Seasons and Weather: Integrating 5 & 8

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Seasons and Weather Audio

Seasons and Weather Audio Transcript

SEASONS AND WEATHER

Now that we know about Eight and Five, we can talk more about how they interrelate, and about the relationship of Eight Principles to Five Elements. The herbs, as we mentioned before, proceed diagnostic language. They do what they do. You can talk about them from the consciousness of any number; you can apply any map to the territory, and the herbs are still going to do what it is that they do. They are a pre-intellectual reality, and then we make up theories in order to be able to talk and to teach about them. 

I mentioned, for instance, how Sun Ssi Mao, from his Buddhist perspective, came up with a formula that helps with the pain of attachment to transient reality. Communist China, with a different frame of reference, a different map, says it’s for arthritis that comes and goes when the weather changes. 

The formula didn’t change. It still did exactly what it always did, and we came up with a different language—the language of Five, the language of Eight, the language of hoo-ha, whatever it is that we come up with. 

Ultimately, an herb does what it does, and there are ways of speaking about it in Five Element terms, and ways of speaking about it in Eight Principle terms. So why not speak about it in all terms? 

How is this useful?  I like to say that everybody has a Five Element destiny, and an Eight Principle excuse. Basically, everybody has a health, and everybody has an illness; that I’ve met, anyhow. Everybody has a destiny—a shining potential of who you were born to be—and everybody has some excuse or reason why they are not fulfilling that potential. 

There’s who you are, and there’s how you are. 

Who you are, your CF, your essential nature, doesn’t change. At least theoretically, if you’re a Water CF, you’re a Water CF, you’ve always been one, you always will be one. You actualize the potential of it over the years; you evolve to the fullness of it. But that’s not the same as changing it. You still are who you were in your essential nature, who you were when you were three. That’s who you are now. When you’re 70, that’s the same as now, and as when you were three; that’s the CF. 

The Eight Principle diagnosis is what changes, all the time. You’re damp for years, then you move to the Sahara and soon you become dry. You go back to Florida again, and after another however many years or months, you’re damp. 

The Eight Principle diagnosis is what changes; the Five Element diagnosis is what stays the same. Or you could say the CF is the bullseye, the potential of what you could be if you are being totally perfectly healthily yourself, and the Eight Principle diagnosis is how you’re off from the bullseye, how you’re missing the mark. 

Every good practitioner is implicitly treating both; they really are. Once you get off Source points, and you’re choosing what you’re going to do, you’re no longer treating just who the person is; you’re treating how they are today. Why are you doing this rather than that? It’s because of some way in which they’re off, that you’re trying to nudge them back on. The distinctions that you need to make, even if you don’t have the words for them, are Eight Principle distinctions. You’re not just abiding in ecology anymore; you’re asking what’s the pattern of how the person is off true. 

For a TCM practitioner—and remember that TCM is not the same as 8 Principle; TCM is a communist, modern day packaging of things that are 8 Principle in their basis—even if you are TCM practitioner treating Liver invading Spleen, there’s a subtle weighting towards the “Liver invading” or towards the “invaded Spleen” side of it. How you make your choices is not just about where the person is at; you’re always weighting it in some way towards who the person actually is, in their fundamental nature, i.e., what is the health that they are trying to get back to, not just what’s the problem. 

Every good practitioner is doing both, anyway, and what we are talking about here is making explicit what the Five people only make half explicit and the Eight people only make the other half explicit. We have words in the Five Element tradition to talk about the health, and we have words in the Eight Principle tradition to talk about the illness, but we’re really always working with both.

FIVE ELEMENTS, FIVE TRANSFORMATIONS

I’m going to first talk about the Five Element health part of it—the Five Healths—and we do that in terms of the Confucian transformations of virtue. This is harkening back to the highest level of herbalism mentioned in the Shen Nong Ben Cao, the level of herbalism that’s about more than just getting rid of your symptoms or keeping you healthy. It’s about your highest potential, given your natural endowment. 

Another way of saying it is, given where I habitually fall from the Tao, what route back to the Tao makes it worth having fallen, and worth having suffered, worth having been ill? The central transformation of virtue of each of the elements is what makes it worthwhile to have fallen from the Tao, and it is the route back. 

Let’s take a look at these five transformations. 

