The Wood Element- Five Element Series
Hey, aloha and welcome everybody. So happy to be reconnecting with you. My name is Paul Fletcher and this is The Healing Source and we are moving now this week into season number six. The previous five weeks included Tao healing and the understanding of it. Tao healing for the physical-emotional, Tao healing for the mental body which was the third series. Tao healing for the spiritual and then we moved into relationships and then the last series, series number five was finances. And so now we are moving into a brand new series and this series will be called The Five Elements of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Now, I want to start by saying I am not a TCM doctor or medical practitioner. I am, however, knowledgeable in what I’ll be sharing with you specifically today because my teacher, Doctor and Master Zhi Gang Sha is knowledgeable in this subject matter. And as a student who has trained underneath him for 15 years he made sure that his Tao healers understood the nature of the five elements so this series will include touching on the wood element which is what I’m going to be discussing today. The Fire Element next week, the Earth element the Metal element and the Water elements. Now, each of these elements have very, very deep roots, far deeper than I’m intelligent enough to explain to you.
But when I say deep roots what I mean is they impact not just the physical human body but they actually impact our planet, they impact our universe and they can impact all universes. It is stated in the ancient wisdom teachings that the five elements is found in all universes in everything. Everything does not, is not limited by our human concept. In other words, if I say wood, fire, earth, metal, water we think, you know, metal and metal pail. Water we think water. Fire we think burning ourselves, right? But these in the larger picture are representative of qualities, they are representative of energies not imageries like we make up here on earth.
So, these qualities and these energies pervade all life. Another way of putting it is your cell, a singular cell, carries the qualities of wood, fire, earth, metal and water within it. Now, imagine that larger than us, larger than a human, larger than earth, larger than this universe and so forth those qualities pervade everything so that’s about as much as I can get because that’s about as much as I understand. On the largest scale what our teach, my teacher Doctor and Master Sha taught me as a healer which is what I’ll be sharing with you today is the nature and the power and the significance of Traditional Chinese Medicine in its ability to to connect the human body and its organs, its system, its emotions, its tissues. All of these qualities that we’ll be talking about today belong to those elements.
Now there are additional qualities that include moistness, dampness, wind, directions north, east, south, west; northeast, northwest and so forth. There are many different layers of this TCM Traditional Chinese Medicine wisdom connected to the five elements but my teacher understood that as Tao healers when we were not trained in TCM we were not trained and are not trained to put people with needles but he also understood that if we had a basic understanding and a basic conceptual grasp of the main qualities of wood, fire, earth, metal and water that we would be able to be better at understanding the root causes of something. So, let me give you a general example before we go more deeply into the wood element. A general example is if someone has asthma, okay? In the traditional Western model of approaching a health condition they would say, ‘Well, asthma is the lungs so we’re going to give you this. We’re going to test and see what the issues. We’re going to give you this pharmaceutical and, you know, good luck!’
The Traditional Chinese Medicine approach would see this as a holistic part of a larger issue. They recognize that the lungs, yes, is connected but they would say that this is a metal element imbalance. They would allow for the possibility of other connective things such as grief and sadness which is an emotion which in the Western model approach to health and wellness has no association whatsoever to anything. It’s just grief and it’s sadness but in the Traditional Chinese model or approach to assisting a person to heal they recognize that the grief and sadness are an aspect of the metal element and, of course, the lungs are as I just shared. So, they would check with that person that they’re working with, they would ask them are they holding on to anger or any sadness?
And, sure enough, a lot of people when they process and purify their grief and sadness all of a sudden their asthma goes away, isn’t that interesting? So, this is one very small example of the much larger approach to Traditional Chinese Medicine to helping identify what is truly the root cause of how a person can be the recipient of a better level of healing. Now, as a Tao healer having trained with Dr and Master Sha for 15 years I wanted to use these next five podcasts to take each one of these elements one by one and give you some insights on them so that you can be more aware as we have been made aware as a healer so that when you are either offering service to somebody as a healer or even when you may have some health issues yourself you might look at those health issues differently now and look at approaching them differently.
