the elements. Its complex understanding of how we stay well and can fall ill enables practitioners to go to the heart of what ails us and to support the momentum of our ongoing healing. It is the role of the five element acupuncturist to decode the complex and varied range of diagnostic signs and symptoms present in each of us in order to design a course of treatment that effectively restores this balance.

Five element acupuncture constantly seeks a restoration of balance rather than just chasing symptoms or illnesses. Its core medical insight is that the deepest and most extensive healing is one that reaches our body, mind and spirit in their totality. It does this by addressing the rhythm of our energies, expressed as the elements, the seasons within us. It seeks the one point in our internal rhythms that will transform all others. Our immunity, tinnitus, anxieties, joint pain or migraines are all treated directly by this attention to our whole experience. Five element acupuncture’s constant quest is for the rhythm of the seasons within us, and the transformation that will answer the deepest needs of our body, mind and spirit.