WOOD

In Wood, the transformation of virtue is from anger to benevolence. It’s so hard to translate words… The word could be benevolence, or could be visionary creativity. It’s a movement from “not fair!” to creative solution. You start out angry. A concern with injustice is the first motivating force. But the person who starts out saying “Hey! that’s not right!” is the one who has a shot at coming up with a solution. You can’t come up with a solution until you’ve discovered that there’s a problem. Only a person who has anger (which means that their soul even noticed that there was a problem), or that there was an injustice, is going to be the one who comes up with the new way, the new vision of how to do things. 

Benevolence is when the entire community benefits from someone who goes from anger to vision; from recognition of the problem to the creation of a solution. Benevolence is not just being nice; it’s not “Oh, would you like another pillow for the sofa?” It’s the invention of the telephone, or the discovery of penicillin, or Paul Revere’s ride, or all the people who have responded to something not being right with a visionary action. King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table going out there and using would-be war energy to right wrongs. Set the community at rights. 

What the transformation of virtue is about for Wood is starting wherever you are in your process with anger, and transforming that energy into benevolence/creative vision. This is what all of the herbs and all the formulas that touch Wood are about, is saying, “Okay, you’ve got Wood here, but what kind?”

There are a thousand and one different ways to be messed up in your relationship with anger—and to help you come back to the bullseye, to come back to the true potential of Wood, which is to be the creative visionary who sees the solution. How do I get perspective and rise through this, and find a whole other way of doing things that’s going to benefit everyone, instead of just going, “Aaagh, it’s not right!” Whether it’s lack of anger, festering anger, or frizzling anger, all of these different types of anger are a different pattern of disharmony, waiting to move from there to visionary benevolence, to 3-space with life. 

METAL

Metal. It’s hard to translate these things, so sometimes I choose several different words. Metal is the transformation from grief to righteousness, or as it is sometimes said, to appreciation. Ted Kaptchuk translates it as beauty or justice, but it’s not the justice of Wood. The justice of Wood is the two lawyers, the prosecution and the defense. The justice of Metal is the judge who sits in between the two. You could call it the “just is.” 

I translate it as impartiality. This is the justice of the judge: the impartiality before what is. That’s the righteousness and the appreciation. How it is. Grief is the ground floor of this. Grief, you could say, is the stance of “I know what perfection is, and this isn’t it.” Grief is an acute sense of cosmic perfection not manifesting, the same way that anger is an acute sense of justice not manifesting. I know perfection, and this isn’t it. That’s grief.

The transformation to righteousness, appreciation, just is, beauty, comes from the ability to accept that what is, is perfect—that the way that things are falling out is bigger than our personal preference. 

I remember for myself when I lost a child partway through a pregnancy, and was completely wrecked over it for about two and a half years. I had a very hard time with it, a very deep grief. The resolution of the grief came from this place of recognition that one in four first pregnancies ends in miscarriage. It became no longer personal in a way. It wasn’t a tragedy; it was something that happens, and I didn’t like it. It wasn’t my idea of perfection, but it is held within the cosmos in a much larger sort of perfection. 

This is the righteousness, the beauty, the transformation, the appreciation, the impartiality, of Metal. It’s not about my idea of perfect; it’s about the universe’s idea of perfect. I’m here and I’m involved, and I’m appreciating that there is no other perfection than this. This is the only possible perfection. That’s righteousness. It’s not resignation; it’s not not caring. It doesn’t come easy. None of the virtues come easy. If it came easy, then it’s not impartiality; it’s grief denial. All of these virtues, you come in at the ground floor. 

The formulas that are for Metal are going to help a person wherever they are in their process with grief, and help them move to that place of inhale-exhale, “just is,” to be able to appreciate, to be able to stand as “Yes, this is the perfection.” 

WATER

Water is the transformation from fear to wisdom. Not knowledge. Knowledge is not the same as wisdom. You could actually say that it’s the opposite of wisdom. Wisdom has to do with darkness. It has to do with those times when there is no right answer. This is not knowable, what to do about your fifteen-year old. There is no a right answer;  there is no knowledge possible here. You are in the dark, and the right thing to do in this situation is unknowable, except by hindsight. 