Now, one thing I do want to tell you is that even though I offer these podcast, they’re out there to the general public and their purpose is informational I do have a business in which I have anywhere from 40-60 clients every month that I am offering this form of healing to, utilizing this same wisdom so I encourage you to go to my website, wellspringoflight.com, and learn more about the, what Tao healing is and now it can be an adjunct or an alternative source of healing for you. Great, so now that the stage is set let’s go ahead and talk about the wood element. So, the wood element is one of five major elements; wood, earth, fire, metal and water. And I’m going to share a screen here, let me get it set up, so you should be able to see this now and you can see that this element has qualities. The first quality is the major organ connected to it and it is they called in the TCM approach that they refer to everything with yin-yang organ or the parent organ is the liver, the liver.
So, again, in the traditional Western approach you would go to see a liver specialist and they would say, ‘Well you have cirrhosis of the liver’ or they have a fatty liver or whatever their diagnosis is and I’ll be the first to tell you that the West is exceptional in diagnosis but their solutions are, for the most part, built around adjusting your chemical balance through the use of pharmaceuticals so they will offer you a pharmaceutical that’s purpose is to change the matter. It adjusts the matter of the cellular structure and at least in my observation, my personal observation, I have not observed a cure from any form of a pharmaceutical. I have noticed an amelioration of the problem, I have noticed that the problem might be postponed and extended as the, over time the organ, the system or the condition tends to degrade but at least in my personal experience I’ve never seen a cure from something that simply adjusts the matter using a chemical.
Now, the Traditional Chinese Medicine approach looks at things differently, they would look at the liver and they would see that it is connected to the gallbladder, the paired yang organ, and as a paired yang organ it may be part of the reason why the liver is having difficulty. They also look at things from a much larger perspective meaning there’s a connectivity of one to the next. Each of these five major elements wood, fire, earth, metal and water lead to each other. I’ll give you an example in the, and this is an ancient philosophy, an ancient statement that is, this is how they start out teaching in the traditional schools. The wood element nurtures, it feeds the fire element; the fire element nurtures and feeds the earth; the earth nurtures and feeds metal; metal nurtures and feeds water; water nurtures and feeds wood. And so, if you think about it from this cyclical cycle of nourishment, water is feeding the wood. Wood cannot grow, trees cannot grow without water. Trees are feeding the fire, fire cannot continue if there’s nothing to feed it, right? The fire feeds the earth, how does it feed the earth? It breaks things down, that nourishment goes into the earth which causes new crops to grow etc. The earth feeds the metal. Earth is the source or the precursor to the metals being found.
Metals assist and feed the water. Metals then can be formed to carry water like a pail, okay? And then the water feeds and nourishes the wood and the cycle is a nourishing cycle. Now, this concept is thousands of years old and it goes significantly deeper than that. In the Traditional Chinese Medicine approach, they would also look at too much water. If you pour too much water on your plants at home, what happens? It dies, right? If you put too much wood in a fire, what happens? The fire becomes so big it burns down what you didn’t want to burn down. So, as well as the nurturing cycle you can do too much of all of this, okay? And then there’s the canceling cycles where water puts out fire, okay? And earth controls metal, excuse me, earth controls water so you can dam the water up and control it and so there are controlling natures as well to all of these five elements. We’re not going to go on to any of those details today, I bring them to your attention so that as we go through how you as an individual, understanding this information, you can apply it to your health, your wellness, this is why I’m sharing this, okay?
So, back to the wood element. Now, for those of you that are listening on a podcast I’m showing an image of a tree with roots and it lists the major in, the major aspects of the five elements and then how it shows up in the physical body and we’ve discussed so far the yin origin known as the parent organ which is the liver and the yang organ which is the paired, they call it a paired organ, the gallbladder. Now, in the physical body they are actually next to each other and it's very sad, again, because in the Western environment if you have gallbladder issues they’ll just tell you to cut it out, just go cut it out, remove it, which is in essence denying that the gallbladder has a very important function to your health and your wellness. One small thing, not small but one very important thing that the gallbladder does is it creates something called bile, B-I-L-E.
