Description

Wind Points

風 Feng

Wind 風 feng has been a notable cause of disease from the earliest times. But long before its importance in medicine, there have always been the eight directional winds ba feng 八 風 in Chinese philosophy and wind xun 巽 ☴ is one of the eight trigrams in the Yijing 易 經Book of Changes. In medicine wind is well known as ‘the chief of the one hundred diseases’, a big topic, covering multiple fields.

With its fundamental division into external and internal wind, affecting respectively the lungs and the liver, it extends from sniffing and sneezing with the lightest invasion of defensive qi to dizziness and full-blown paralysis, where everything is stopped or epilepsy and even full-on madness, where everything is awry. Wind covers an astonishingly wide spectrum.

We will start this evening with a review of the essentials of wind and then study the feng 風wind points, which are extremely helpful for wind disorders:

SI 12 秉 風 bing feng Grasping the Wind

Bl 12 風 門 feng men Wind Gate

TH 17 翳 風 yi feng Wind Screen

GB 20 風 池 feng chi Wind Pool

GB 31 風 市 feng shi Wind Market

Du 16 風 府 feng fu Wind Storehouse

M-LE-8 八 風 ba feng Eight Winds

We will explore why these specific points have been designated as wind points, their full meaning, qualities, uses and helpful clinical combinations in practice. Point by point we will build up a study of the point names, so that we are aware of them as the Chinese are, by name and not just by meridian and number, which was never a traditional concept. The points were carefully named, often evoking traditional images and stories, setting a point within a larger context that is extremely useful in practice.

Date: Tuesday 18 November

Time: 6-8pm

Cost: £40

Eligibility: Acupuncture practitioners and students

Location: Online (class will be recorded)

About the teacher

I have been practicing acupuncture for forty years and teaching and writing on Chinese medicine and philosophy for nearly as long. My influences have been Dr van Buren at the International College of Oriental Medicine, where I originally studied and later became the principal from 1985 to 1990. The college has a special interest in heavenly stems and earthly branches. With teachers Claude Larre and Elisabeth Rochat de la Vallée from the Institut Ricci and Ecole Européene d’Acupuncture in Paris I studied classical Chinese, the Daoist writers Laozi and Zhuangzi and the medical classics. This balanced Chinese medicine with its deep-seated cultural perspective.

I have been teaching internationally for many years. I now live in Denmark where I am focussing on four particular subjects – the nature of time and timing, Neidan internal alchemy, Yijing patterns of change and acupuncture point portraits. In time these will become available online at Guan Academy.

Watch a free presentation of Bringing the Points Alive with Peter Firebrace