Wisdom comes from the acute awareness of how much, that is of vital importance, is not known. That gives rise to the fear first, as we realize how much that is really important, we don’t know. Uh-oh. But the wisdom comes from staying with that; the longer you stay in that place of acute awareness of how much you don’t know, it leads to the ability to negotiate in those kinds of territories rather well. Wisdom is the ability to move well with the current, with no vision, to negotiate situations that are not knowable. It’s like being in the ocean in the dark, and having to figure out whether the tide is going in or going out, so that you know which way to swim.

It’s very different, this wisdom and this knowing which direction to go. It’s not the same as the boldness of the Wood, which is the boldness to make the move after it’s clear which way to go. This is what it takes to make the move before it’s clear, which is a whole other order of nerve, to go in whatever direction. 

I think you’re going to be meeting my husband Tom Gentile, at some point. He’s a very good negotiate-in-the-darkness person. It’s why I think he’s a good clinical supervisor. He’ll say to you, “Well, you don’t know. I don’t know either.” He has an incredible ability to be able to relax in the place of “I have no clue what to do here,” and not to run from that moment. From having not run from the moment of cluelessness so often, he comes to a place of “Okay, I’m comfortable enough in the unknown to say, ‘Well, what do we do when we don’t know?’ and get somewhere that’s worth going.” That’s very different than “I know what to do.” That’s a much wiser place that comes from deeply listening, to feel out where things are headed, where it’s not knowable. 

EARTH

Earth could be translated as the movement from sympathy to sympathy, but it’s two different characters. The transformation is from pensiveness, self-pity-type sympathy. The character shows a box with an X in it, which both means a brain and an agricultural field that’s being worked, over the heart. It’s mulling, pensiveness. 

This transforms to something translated variously as fidelity, integrity, sincerity, loyalty, dependability, or sympathy again, but this time, the character shows: over the heart, there’s a person walking, and an eye watching them and a mouth speaking words. It basically means that you walk your talk; that who you say you are, who you think you are, and who you are (under scrutiny) is the same.

Fidelity, integrity, sincerity, loyalty, dependability, sympathy. You don’t just say, oh, you poor thing. You actually help out. “Oh, that must be so hard for you lying there in that ditch.” If that’s really how you feel about it, help me out. You don’t just say “Oh, I’m having such a hard time with my roommate, I can’t stand it . . .”  Well, what are you going to do about that? It’s about going from some kind of round and round, churny mode to walking your talk, make it concrete, and fleshing out what you are thinking in the real world. 

Certain kinds of very highbrow abstract, philosophical, mathematical, scientific, or sociological, ivory tower academic thinking also goes under Earth pathology. Does this grow corn? Does this make anybody’s neighborhood better? Walk your talk. Where does it hit the ground, where is the embodiment? Where is the pumpkin? Where is the flesh, the embodiment that comes from this? Elizabeth Rochat de la Vallée says, “All thought that does not lead to concrete result is pathological.” Don’t till the earth unless you are growing a pumpkin.

If you say that you are concerned, do something. Not just whining, not just ingratiating, not just mulling, not just worrying. Really being there for someone in need, walking your talk.

Intention, also. It’s not just what you have in mind; it’s what you are embodying. Intention is the power of earth, yi. It’s not an abstraction; it’s in your mind and it’s coming through your body. Thought, body, unity. This is Earth, the strength of Earth. 

All of the Earth formulas are about wherever you are at with this separation of thought and embodiment. Spinning your wheels, round and round in mud, not being able to think of a thing, or many other possibilities to this concrete, solid movement between the thought and the flesh, the embodiment. 

FIRE

Fire’s transformation is from joy to propriety. Who needs virtues like that?! I hear that, and I don’t want to go from joy to propriety. All the others sounded pretty good, but to go from joy, to propriety? Wait, does she have those backwards? Is that a typo? 

Once again, translation is a little tough here. It’s hard. It’s not what you think. It is actually a really lovely transformation; it’s really good. Joy here is the character Xi, which is a state of excitation that leads to scattering, and that makes you very out of touch with the details of here and now. This state –– woohoo! 

I used to live in a great house for parties, so we had a lot of parties. I used to tell every single person, as they came, please not to step on the flowers, especially these two flower beds around the outside of the house. 

