Yellow Path - Gerad Kite’s Five-Element Acupuncture Training

So, it's autumn. 5 a.m. in the morning and it's dark outside still, and it feels quite heavy. This is the first heavy mist of the season and it really feels quite oppressive. You've come out of late summer, we had the harvest season, and we still had the warmth of the sun right the way through until just recently. And then suddenly the mists descend. The trees have turned so quickly they've gone from this beautiful rich green to a yellow and now to a white and move into a grey. This is the dying season. This is the autumn and this is the end of the season as far as creation and production. The harvest has now been taken in, and now it's a matter of waiting for nature to eliminate everything that is no longer needed. So, the fruits have already fallen to the ground, smashed. The seeds are already sinking into the ground with the mist and the moisture and the rain and the atmosphere is very different. Suddenly the people that were visiting over the summer in late summer are not coming. I'm not speaking to as many people anymore. There are fewer people calling here. Everyone seems to know that something has changed, that it's a time to come back inside and be more quiet, introspective. It's kind of a nice time this time in the morning from like 5 to 7, where it's so quiet and you feel kind of fresh, having slept, but also a little bit dreamy, sleepy.

 

It's almost a meditative time. It's a time to be really self-reflective and start thinking back about what happened over the past few months and over the summer, and all those plans I made in spring. Did I actually do what I planned to do? Did I actually produce something? Have I actually gained anything from this year? So, all of this stuff is swirling around my head and I've got the time to think about it. This is the time of the year where we are reflective, where we do take stock and look at what's happened and make an assessment of have, we achieved what we wanted to achieve? Have we been surprised by anything? Has the year been good to us? Has it been bad to us? What's our assessment? It's a time where we weigh things up. And in the classics they talk about autumn as being the time of balance. And the balance they're talking about is the balance between the heavens above and the earth below. And we've just kind of left the Mother Earth season, and as the Mother Earth season descends and the fruits drop, suddenly the leaves fall and we're more aware of the sky. Suddenly there's actually, in a strange way, more light. Because the fullness of the summer and the abundance of the late summer has now pulled away. And suddenly I'm much more aware of looking above and below.

 

So, the metal element. The metal element is the element of autumn. It is the time where we do reflect and where we make a very strong connection with father Heaven. So, Mother Earth was all about nourishment. It was about how Mother Earth provides for us, gives us what we need on a very material level. It helps us think about things. It helps us feel solid and secure in our lives. And suddenly now we have this connection with the heavens, with Father Heaven and the Chinese were very clear that we need to understand that we have a mother, Mother Earth and Father Heaven, and these two parents are our real, eternal parents. And it is important that we have a clear and good relationship with the earth and a good relationship with heaven. And it's in the autumn that we are really focused on making that connection, maintaining that connection, and really feeling that the poignancy and the importance of the connection with the father energy. Now, for some people, this language is a little bit difficult. It doesn't quite make sense, but really what it's saying is, is that we have a different experience. The Father Heaven, the metal, the lung is associated with the metal, and the lung is the way that we breathe in the air from above, where we get that purity and cleanliness that comes from the sky. We don't have to deal with all the rubbish down below.

 

We don't have to deal with the problems. We can literally look above them, just like looking above the clouds and up to the sky, and really have a profound feeling of nothing. This is the void. The void is space. When we look above, looking into eternity and looking into eternity has a very particular feel for us. There's nothing to grab a hold of, so suddenly our whole perspective expands and we have an awareness of how we are totally alone in the universe and yet totally connected. And that's what the metal does for us. Metal, we know in nature, is the element that we connect. We make mobile phones with metal. So metal is a powerful element that enables everything to connect above and to below, and it enables us to have a deep connection with ourselves, our maker and everyone around us. So that balance of being totally okay, totally alone, but also equally totally connected. As much as I'm sitting here alone in this house the early hours of the morning in autumn, feeling that I am somewhat disconnected from what I've been used to, I also have a very strong feeling of being connected to the whole universe. There's a poignant feeling about this time of year. There's a certain kind of sadness about it, because we are letting go of everything that has gone so far. But there is a real beauty in letting go, because when we let go of something, we create a space for something new.

 

So, it has just the tiny frisson of excitement of I wonder what's coming next. And the more we let go, the more space there is for the more to come. So, there's a real encouragement in nature to start to really question, do I need this? Do I need that? It could be material things. You look around your home. You look through your address book and you say, do I really still want to be friends with that person? Or has that friendship? Has that lasted enough? Is that enough for me? And do I need these things in my cupboard? And throughout this season, we have an opportunity to scan and look at everything internally and externally and make these clear judgments as to whether we're going to keep things or let things go. The next season, after the autumn is the winter, and this traditionally was a very scary part of the season because people died. They didn't have enough food. They were too cold. The elements were so challenging. There was a risk that the cycle for these people would end. And so, to ensure that survival, the autumn was the time to make sure that everything was prepared so that whatever happened in the winter, they would have the best chance of survival. And a lot of that is to travel light, to make sure that anything that could get in the way, that could inhibit that security is taken out.

