Our Work

A DESCRIPTION OF OUR WORK
Excerpts taken from the opening talk at the Vermont Teaching Clinic Fall 2016
Laura Stelmok

The excerpt below will tell you where 5 Element acupuncture first came from. It's a small reference in an old text in the Introduction to Thomas Cleary's book Immortal Sisters: Secret Teachings of Taoist Women. 

"The record of contributions of women to Chinese civilization goes back even further than Huang Di, however, to the legend of a certain female tribal leader of high antiquity who is said to have "patched the sky with five colored stones" at some remote time when the pristine completeness of human life and harmony with nature had been lost. The use of traditional keys to Chinese symbolism according to which the sky stands for the mind and the number 5 stand for the center, suggests that the origin of the doctrine of the five forces or five elements that figure so prominently in Chinese thought as a central organizational device, is at least mythically associated with a pre-historic shamanness who was at one time instrumental in restoring the balance and sanity of her people when they had gone mad, lost their original mental coherence and were on the brink of destruction.  History and legend seem to meet clearly for the first time in the Taoist lore of the female immortals when King Mu of the Zhou dynasty (1001-952 BCE) dynasty met the Queen Mother of the West at her abode in Kunlun mountains. This is the great central Asian system called by the Chinese the ancestor of mountains and traditionally believed to be headquarters for the earthly immortals of the Taoist spiritual government.  Also called the Golden Mother, and the Golden Mother of the Tortoise Pedestal, the legendary figure usually known as the Queen Mother of the West is also believed to have appeared at the court of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty 110 BCE.  All women who attain the Tao of spiritual mortality are considered wards of the Queen Mother and the stories told of her testify to the great antiquity of such beliefs. Next in rank to the Queen Mother of the West in the woman's division of the Taoist inner government is the Lady of the Supreme Basis. considered the leader of adepts and said to join the Queen Mother on many her forays into the ordinary human world.  She too is said to have appeared at the court of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty to whom she is reported to have said  'You were born licentious, extravagant and violent and you live in the midst of blood and force. No matter how many Taoists you invite here in the hopes of immortality, you will only wear yourself out'." 

JR Worsley brought a thread of antiquity to the west. This thread, this tradition grew in him, adapted in him to meet the western psyche in the mid-twentieth century.  There are few places left where you can learn the skills of diagnosing the causative factor. If people follow the few who can truly diagnose the CF, it is possible to treat illness at the root, because they have seen it, lived it, felt it. CF is not an idea.  It is our discipline in this school  to be in an environment where our own survival mechanisms, our own individual identities can unravel. The only way you can see another person is if you, yourself, are not trying to stay alive. If your senses are primarily organized around your own survival, you will be primarily seeing yourself.  I was given what JR brought to the west.  I didn't ask a single question in school. I was like a baby bird with my mouth open. I was given something that was alive.  How I knew that at the time, I don't know. I didn't understand then what a living tradition of medicine was, only that in my actions I practiced what I was given. Period.  I knew that I was given a living transmission.  That innocence protected me tremendously and emboldened me in the face of people's suffering. I was able to stay with people, figuring out ways to be allowed more deeply into Life itself and therefore their life.  Following the laws of nature.

This little school has formed first and foremost to be a place for practitioners where the long hard work of being reduced, being crafted into an instrument of the Divine that can truly see another person can happen.  We only teach in clinical settings.  The reason for that is that we all have too many big ideas. We are all over fed on ideas, especially spiritual ideas in this time. Most of our acupuncture training is also over fed with spiritual ideas.  We are here to learn as physicians, to guard life inside of the laws of nature. We are here to reach the root of suffering in our patients. We are here so that your own practices become simpler, more capable of conversation inside these laws of nature. We are here so that when you are unable to reach the root of the question in a person's life, there is a place where you will be supported and trained and you can say 'we need to go here'. There is a place where your patient can come with you. My job is really working inside the relationship between the patient and the practitioner, so that your relationship with your patients becomes more precise, more full of life, more accurate and treatment therefore more responsive.

I spent many years and every penny I earned following JR and other teachers around. I like to provide environments where people can do what I did, because I would not be able to serve my patients if I had not been in the presence of someone who could see people, reach people, a person whose senses had been given to the medicine. I did not know what I was watching, but I knew it was real.  I did not have particular natural gifts.  I did not feel or see or imagine the energy. I did not have a clue about pulses. I was young. My natural gifts were covered by arrogance, fear, wanting to “get it right.” I became an acupuncturist because acupuncture saved my own life when I was 21 years old. I was given the practices to awaken the senses. He brought the Officials and the Channels and the Points alive.