Every single time, every single flower had been trampled on, because it was a really good party. Everybody was just doing whatever they were doing, and you ripped your shirt, and stepped on the flower, whatever, all kinds of stuff. Because of that state of excitation when people are that high on life, they don’t notice where they are putting their feet. They have no idea that they are dancing right through a magnolia bush.  This is why in Chinese, this same character for joy is the same character for nervousness and anxiety, which is also a state of excitation leading to scatteredness.

Xi is being scattered and jumpy and not fully aware of the details of your surroundings, making lots of mistakes, oh the mistakes… We make a lot of mistakes when we are nervous, or when we’re head over heels in love. This is when the crazy things happen, because we are out of touch with the details of here and now. We are not congruent with here and now, and this is why propriety is so much better. 

Propriety, real propriety, real politeness or ritual (the character is Le) is not Miss Manners. It’s not an invitation to uptightness; it’s not refraining from having a good time. One of my favorite examples of propriety is a friend of mine who knows exactly the moment to scream on the dance floor, to set the entire room start screaming. He goes, “Aaaaeeeeh!”, and the next thing you know, everybody’s going “Aaaaeeeeeeh!” That’s propriety. 

Propriety is when you are so in tune with the environment, and so in tune with the moment, that you are the Heart; you are the Emperor. You channel the heavenly mandate, then and there. When you are the Heart, when you are channeling the heavenly mandate because you are so in touch with everything that’s happening here and now, every move is perfect; every word is golden. It’s that feeling of being totally on. You are so connected to here and now that with every heartbeat, you are tuned into the heartbeat of this group, of this class, of this whatever-it-is. Of course! Whatever you say, it’s going to be right on the beat, and it’s going to be the right thing to say.  

That’s propriety; it’s getting it right, because you are so in touch, because you are right here, because you are really connected. It’s the perfection of the 2 space, the perfection of Fire. It’s an amazing feeling, when you are in that space of “It’s working!” It’s working because you are totally here now, and in touch with everything else that is here and now. It’s so much better than all the giddy jumping around that sometimes passes for joy. 

Yes, all of the Fire formulas are about moving from some place of scattering and not making that contact, to being totally here, totally now, totally connected, so that everything is just right. 

These are the Five Element destinies, so bless your deepest pathologies; they are your only hope of redemption. These are the CF virtues. They are the virtues that most exalt us if we cultivate them. In other words, if you are a Wood CF, cultivate the visionary benevolence; if you are a Metal CF, cultivate the righteousness, or impartiality or just is, et cetera. 

It’s the same with your Withins. The elements in which you have the most so-called pathology are the ones in which you have the most opening for the potential of the virtue. They are also the virtues that we will be the most ill if we don’t cultivate. 

So that’s all speaking of the bullseye, of the apex of the mountain, the Five Element destiny. 

Now let’s talk about some excuses. 

EIGHT PRINCIPLES: THE WEATHER

Basically, Five Element tells you about what season it is inside somebody. The Eight Principle diagnosis tells you what the weather is like that day. It really is simple like that. The books by Maciocia made it seem much more complicated, but basically all the Eight Principle information is also out there in nature. Technically you don’t need a book; you need to spend a lot of time outdoors—in every season, in every weather, all over the world. If you do that—spend time outdoors in every season all over the world—you’ll get the Eight Principle stuff as well as the Five Elements stuff. 

Five Element is learning to recognize the seasons of the year and the human soul. Eight Principle and patterns of disharmony is learning to recognize the weather patterns in the human soul and human body. 

There is weather in every season. You will not find a single day in any season that doesn’t have weather of some kind.  There is no contradiction; these are two different maps. Eight Principle looks out and says, “It’s raining.” Five Element looks out and says, “It’s Autumn.” 

Okay, it’s Autumn and it’s raining. It’s different to have an Autumn where it’s raining, than an Autumn where it’s dry. It’s different to have an Autumn when it’s raining versus a Springtime when it’s raining. It’s an agriculturally-based system. It’s equally important what season it is, and what the weather has been lately. 

Being in nature and getting the energetic of different kinds of weather is going to be very helpful with this. I’m going to give you a lot of the book stuff also because you probably haven’t spent most of your life traveling all over the world sitting outside in the weather. We’ll be connecting it to the different Zang/Fu patterns. 

One of the really nice things that the Zang/Fu folks have done for us is spend a lot of time looking at the correspondences on the physical level of the different weather patterns. Historically, the patterns of disharmony were not just physical;  it’s a body-mind-spirit thing; what dampness is like in the spirit, what dampness is like in the mind, what dampness is like in the body. It’s all on the same continuum of correspondences.