 

So, at this time of year, we have the opportunity to strip away everything we don't need. And interestingly, as we strip it away, just as nature strips away the leaves and the plants die down, we feel there's more space. There's more space for us mentally, physically and spiritually. So, in the five-element cycle, we have the water below and the fire above. And then on either side we have the wood and the metal, and the wood is all about creation. It's the creative cycle beginning. So, the season of spring creates and starts to build up through to the fire and to the earth. And then the metal comes in to balance the wood, and the metal is about destruction. Now often we think destruction is a bad thing. Creation is a good thing. But when we look at it as a cycle, we understand that there is no creation without destruction. There has to be space for new creation. We cannot keep accumulating and accumulating and accumulating because before we know it, we're going to be completely overwhelmed. And when we look at the metal and how that operates within us, we can see that when this goes wrong in our fellow human beings and in ourselves, it can be a big problem. So, let's look at the two officials that reside within the metal element. The first one we have, the lung.

 

And the lung, of course, is how we breathe air in. It's how we bring in the purity of the heavens. So, it's how we air ourselves. Literally. It's no different than opening a window of a stuffy room. We are breathing in the freshness and the inspired wisdom of the heavens with every breath. So, nature gives us that capacity to take in the new, take in the new with every breath. But it also designs us in such a way that the outbreath we release, the destruction we release the byproducts of the process of living. We understand that balance is even within the metal that we take in and we let go. So, for our health and for the health of all the officials, that mechanism needs to be working well. We need to breathe in and let go in equal measure. If the lung and the large intestine in US is not working properly, and this is on all levels on body, mind and spirit, then we see terrible problems start happening. If you don't breathe in properly, you don't have enough energy. Every cell in your body starts to suffocate. If you don't let go, if you don't release the waste through faeces, through sweat, through the breath, you start to become congested, polluted, and we start to see that there's a condensation. There's a rotting that starts to happen that's inappropriate.

 

The season of autumn tells us that it is the rotting season. There is a healthy aspect to things rotting down, but the point of the rotting Thing is to give life to the new. So, when we look at nature and we look at what the leaves do, they drop to the ground and they start to mulch down, and this becomes the trace elements that then go deep within the ground through the winter as the rains come, push down, and it is the very food that will give life to the next cycle in the spring. Nature tells us that what we let go of has a purpose. This is not just discarding stuff for the sake of it, it's to ensure that we have what we need to start again. So, when we're working with patients, we need to see how this element is functioning within them. Are they able to take in fresh new ideas? Are they able to take in new people, new concepts? Are they open enough? Do they have enough space to look at things differently, to revalue things? Our life is a process. We are evolving all the time, and something that may have been good for me five years ago may be totally toxic for me now. Something that was toxic for me back then may be good for me now. And this is something that we don't have to have control over. The metal element organizes this for us.

 

It works out this time of the cycle of the season, what will be kept and what will be discarded. And all of this, when these officials are working properly, happens automatically. We don't have to do a thing. We automatically discount someone or we automatically make a new connection with someone. And so, we rejig the whole system. We rejig our whole life before the resting phase of winter. We always need to look at these elements in the body, the mind and the spirit. In the body is quite simple. We breathe in air, we need air to survive, and we have to breathe out so we can breathe in again. We also know we have to release waste. We have bowel movements and we sweat and we breathe out. On a very physical level that makes complete and utter sense. But then we come to a mental level, and then we also understand that we need to be inspired. We need to be able to wake up in the morning and suddenly have fresh ideas, to have epiphanies about things. We need to suddenly realize the value of certain things. So, this is where we are inspired with along comes in and offers this freshness and newness and keeps us connected with the new cycle. And on a mental level, we need to let go of things. We live in a world of good and bad.

 

And what nature has done is has designed us in such a way that we can get rid of the bad, or what we label as being the bad during this part of the cycle, on a daily basis, on an annual basis and throughout our life. And so, for example, we as human beings can have lots of very difficult thoughts or ideas about people or situations. Resentments, for example, we can become resentful when people don't do things the way we want them to do it, maybe they've let us down. Maybe they haven't done something that we thought they were going to do, and that can build as a resentment. What the metal does, it will come in and look at that. It will learn from it. It will keep what it needs to learn and put that back into the system. And the toxic resentment, the part of us that will be ultimately drinking poison when we think about this situation is taken away from us, for us. So, on all levels, we need to be able to let go of things. We need to be able to let go of ideas about ourselves. We need to let go of negative thoughts about ourselves, negative thoughts about other people, and sometimes even let go of good things, because the good things and the bad things are really just two sides of one coin. And then we come to the spirit.

