3. The importance of the spirit
Chapter contents
The primacy of the spirit13
The meaning of mind and spirit14
Chinese medicine’s approach to the spirit and health15
The five shen15
The spirit and the emotions17
The primacy of the spirit
Five Element Constitutional Acupuncture is a very ‘person-centred’ style of treatment. When a patient comes for treatment, a Five Element Constitutional Acupuncturist is more likely to consider, ‘how can this person be treated?’ rather than ‘how can this person’s symptom be treated?’ This is because one of the practitioner’s core values is that diagnosis and treatment should be focused on the health of the individual, rather than on the physical symptoms presented.
Chronic physical symptoms are seen as being the manifestation of the illness (biao), which stems from the root (ben). The root usually lies in the mind or spirit. This is not true for all symptoms, of course. For example, symptoms caused by physical trauma or acute infections are likely to have their ben arising from an external cause rather than from a deeper internal one.
Although a person’s most underlying imbalance can arise from body, mind or spirit, the majority of patients coming for treatment in the West are suffering primarily from an imbalance of the spirit. Around a quarter of all drugs prescribed by the National Health Service in the UK are for mental health problems (The Stationery Office, 1996). There are also huge numbers of patients who present with symptoms that have a psychosomatic component. In addition, there are a large number of substances taken for their symptom-relieving effects, such as coffee, alcohol and ‘recreational’ drugs. Stress-related absence accounts for half of all sickness from work (Patel and Knapp, 1998). A recent study of 22,000 people in the UK found that:
• 58% of people suffer from mood swings
• 52% feel apathetic and unmotivated
• 50% suffer from anxiety
• 47% have difficulty sleeping
• 43% have poor memories or difficulty concentrating
• 42% suffer from depression (Holford, 2003, pp. 2–3)
As Cicero observed long before the advent of modern lifestyles and contemporary neuroses, ‘Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body.’ It is fair to say that today many Westerners are suffering from what seems to be spiritual malaise with much accompanying mental dysfunction.
Diagnosing and treating the whole person
A practitioner of Five Element Constitutional Acupuncture diagnoses patients by assessing which is the primary Element in distress. This diagnosis is based on various sensory signs, especially the patient’s emotional balance, facial colour, odour and voice tone. The patient’s personality is also of utmost importance. The focus is on diagnosing the balance of the Five Elements within the person rather than making a differential diagnosis of the symptoms presented by the person. As the great physician Xu Dachun described it, ‘Illnesses may be identical but the persons suffering from them are different’ (Unschuld, 1990, p. 17). This idea is also reflected in the Chinese phrase yin ren zhi yi, which translates as ‘different patients require different treatment’.
Treatment is only perceived as fully successful if patients report improvement in how they ‘feel in themselves’, as well as in their signs and symptoms. Sometimes patients are surprised to notice positive differences in how they feel even if they did not perceive anything to be ‘wrong’ with them in the first place. Five Element Constitutional Acupuncture has the ability to direct treatment to any level of the patient’s mind and spirit if that is what is required to help the patient to return to good health.
The meaning of mind and spirit
What do we mean by ‘spirit’?
Many people already have a view, albeit indistinct, of what the word ‘spirit’ means. Others do not accept that human beings have a spirit at all. The word ‘spirit’ also has many different meanings in the English language. For these reasons this topic can be difficult to discuss.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists 34 separate meanings for ‘spirit’. The one that is closest to its meaning in Chinese medicine is ‘the animating or vital principle in man’. Cicero called it ‘the true self, not that physical figure which can be pointed out by your finger’. In the Chinese language the words shen and jing-shen most closely describe the spirit, although it also encompasses some aspects of the mind. The sinologist Claude Larre described shen like this:
The shen are that by which a given being is unlike any other; that which makes an individual an individual and more than a person.
(Larre et al., 1986, p. 164)
People often equate ‘spirit’ with the spiritual and religious sides of the person. The word ‘spirit’, however, encompasses many other aspects of being. Religion, mysticism and spiritual awareness emanate from the human spirit, but so also does the desire to look at a radiant sunset, to listen to beautiful music or to achieve one’s potential as a human being. When people wake up and experience the joy of seeing a beautiful day dawning, it is their spirit that is touched by that experience. Love and compassion are expressions of the spirit.
People who have problems in their spirit struggle when under stress and have difficulties coping with their lives. This may manifest in areas such as their relationships, communication, posture, use of language or the look in their eyes (for more on this, see Chapter 27, this volume). Resignation, anguish, despair, depression, disappointment, sadness, anxiety and many other states are present to some extent in almost all of our patients. As Thoreau said in Walden, ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’.
What do we mean by mind?
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