That’s all part of the Eight Principle and Zang/Fu heritage. TCM is something that is a particular packaging of Chinese medicine that owes a great deal to the Eight Principles and Zang/Fu patterns of disharmony, but the Communists put it together, and Communism is dialectical materialism. They stuck with the physical level, so a lot of the spirit of the Eight Principle and Zang/Fu diagnostic were left out as irrelevant. They’re not talking about transformations of virtue; they’re talking about transformation of phlegm and things like that. 

The TCM tradition has only been around since the 1940’s or 1950’s. We have many, many years of working with the Eight Principles and Zang/Fu patterns from earlier, and what it can do for us is give us a tremendous opportunity to back up our spirit-level diagnosis in physical terms.

This is potentially a slight criticism. What I have often seen, more among Five Element practitioners than TCM practitioners, is the tendency to project psychology, i.e., the tendency to say, “Oh, what their spirit needs is this, and what their spirit needs is that,” and . . . maybe. In order to be sure, I’d like to see some physical symptoms backing up the notion that this is, in fact, the energetic. 

“Oh, I think they’re like a rainy autumn day, and it’s really sad and gloomy. There’s so much cloudiness, and Cloud Gate, and they really need more sun shining through the rain. I think this is a really rainy, damp kind of Metal.”

Is their mouth dry? Is their skin cracking? There are physical signs right in front of you, if you know the patterns of disharmony, that can let you know what’s going on in the person’s spirit. It’s very, very, very worthwhile. It is in fact required to get through this herb course, even if you are about healing the spirit.  It’s necessary to know how to track it and reality-check it through the body, just in case it wasn’t God talking to you that day. 

What I tell my students is that I don’t care where you get your diagnosis from. I don’t care if your spirit guide Snoopy whispers it in your ear. That’s fine. What I care about is whether you can reality-check it for me, and show me rigorously where it checks out. Fine, go do a shamanic trance. Now come back and tell me, “I have this, this, this, this, and this, that’s concrete and factual to back it up.” 

The physical patterns of disharmony are no different than the spirit patterns of disharmony. They mirror each other. It’s one body, and whether we know it or not, we are generally more astute at knowing whether or not someone’s skin is dry than at knowing exactly what quality of grief we are being presented with. Learning the physical level of the patterns will give us a psychological and a spirit level in, that we wouldn’t have without the physical. 

Many Five Element people have a tendency, sometimes without even realizing it, to distain the physical and prefer the psychological indications. You’ll get further with the spirit by paying attention to the body. The body never lies; people can talk bullshit. Learn what someone’s body is doing, even if you have no clue about their spirit. With herbs, if you treat their body very accurately, then you are going to give their spirit everything it needs. 

HOW HERBS WORK: MECHANICAL CAUSALITY VS. RESONANCE

I want to talk a little bit about how herbs work, how they do what they do, and therefore the difference between mechanical causality and resonance medicine. Herbs, unless they are being used very crudely, don’t work the way Western meds or even Western herbs work, not in a cause-and-effect way. It’s not mechanical causality; it’s not chemistry. 

In fact, one of the reasons why Chinese herbalism is so discredited in the West, is that normally the active ingredient in the formulas and herbs is not enough to do what it’s actually doing. The amount of phytoestrogens in Tian Wang Bu Xin Dan just isn’t enough to stop a hot flash, but it does. 

What is this stuff? It can’t possibly work; there’s just not enough stuff in it, to do it in that mechanical, make-it-happen-chemically way: it just isn’t there. No more than sticking a tiny filament in somebody’s foot is going to be enough to totally change things, to cure somebody’s ulcer or something like that. Except it does.

It’s not happening mechanically.  You’re using resonance medicine; you’re using acupuncture, zero balance, herbs. You’re using a medicine that’s about energetic matching, not cause-and-effect mechanics. 

In a resonance medicine, it’s not how much; it’s how accurate that matters. 

Example: 

Have you ever seen a guitar leaning against a speaker while somebody is playing Bob Dylan or something? As the notes come out, those strings on the guitar start to go [humming sound]. That’s resonance. Those strings are making music by resonance. Mechanical causality is when you go over there with your finger and you go “bing!” and pluck a string. Western meds, and the way Western herbalism works, is getting over there and going “bing bing bing bing bing.” 