 

And what does the spirit do for us with the metal? In simple terms, it connects us with God. And I use the word God lightly, whatever word you want to call it, the divine, the deity. But we're talking about something that we cannot comprehend with our mind. It is a feeling. A feeling of being connected to the universe. A feeling of being connected in the world. Having your rightful place here. That is the spiritual aspect of the metal. It's to feel that you have a right to be here, that you have some kind of purpose, that there is meaning to your life, and that whatever you do in the next cycle, it will be infused with real purpose and meaning. That will give it the ultimate quality that we need to feel that our life has real meaning. The metal is always there. It's always there making that assessment. It's showing us the value in everything. It's showing us how we can separate things and how we can say, I will take this part and let go of that part. And this is happening every second we're alive. It's happening in our cells. Every second we're alive. Cells are dividing, they are reproducing, they are creating, but they are also destroying the old. They are evolving. So, we are evolving beings, and we live in a world of yin and yang, black and white, the opposites. So, we have to contend with both sides of life.

 

And what this system teaches us is that both sides are beautiful. Is spring better than autumn? Some people have preferences. Some people say, yes, I love the spring, I hate the autumn. But that's possibly because they haven't really felt or understood the power of the autumn. Because the dying and the death is inescapable. It is the world we live in. We are going to die. Our parents will die. Our friends will die. We have to accept death. And ideally, we see it for the beauty that it is. The metal is all about father Heaven. And when we talk about father Heaven, it's kind of an abstract idea, but it also feels very real. And when we think about the archetypal father, we think about the qualities of the father. We have this image of this paternal character who protects us. The job of the father is to protect us, to ensure that we can grow up, that we can live our life in a way that is true to us and that we feel safe in the world. So, it has this kind of envelope of protection, and the heavens are like this envelope above us that look after us in that very fatherly way, just as the envelope beneath us, the earth, gives us the nourishment and the capacity to develop and grow in that loving, caring way. But it's a very different feel, the father energy.

 

There's a real poignancy to it, and the protection is important. Our father is our guide. We are living our life. It is a journey and the Taoist tradition. We are talking about the Dao, which is translated as the path or the way, the way of life. And therefore, we know that we're on a journey, but it's a journey that's new to us. We've never been here before. I've never been here as me before, and I don't know what's going to come along the way. It's very reassuring to know that the father is just ahead of me, showing me the way, pointing in the direction that I need to go, giving me the wisdom of the elder to take me in the right direction, and that feeling of connection to a character that I respect, that I trust, gives me that confidence to move forward in an incisive and clear way. The instincts are associated with the metal. In the Chinese tradition, they talk about the metal, the spirit of metal being the seven po. These are like seven little gremlins who have this unique capacity to engage with the earth. They say that the Po associate with the essences. So, the metal is the descent. It brings everything back down to the ground and so it takes the riches of heaven from above. It takes the sunlight and draws it down and impregnates the earth. And they kind of get down and dirty and they're kind of playful.

 

And what it does is it gives us this understanding that this life on earth is a really fun place to play. It's like kids playing in a mud pit or a sandpit or getting filthy. The joy of just messing around. And that's what the metal does for us too. So, it has this purity of heaven, but it also has this ability to show us what fun it is to be earthly and be dirty, and be down there with the grubs. The father energy gives us this very broad perspective. It shows us the direction spiritually, but it also shows us how to get our feet in the mud and walk our path and have the full experience. It's very important for us to feel recognized or acknowledged. We as individuals are here and we look around at other human beings and we see what they do. And of course, we make comparisons and society makes comparisons. And our parents say, oh, I hope you're going to be successful, and I hope you're going to meet a nice partner. And there's a lot of pressure on us to find the right path and to be successful and to be recognized, acknowledged and rewarded. And it is the metal that naturally rewards us for who we are, the metal. The autumn comes at the end of the season, so it is the part of the season that literally places a metal medal on us and says, well done, well done, you have succeeded and we need that validation on a regular basis.

