Five Elements Energetics
What is health? In the West, we think of disease and sickness when we think of health. We see a doctor when we have visible symptoms of pain and suffering. Medicine is something to relieve this suffering. Take an aspirin to make a headache “go away”. This leads our medical establishment to focus on disease and curing its symptoms. Is this really health? Is health just a lack of dis-ease symptoms? Not all schools of thought would agree. In some eastern schools, health is seen as a person in balance. Someone who moves freely and effortlessly in themselves and their environment is healthy. This ‘positive’ view of health where one is striving to be as well attuned as possible is very different from our ‘negative’ view of health where one is striving to be free of dis-ease. It is a to have health rather than to not have disease.This simple difference in perspective has led us down two different paths. A Western medical approach is astonishingly good at treating acute symptoms of disease. The advances in surgery alone have prolonged many people’s lives and increased the quality of life for countless more. The Eastern approach takes an energetic view, symptoms are seen as a cry for help from the body resulting from an imbalance which could have been building for years. Spotted early, these imbalances are countered by a combination of nutrition, lifestyle changes and ritual. The longlived, spritely eastern constitution can attest to the effectiveness of their approach. In essence, we see the western approach presents an effective short term modality suited well to acute health problems. The eastern perspective provides an effective long term modality suited to chronic health problems. The marrying of these two perspectives can become an incredibly powerful system of health.
How does this alternative perspective work?
So far we have used the term Eastern as a catchall for health practices originating from the middle east through to Japan. To dive a little deeper we will focus on one of these systems, the Five Elements Theory from China. Five elements theory sees the human body as an interconnected web of systems like a microbiome or ecosystem. If something is wrong with a part of the body it will have knock-on effects, which will eventually affect the whole person. To simplify, the body is split into five major attributes which are named after something everyone can relate to. Namely The Five Elements, these are metal, water, earth, fire and wood. Each element is vast in what it represents but many aspects of it are intuitive.
Let’s look at the earth element. It is from the earth where all of our food comes from. The earth is also our ground, what we stand on, when we eat we feel more grounded. It follows that the earth element governs the stomach, whose job is basically master of sustenance. The stomach is the first place in the body that decides what we take in and what we expel. So we could say the earth is about grounding and nourishment. If something is wrong with earth or it is out of balance as it is more commonly put then we might notice someone not eating foods that nourish them or someone who is unsteady. They might develop stomach ulcers or be prone to falls. These behaviours might alert a practitioner to look into the earth element and its associates, whilst creating a program to help the patient rebalance their earth element.When we look at how the earth interacts with all the other elements then things start to get complicated. Each element has at least two major organs it governs, amongst other properties, these interact and change one another. Fortunately, there seems to be some order to this. Each element is said to be a mother and a child to one of the other elements in a closed loop. Earth comes from fire whilst metal comes from earth and so on. If an element is weak, we might look at the previous element to see why it isn’t being sustained. To put it more concretely, if someone seems unsteady, an earth-based symptom, we might look at the fire element, earth’s mother, and notice that circulation is poor, resulting in swollen ankles and an inability to walk properly. As one builds a picture of the body, one starts getting an idea of how this ecosystem works and can thus aid it to function, pushing it towards balance.
We have found that health is like an ecosystem in balance. As we get to know that ecosystem more we can respond to its needs. Our tools include the surgical tools of the west and the energetic models of the east.[Disclaimer this article is set in a dualist framework between east and west which isn’t strictly true, the west have always had their own energetic version of health, for example, the Greek system of the four humours and the East has advanced surgical techniques and modern drugs as a staple part of their medicine.]
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