Resonance medicine is about sounding the note, going, “Hmmmmm . . .” and then that part of the person, that string that was silent, says, “Hmmmmm . . .  Oh goodness, Abundant Splendor, yes, I had forgotten that I have that string on my guitar. This potential in me had fallen silent.” 

But the herb hums the note, or the needle in the point hums the note of Abundant Splendor, or the note of Greater Mountain Stream, or the note of Bright and Clear, and all of a sudden, oh, yes. Now, suddenly, that string is alive again. I remember that I am Bright and Clear. I am Abundant Splendor. I am… whatever it is. 

This is why a very fine-tuned herbal formula for a person can be so powerful. It’s a way of bearing existential witness to the latent possibilities in someone’s constitution. It’s a way of saying, “I see where you fell from the Tao, and what few notes I can hum to bring you back into your song, to bring you back into your dance.”

This is evocation; this is healing rather than fixing. We can’t make someone heal, but we can evoke what is in them and bring it forward. We can “hmmmm” them back into their own vibrancy. 

This is very different than what Western meds do. It’s harder to understand the difference when it’s written in English, for instance when it says “bai shao tonifies blood,” but it doesn’t tonify blood in some mechanical way, to make you have more blood. It hums the note of blood, which is an energetic first and only a physical substance secondarily, the same way that the Heart is an Official first and an organ second. The Liver is not a thing. It’s an energy, and when there’s enough of that energy, it coalesces into a physical form of a Liver, and a function secondarily to the energetic. Bai shao peony hums the blood song, or one of the blood songs, and helps to evoke in a person the potential of Liver blood. 

Let me talk a little bit more about how this works. There is body, mind and spirit. It’s like the three levels of healing in the Shen Nong Ben Cao. Each herb is like a note sounded in all three octaves of physical symptoms, natural balance of health, and potential. Each herb is a vibration that exists on all these different levels. You learn about this in the correspondences, for instance in terms of the Wood energy. In directions, it is the East; in climatic influences it is the wind; in tastes, it is sour; in expression in the body, it is the nails; in the Officials it is the Liver and the Gall; in sound, it is shout. It is one thing expressing itself in different media, or the same note played on different instruments, but it’s the same thing.

I’m going to keep talking about the different levels that the herbs touch, and the physical/mental/spirit levels of things. Like for instance, Bai Shao, the herb that I mentioned that tonifies blood. On a physical level in terms of pathology, it is good for muscle cramps. On the level of xing, of temperament, it’s good for defensiveness. Even as I say “defensiveness,” I’m starting to tighten up; it’s like the muscle cramp is the defensiveness, manifesting in a different place. 

There are spiritual truths and spiritual teachings given to a person’s spirit by the herbs that may well be beyond us as individuals; we may not grasp those spiritual possibilities ourselves, enough to give the teaching directly to the person. How we know that this herb would be useful, and this teaching would be useful for the client, is that they are showing us on a physical level that they’re crying out for this energetic. As their spasm softens, so does the defensiveness. 

It’s an exciting thing to me, because we can give to our clients awakenings from beyond our own level of evolution. Wu wei zi schizandra helps people grasp the essence and come to terms with the nature of loss. I can’t do that. I can’t even do that for myself. It’s not even just coming to terms with a particular loss. It’s coming to terms with the nature of loss. It’s incredibly profound what this herb has to teach. It also corresponds with a certain type of Lung pathology. 

I can say, “Yes, I see, in you, the need for this,” and the way that I ground that assertion is with something happening physically, and in CSOE and the whole elemental dynamic. I can give you this herb that will put you in contact with the vibration that will bring you the healing. 

It’s a great joy that as herbalists, we get to interact all the time with hundreds of little teachers that, over time, (because we even know there is such a thing, and we also are in contact with their energy), we start to begin to open to these other ways of being.  We open to the elements, to other ways of being Metal besides, “I can’t believe it’s gone,” or other ways of being Wood besides “Don’t hit me,” through the transformations of virtue.