 

It builds our self-esteem. Now the difficulty is when we look externally for that, we want our parents to approve of us. We want society to approve of us. We want our friends to think that we're great and that we're rallying with them. But the truth is, we have our own unique path, and we are the only ones that can validate ourselves and the part of us that validates ourselves is the metal. So, the metal says, congratulations! Well done. You are a value. You have a reason to be here. You are an integral part of the evolution of the universe. That is a profound thing to take on board. But we have to do it for ourselves, and it is the metal that does it for us. So, when the person who is struggling with the metal element, if the metal element is the underlying cause of all the imbalance in the whole of their system, there's doubt, there's self-criticism, there's criticism of the outside world. There's an insecurity and a lack of self-worth because the element itself is not working properly and coming in at this crucial part of the cycle and making some kind of justification and acknowledgement that everything is okay. So, the metal is all about the void, what the autumn does is it clears the pathway.

 

It strips everything down and opens up a space before we descend back into the winter. And some people are frightened of the void. They find it terrifying to be on their own. They find it scary to think they're not directly connected with anyone. But the void is there because a void will be filled. Nature hates a vacuum. It's an expression. There's no such thing, really, as a space because the space is always filled. This is the yin and the yang, the filling and the emptying. In this part of the cycle, what we understand is that there has to be that space that can be filled. And so, we have to embrace the void within us. We have to learn to be okay, to be quiet and still, to look within, to find the connection deep within ourselves, which automatically connects us above to father Heaven. The void is a spiritual place. It is like space itself. It's the unknown. We are not meant to understand it. We are not meant to run away from it. We're meant to embrace it fully. And in many traditions, the breath is very, very important. The breath is a way of acknowledging the void. As we breathe out, we create the void. As we breathe in, we fill the void. And when you put your attention on your breath in some kind of meditative practice or even exercise, any place where you are experiencing the void, filling and emptying your attention is going to this profound place within us.

 

The space where everything happens and nothing happens. The emotion associated with metal is grief. and grief again, sounds like a negative emotion. And of course it's not. It's an entirely necessary emotion. If you've just lost a loved one, you need time and space. You need that void to be filled with everything about that person or the thing you've lost. It's a moment where you are with your own loss, and as you have that experience and you slowly let go of the memories, the associations, all of the things that you have been so used to attaching to that is the process of grief. They talk about the seven stages of grief, where all the emotions come up, where you feel angry, then you feel sad, then you feel sorry for yourself. Then you almost feel delighted. So, all of the emotions are in there. Grief is a full emotion. It is the entirety of all the emotions working together. And then as you go through this process of letting go those feelings for someone or something, you start to see them break away and drop away and create the space again. And it is that space that is then filled by your future life. So, the metal is an interesting mix of super tidy an absolutely chaotic and messy. If you look at nature, if you look at autumn, it's very messy.

 

I had a patient once, she said, ‘I hate autumn. It's just so messy. All those leaves everywhere. Having to sweep up all the time.’ It really annoyed her. But there is some beauty in the mess. There is some beauty in the chaos because we know it's going to pass. And what you see sometimes with people is they really indulge themselves in the mess. They don't care what they wear. They don't do anything with their hair. They're. They let their house go and then they go, okay, I'm now going to clear up. I'm now going to tidy up. And to engage with both of these things is to really embrace the metal. It's to really enjoy both sides of it because both sides are beautiful and necessary. When we're balanced, we automatically do that. When we're out of balance, then what happens is we start to feel messy on the inside. We feel dirty, we feel polluted, we feel congested. And then the same happens on the outside. This is where you see the person who's hoarding won't let go of anything is full of resentments for other people. So, it is essential if we recognise that this is happening on the outside, it for sure is happening on the inside. And what this system of medicine teaches us is that we have to take responsibility for everything we see on the outside, because it is a projection of what's happening inside.

 

And the metal shows us this the clarity of the insight to be able to see the inside and connect with the outside is everything the metal does. This is nature's gift for us to give us this incredibly broad perspective. The most beautiful thing about the metal is what we see in the season of autumn. When you go out into nature and you see the leaves change into these incredible colours, it is like a jewel box. It is nature saying to us, look at this absolute beauty, and there probably is no more beautiful time with that slightly misty atmosphere and the way that the sun, low in the sky, catches these beautiful colours. It's demonstrating the real value and beauty that is in nature, but also within us, within all of us. We have our own little jewel box, and it has rubies and diamonds and gold and silver. All of this is within us. This is the gift of life. This is the gift of the heavens. How the heavens shine down and produce the gems on earth. And we are the children of heaven, and we carry that beauty within us, and we simply need to be able to connect with it. And this is what the element does. So, if you're not connecting with your own internal jewel box, if you do not see your real value, regardless of what you've done in your life, then it's the metal that needs the help.

 

The metal is a key part of and acupuncture training gives the acupuncture student a way to understand the workings of nature both externally and internally.

 

The Metal Element is written by Five-Element Acupuncture Master Gerad Kite