Bile is an absolute necessity for your digestive process, it carries with it intelligence that helps your digestive process to function significantly better and yet the Western model simply ignores that. And so when the gallbladder is cut out then it leads, it could lead to significant issues on a completely separate note but just something that’s relevant to understand in 100% of the cases for someone who has received, they call it, I can’t think of the exact name but it’s basically it’s when somebody is so hugely obese that they do a very aggressive surgery and they remove their stomach and they remove parts of their entire digestive processes, right? And the person comes back to a normal weight, I forget the exact name of it but they don’t do it too often because it’s very aggressive and the person’s heart has to be strong and so forth. But, curiously enough, in 100% of these cases and this is well over a hundred, all of those people prior to the surgery had well known, documented diabetes and had been dealing with diabetic conditions and after they removed parts of their body the diabetes went away. 100 of the cases and then interesting they found that it has to do with what’s called the duodenum.
So, you’ve probably never heard of the duodenum, but it is one of the parts that receives the bile from the gallbladder and then it gives signals and messages to the stomach and the small intestine and by removing that part the duodenum the diabetes went away. Now, that’s being hidden, of course, from the world because if somebody can remove their duodenum then they can solve their diabetic issues and the multi-billion dollar diabetic industry would go away but, again, this is what can happen. You can actually have detriment to your body or you can have benefits to your body by what you do to it so pay attention. So, going back now to this chart we see that the liver and the gallbladder are very connected. There is something known as the gallstone flush, sometimes referred to as a liver flush and something you might want to look into. This is not associated with the wood element but do your own homework.
I came across it probably about 10 years ago, it was called the Holda Clark Liver Flush (sp?) and the short version of it is it releases your gallstones. Gallstones are not kidney stones, okay? Kidney stones are painful, gallstones are soft, gallstones are formed in your liver, they are formed when your liver gets too much toxicity and then the cholesterol wraps around that toxin and those cholesterol wrapped toxins start glomming onto each other. Therefore, eventually, forming like a snowball rolling in the snow, eventually it forms a gallstone it might take a thousand toxins that are a little toxin wrapped in a cholesterol sheath. But, eventually, those snowballs form into a gallstone, the gallstones forming in your liver fall into your gallbladder and as they fall into your gallbladder they create, of course, what you call gallstones. The oldest and biggest ones are actually in the back of your gallbladder because they’ve been forming for 30 or 40 years and the newest ones are kind of small, they’re like the size of a BB whereas the bigger ones can actually be the size of a stone, they can be the size of your thumbnail.
So, when you do a liver flush or gallstone flush you can have a significant benefit to your health and wellness. Again, stuff that you would not find through the Western model so when we look at the wood element, we open up to how it can affect us, we can learn quite a bit. For example, the body tissue associated with the wood element is your tendons and nails. Some of you find lots of literature out there. If you look at your nails like I’m looking at mine and if there are vertical lines on it like going the direction of your thumb pointed outwards those vertical lines mean that you have some imbalances in your liver, okay? The tendons are directly associated with your liver. These are what’s called body tissues. Each element in the five elements have associations with the tissues of your body so your tendons, if you’re a person who has joint pain, knee pain, shoulder pain, elbow pain, okay? This could very, very likely be a sign that there is an over toxicity in your liver or gallbladder.
Okay, what’s another one? Eyesight. How many people’s eyesight goes the later on in life that they get? A lot of people’s eyesight gets worse later on in life that they get and people think it’s, ‘Oh, it’s just normal.’ Well, it’s not just normal. True story, this goes like about 20 years ago I was working in a real estate industry and one of the people I was working with was doing a specific kind of a fast, it was a juicing fast, and the duration of time in this juicing fast was 10 days. It was no fruit in this juicing fast, no vegetables in this juicing fast, it was almost just a water fast with few additional things. So, he’s only supposed to go 10 days, he did it 40, 4-0. Now this man lost about 40 pounds, he looked great, and I chatted with him it’s about a month after the fast and he said the most amazing thing happened. Every night for the previous 10 years when I went to bed I would pick up my book and I would read it and when I picked up my book I would always pick up my reading glasses. They said I put on my reading glasses and the book was blurry. I took them off and it could see.