In resonance medicine, there is no such thing as just a symptom. Illness is needed to give entree to the wisdom. We’ve talked about the virtues; you always have to come in at the ground floor. You could see pathology—you could see the symptom—you could see the illness—as a big X on a treasure map saying “Dig here for buried treasure.” Every illness is a virtue that hasn’t happened yet. It comes in as the pathology, and then you transform that energy into the virtue. 

For me, one of the greatest examples was when I was in acupuncture school. The big joke about me was that I didn’t have a Metal element. They used me as the emotion test for Metal CFs. They would bring me into the treatment room, and if the person’s skin crawled at the sight of me and they began edging away, then you knew it was a Metal CF. 

We also had a supervisor who was like that for Wood. You brought her in the room, and if the client was a Wood CF, the hackles would be up right away. 

Too bad we didn’t have one for all the elements! Or maybe it’s good, or we never would have learned diagnosis. We would just bring these people into the room and watch what happens. 

I was already an herbalist when I went to acupuncture school, and I thought I’d get me a Metal element. There was this one Metal formula that I really, really liked. My sense of what the virtues were about, and what this formula was for, was really cool. I thought, I want a Metal element like that; that would be really cool. 

So I took the formula, and nothing happened. It tasted pretty good. It didn’t really do anything, though. 

Then I lost a child, due to bronchitis, which became asthma. I could barely breathe in the autumn, and it was a pretty strong hit on Metal. The asthma that I developed was, in fact, the type of asthma for which that formula that I’d been attracted to was appropriate. In Bensky it said that if you take this formula all through the Winter, the asthma will be gone by Spring.  

I took that formula. I didn’t give a crap about spiritual anything; I wanted to be able to breathe. It matched the pattern on a physical level. Get me out of here; I want to be able to run again. I took the formula through the Winter, and by Spring, not only did I no longer have the asthma, but I have quite a prominent Metal element. Many people say I’m a Metal CF; everybody knows I’ve got a Metal element now. 

The virtues in that formula were, in fact, the ones that came out through that process, but I had to have the illness first and work it through. There was probably some prefiguring of the potential in my attraction to that formula. But the cracking open and the movement in the process, it started on the ground floor. 

TREATING SYMPTOMS

It reminds me a lot of the whole Worsley thing; he used to go on and on about how it’s a sin to take away someone’s symptoms. “Take away” is funny if what you mean by “take away” is just get rid of them by mechanical means, like an inhaler for the asthma or just treating the tip of the iceberg and not really getting to what’s underneath it. 

I can understand that, but if what’s meant by “take away” is transform the energetic, then it’s wonderful for the symptoms to be resolved—not taken away, but resolved—because the issue has been resolved. The herbs didn’t take away my asthma; they resolved it, whether or not I was interested in having it resolved. They resolved it. I just wanted it taken away. 

So each person is on their CF journey, trailing their Withins behind them, and the Eight Principle pattern of disharmony analysis lets you know where they are getting stuck in their journey towards their highest potential. 

We don’t want to get rid of the signposts, but we do want to read the signposts. Symptoms are just signposts, letting us know where the sticking is happening. You want to read the signposts; you want to know what they are telling you about the person. What is happening in this person’s Water element? What’s it like? How is that relating to the Metal? What’s the relationship between Metal and Water? How can we learn about this relationship by what’s happening physically? 

These signposts give us so much discernment into what’s going on in the energetic; we especially don’t want to get rid of them, because they tell us things about our client’s spirit that we may not be spiritually adept enough to know. If you’re enlightened, you get a job as a guru or a teacher. If you just think there is such a thing, you get a job as a healer, and try and help people along in that direction. 

The symptoms are shadows. It’s pointless to treat shadows, but to read the shadows can tell you a lot, and that will keep you from the spiritual arrogance of potentially projecting on your clients what you think their spirit needs. 

The rod of Asclepius is a perfect example of resonance medicine. You know the medical thing with the rod with the snakes? The story is that Asclepius was walking along and saw these snakes fighting; he placed his rod there amidst them, and they resolved. He gave them a look at a whole other dimension; they didn’t have to be locked into this struggle. They could come into this beautiful 3-space harmony again. He just put in a fulcrum. He just put in a needle. He didn’t whack the snakes apart. He just essentially went, “Hmmmm, here’s the true note.” That’s what we are doing with the herbs, with the acupuncture, with zero balance, with any form of resonance medicine.

© 2018 Thea Elijah