The most important proposition of life – know yourself
The goal of any treatment is to bring about some change in the patient’s life, and each therapy attempts to achieve this through different means – physical therapy through the body, psychological therapy through the mind and spirit.
Of course, the interesting thing is that as Five Element Acupuncturists, we have both roles, healing both the body and the soul, which is almost unique to Five Element Acupuncture. In all treatments, we cannot ignore our own role. Every therapist is involved in the treatment, and it is inevitable.
Treatment is therefore a two-way street, with some therapies more acknowledging, or indeed welcoming, the role of the therapist than others. In our training as Five Elements Acupuncturists, we spend a great deal of time studying the subtleties of the doctor-patient relationship and the importance of meeting the patient’s needs appropriately.
Of course, this also means that we must be open to these needs and aware of the extent to which we as therapists may inadvertently prioritize our needs over those of our patients. I call this projecting our shadow onto our patients.
Therapist, know yourself
“Therapist, know thyself”, this is perhaps the most important lesson we all need to learn if we want to help others.
There is something patronizing about thinking we can help others, unless we can ensure that we have the humility to do so and not to think that we knowthat we may all have.
It is easy to inadvertently bring this desire for power into the doctor-patient relationship. After all, patients are always overly grateful for the care we provide, and it is easy to be overwhelmed by such compliments and become flattered. This is a natural human weakness, and we must remain aware of it and not be moved by it.
So, what does “knowing ourselves” involve?
Most importantly, it means being honest with yourself and asking yourself what your motivations are before you do anything.
Take acupuncture as an example. Suppose we all engage in this caring profession and our purpose is to help others. This purpose sounds extremely noble, but its meaning is vague and can easily hide many less noble motives.
Every student who wants to study at my school, I ask them why they want to come, and they all say they want to help others. However, I later observed that when it comes to learning to deal with the needs of patients, some people cannot face this reality.
For new practitioners, they need enough experience to be able to step back and observe their own reactions to patients, and to develop enough confidence to admit their failures and find ways to cope with them.
Therefore, “know thyself” means knowing yourself enough to be humble enough to accept that you need to change your approach to patients when necessary . In this way, every patient helps us improve ourselves.
Many people don’t realize this until they start learning acupuncture or other therapies. I was no exception many years ago, and it was years of experience that taught me that this is essential to being a good and caring therapist. Because who we are as people never really changes, but like fine wine, we inevitably mature with age.
Whether we become more mature as we age depends on whether we have a clear insight into ourselves. Of course, we also need to have the humility to admit our own shortcomings and the inner strength to work hard to correct them.
This is of course true in all areas of our lives, not just in our small corner of work as Five Elements Acupuncturists, but because this work requires a close relationship between the practitioner and the patient, it is important that the therapist is as balanced as possible and as transparent as possible about their motivations and personal goals.
This is a lifelong endeavor, as we learn to adapt to the conflicting demands of life at different stages of our lives, but it is important that we as therapists constantly reflect on ourselves and recognize any problems we may have in the patient-doctor relationship before our patients do.
What we bring to therapy
It is helpful for each of us to think about what qualities we bring to therapy, as these will determine the nature of our relationship with our patients.
I like to use the five elements as a rough template. No matter which element the therapist’s supporting element is, it will bring certain characteristics to him. Just as we cannot get rid of the mark of the supporting element on us, we cannot get rid of the influence it brings to our treatment. This issue is always rarely discussed , perhaps because everyone thinks it is not worth discussing.
Having observed many, many therapists over the years, I am convinced that a key factor in developing a good relationship with a patient is that the therapist understands how they interact with the patient and takes into account the impact of their practice on the patient-doctor relationship.
I think that no matter what our role is, everyone wants the best for their patients, but we may find that we give all kinds of advice to patients about their wishes, and these advice are only guided by our own lives. There is no neutrality in anything we do.
It would be understandable if we accept this as a given, but we must always be vigilant, because if we ignore it, we may understand the patient’s needs through our own feelings and cause misunderstandings about them.
Understanding Yourself and Others in Life
Life gives us many ways to help us understand ourselves and others, because, unless we live alone in the mountains like a hermit, we will meet thousands of people in our lives, and each of them can become a teacher to teach us to understand the Five Elements if we are willing to get to know them .
Whether at home, at work, on the street, or just sitting and watching TV, the value gained from real communication with everyone you meet is greater than any other method. All of these provide excellent opportunities to observe the real manifestation of the Five Elements and provide a constant source .
I like to watch the interactions between families or groups, or how much eye contact people passing by on the street make with me, whether they are aware of the other person, move out of the way to let me pass, or ignore the other person.
All of these subtle interactions can be used to increase our sensitivity and help us bring this higher level of awareness into the clinic. Therefore,when we learn to apply what we learn from interacting with others in the clinic,interacting with others is never a waste of time.
This makes sitting in a café or a park and watching passersby almost as valuable as observing patient after patient, and perhaps even more valuable, because passersby, like the people who appear around us, can provide us with an infinite number of new paradigms.
Although we cannot get direct feedback and have no way of knowing whether they are the one we think they are, the fact that so many different people pass by us gives our eyes a good training, and if we are lucky, our other senses as well, thus greatly enhancing our sensitivity.
Accurate and true self-perception
But most importantly, we must learn to observe ourselves, because therein lies the secret to our deep understanding of the Five Elements. In theory, this should be the easiest thing for us to do, but in reality it is not, and this is human nature. Because no one is good at observing themselves objectively and analytically, so as to accurately judge their own weaknesses and strengths.
We may all have the same problem – building a likable image for ourselves to cover up those less admirable aspects, hoping that our flaws and shortcomings are as few as possible. We all desire to have certain qualities that we think are admirable, most of which are related to “loving”, “selfless”, “generous”, etc. However, we are reluctant to admit other very common and human qualities, such as “selfishness” and ” intolerance”.
The other extreme, equally undesirable and just as far from the truth, is to exaggerate our negative qualities, such as “I’m a loser” or “I always do things wrong.”
For most of us, the truth lies somewhere in between. We are all sometimes selfish and sometimes selfless, sometimes loving and sometimes indifferent.
The secret to gaining an accurate and true self-perception is to look at ourselves calmly and objectively over a long period of time , observing our interactions with others and how we respond when things happen to us, so that we can gradually understand our strengths and weaknesses, and, as a Five Elements Acupuncturist, we also need to relate these to the balance of the Five Elements within us.
This helps us recognize how our own specific five elements can help or hinder our clinical care. And the extent to which we can learn not to let our deficiencies affect our interactions with patients is also based on this understanding of our own internal five elements.
A clear assessment of how our inner five elements influence the way we approach others will deepen our understanding of the nature of the five elements while minimizing the need to project our own five elements onto our patients.