JR said, if it takes you 10 years to do what I can do in 1, why is that a problem?  To have the light turned back on, to be restored to one's own map is the greatest experience a soul can have, so if it takes you 20 years and it takes me 5, who cares?  It doesn't matter how long you live, what matters is that you live the allotted number of days that you came here to live.  If at someone's deathbed after 20 years of treating them you see, finally, that the causative factor is Wood, and you treat her source points at the level of her spirit, she will finish her curriculum. If you know it, if you've lived Liver 1-14 for 35 years, and she looks into your eyes, she will walk the whole road with you via the source point.

I am hoping that this school, these clinics restore a little bit of common sense. A place where your natural intelligence is not only allowed, but invited to get greater. Almost all illness now is at the level of the spirit. To be given a tradition... for a tradition to have been preserved through the life and suffering of a single physician so that we actually can learn how to reach the level of the spirit. Such a gift is rare and very precious. If you reach the level of the spirit, you have very little to say. You are struck dumb with beauty, with peace, with awe. If you are talking on and on about the person or the point, it is the mind. You have gotten to the mind. Interestingly, in many cases you will have good clinical results even reaching the mind because the body follows the mind, but when you really reach the spirits, the mind stops.

The reason I never thought to ask a question when I was being taught by JRW was he was watering the spirit. A living tradition was being passed directly into my heart, my hands.  I wasn't thinking about what I was going to need in 10 years as a practitioner. It was because of the presence of antiquity.

This school is a clinic where people come that no one has been able to help.  The dislocation of the natural order by humanity has created many problems, not only with people having clean drinking water and air to breathe, not only with the confusion of the central axis, the purpose of human life, it has also created a problem in the relationship of the spirits at the planetary level.  Dissonance in the relationship of the spirits of individual people has become extremely common.  I had people coming to my practice with very severe, long–standing physical and psychological illness. At 15 years in practice I was given a teacher who helped me find a way back in to the protocol of the 7 Dragons in a way that could free a person.  Most people studying here are interested in being able to find their way with that.

As acupuncture becomes more known in our culture, the ego of the profession also becomes bigger, shinier, and unfortunately the deep work becomes less available. Taoism has always found the low places, the hidden places, the depths. Practitioners of Taoist medicine wait out turbulent times in small schools in the mountains or hidden valleys. The Virtue of HeavenEarth is a last stand to preserve something so precious, between the schools, between the degrees, between the professional arguments.  A place where a physician can come to become an instrument of the regulation of Life, the majesty of JingShen, the Virtue of HeavenEarth.  You don't come here to know more or be more, rather to enter life more deeply.  In the same way that the Queen Mother showed up at the court of King Wu, we would be a place that would preserve something with our life.   Very simple, very pure, that can work with the cause of illness in our time.  We are a mixture of people.  We come from different root trainings to become finer and more precise instruments of the spirits.  That means that we get emptied.  We don’t get smarter; we get emptier.  The use of the classics isn't so that you know more. But so that you are accompanied more deeply, so that you have places to lean against, places where the mind just falls into place: "oh right, that is why colon 6 is between 5 and 7."  Not so that you have memorized the point book about Co 6.  That will do you no good. 

These disciplines empty the heart.  If we are going to speak of the will of life, we will be speaking a lot about the central axis. It is my great joy to be in such a committed learning environment where people are wanting their central axis to be shaped by the Tao, to become more capable of responding to life. To become stronger.  "The proud virtue of Heaven consents to become the humble virtue of a human being."  (The Way of Heaven Claude Larre)  Heaven wants only to give itself to us. That is its nature.  The sun brings warmth, it can't not bring warmth. It is us that prevent the warmth from reaching life. 

The Virtue of HeavenEarth is a school where teachings and practices are collected and a clinic where patients come to get well.  I guard your presence here with all of my heart. To become a physician in this tradition requires absolute transparency.  You can’t learn to see if you are hiding yourself.  You can't. It's impossible. That does not mean you don't have boundaries.  It has to do with something inside that is allowed to be known. You are allowed to be known. We guard the integrity, the vulnerability and the anonymity, the privacy of each practitioner's learning.