Put them on, the book was blurry. Took them off, I could see. He said, ‘Paul, after I cleaned my body for 40 days I could see again.’ This is the nature, what he was purifying, the liver, the liver was cleansing out its toxins. So, the Western approach would just laugh at that and say, ‘Oh, it’s hocus pocus. That’s just a lucky, lucky whatever’ but the Eastern model says, ‘No, it’s all connected.’ The wood element is connected to your eyesight so for those of you that have eye-related issues look to purify your liver, look to do cleanses for your liver, look to take herbs for your liver, go see an acupuncturist. If you have Tao healing or you would like to receive Tao healing then contact me and I can help you to help purify these organs as well as use the energy practices that we use. But, again, in sharing this wisdom with you it’s so that you can have a wider swath of comprehension of the nature of your body and its interconnectivity. Now, the next one is going to really surprise a lot of you especially if you’ve never heard this before. Each one of these major five elements has an emotion associated with it.
The imbalanced emotion of the wood element is anger. Raise your hand if you have some anger issues, right? I definitely had my share of anger issues, quite a few of them and they got better and better as I moved forward on my spiritual journey. I learned to first hold it in and then I learned to process it and I learned to look at why I was angry and, you know, you go through this process of becoming responsible and anger is connected directly to the liver and the wood element. How many alcoholics do you know because, you know, alcohol affects the liver, right? How many alcoholics do you know are very angry people? How many angry people drink alcohol? How many alcoholic people have anger? Sometimes one begets the other and this is really important to grasp, the connectivity here, you know? So, if you want to help somebody that has alcoholism tendencies you need to get them into a set of conditions where they can do it.
Their anger, they could have become alcoholic at a very young age, 18, 19, 20, 25, whatever and had difficulty getting past it. Maybe popped up from one addiction to another and so forth. This is very often because they have imbalanced emotions that they never processed properly. Okay, so, again, the higher approach seeing the connectivity of everything. I have received Tao healing transmissions for healing my liver. I have received Tao healing transmissions for releasing and healing anger. I have received Tao healing transmissions for the balance emotion of patience because the opposite of anger is patience, okay? And that’s the balanced emotion so if you would like to receive these Tao healing transmissions for yourself make sure you contact me. Patience is something that we can all use more of. You have to be a superhero if you’re a person that has a tremendous amount of patience. Most of us work towards that as we get better.
So, let me offer everything now in a conclusion. This series will include information on the wood element which we covered today. The fire element next week, the earth element and then the metal element and then the water element. Each one of these elements are interconnected. If you have the right balance of each, then they nourish each other. If you are pushing too much on one then it could harm another organ or system, it can put emphasis on an imbalanced emotion. So, you want these elements to be balanced in your physical body, in your emotions and in the way you bring yourself to life. The comprehension of each one of these and the interconnectivity like today you have the parent organs of the liver and the gallbladder, you have the imbalanced emotion of anger, you know that it affects your eyes and your tendons.
You know that having more patience in your life can help bring balance to these. By having this larger understanding, you can now look for different solutions. If you have health issues related to this and as we move into next week and we start talking about the fire element which has a direct association to the physical heart, the heart. You can maybe start to understand, and I’ll give you a little clue that if your liver is off, if it’s weak then that means it’s not nourishing your heart enough. Or if your liver is over emphasize, too much alcoholism or too much anger then it’s really firing up your heart and it could led to a heart attack and so forth. So, we’re going to cover this continuity of understanding more as they move from week to week in this podcast.
So, I hope you have enjoyed today’s wisdom and information. I give all credit to my teacher, Dr and Master Sha, who is a world-renowned healer, and he is a highly trained Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor as well so he has a wealth of knowledge and he is the one that has shared the information I’m sharing with you today. Of course, I make no statements of medical information, I’m not telling you to avoid your doctors or anything like that, always follow your doctor’s guidance. Just be much more aware of what they might not know. What is known with other traditions that have been doing this for thousands of years and how that additional information could bring value to you and your health, wellness, and healing. So, I look forward to seeing you next week. Until then have an awesome day! Bye-bye everybody!
