INTERVIEW WITH NORA FRANGLEN

Interviewed by Sarah Matheson

‘What I love about five-element acupuncture is that it touches the deepest part of us.’ (Nora Franglen)

Sarah: Nora, how did acupuncture come into your life and why five-element acupuncture especially?

Nora: I was very lucky because I had never really come across acupuncture until I went to a party and I was sitting beside a five-element acupuncturist. In those days, most of the acupuncturists were five-element practitioners; that was the largest group of acupuncturists because of J.R. Worley’s college. The acupuncturist mentioned something about acupuncture treating the body, mind and spirit, and I’ve always thought that I must have been hooked in by the word ‘spirit’!

I had a hyperactive thyroid, which seems to have disappeared now – maybe due to acupuncture – and I thought: ‘How nice, maybe I could try some acupuncture.’ I thought acupuncture (because I’d seen it demonstrated on television) was only needles in the ears. So when I went to this acupuncturist for treatment, I was surprised to be asked to talk about myself. For an hour I talked all about my life, and I was going through a difficult patch, so it was lovely to be able to talk to somebody who really wanted to know about me and that surprised me. He started treating me and that meant that I had to get undressed and that surprised me too; I was waiting for the needle in the ears. Then he put needles down my back, which I now know was an aggressive energy check, and he started to laugh because every single needle went red, and it took a long time for the aggressive energy to drain. Then he decided to treat the Fire Element because he did something on my hands, just twiddled some points on my hands, and then left me to go home.

I felt a bit surprised as I was a doctor’s daughter, so I had been brought up very much in the Western medicine mind-set and I couldn’t quite understand what was going on. Well, I woke the next morning feeling absolutely different. That’s something I always think was a sort of blessing: that the Good Lord, or whoever you believe is up there, gave me this gift as it made me understand how five-element acupuncture could transform a person’s life and I understood it from my own viewpoint. I felt completely different the next morning and I can still remember the excitement of feeling more alive. I remember having this strong urge to go out and find some grass, take my shoes off and walk with bare feet in the grass, because I felt as if I wanted to connect with the earth below my feet – as if I was connecting to something from which I had been disconnected for a long time. And that was the start of me falling in love with five-element acupuncture.

Sarah: Then you went to train at the College of Traditional Acupuncture?

Nora: I had treatment for a year and, one day, I said to my practitioner: ‘You are so lucky to do this!’ For I thought you had to be a medical doctor to practise acupuncture as my then practitioner was also a qualified Western medicine doctor, so I did not give it any more thought. Then, by chance, I meet a woman who mentioned that she had trained for a year at a college in Leamington. I asked if she was a medical doctor and she replied: ‘No you don’t have to be!’

So that made me think. I had said to my practitioner: ‘Aren’t you lucky to do this!’ Then the woman had said: ‘You don’t have to be a doctor.’ And she just said: ‘Well why don’t you find out what the course is like now?’ She gave me the name of the college where she had trained and I phoned the College of Traditional Acupuncture (CTA). The woman who answered the phone said: ‘If you get your application today, we can consider you this year. If not, you’ll have to wait a year.’ I’m a very speedy person, I make very quick decisions. So I wrote a very quick application talking about my life and why I thought it would be lovely to be an acupuncturist. But I really wasn’t thinking that I was going to be an acupuncturist; I just wanted to learn why I felt so different. It was really curiosity, more than knowing that I wanted to practise acupuncture. They accepted me within a day and said: ‘Do you want a place?’ I said: ‘Yes!’ So, within two days, they talked to J.R. Worsley who was there reviewing the applications. Apparently, he said: ‘Well yes, I think we can accept you.’ I never had an interview. That was the start of my love of five-element acupuncture.

Sarah: What influence did J.R. Worsley have on your life?

Nora: I knew he’d started the college and I knew he was the founder of the college and I knew that the five-element approach to acupuncture owed everything to him. First of all, I’d read his little book Talking about Acupuncture in New York. This was a little book that just blew my mind because it sort of explained life in a way that I could understand. A lovely little book which I used to give all my patients. And I just felt that this person understood the way I felt; he offered something that I might be able to offer other people, and it just persuaded me that he must be a great healer. I then trained with him during my Master’s at CTA

Sarah: Looking back now, how do you feel about SOFEA and its success?

Nora: With every year that passes, I feel prouder of the School of Five Element Acupuncture (SOFEA). We managed to keep it going and also to spread it wider, because it led me to being invited all over Europe to teach five-element acupuncture, and eventually to me teaching in China. So that has been an enormous development for five-element acupuncture, and I feel very proud that it has re-established itself in China.

Sarah: That leads onto my next question, which is: Over the last decade, you’ve worked in China and how was that? And how, going forward, do you see five-element acupuncture in China?

Nora: I think the whole of my association with five-element acupuncture had a pattern to it: it was my destiny. Even though I’m not a fanciful person, it seems that everything I did has led from one step to the next step to the next step. Meeting the acupuncturist at a party led to me to receiving acupuncture; then meeting this person who said ‘You don’t have to be a doctor to be an acupuncturist’ led to me applying for the course. Then meeting J.R. Worsley and going to CTA was exactly what I needed because I understood there was a truth. So I feel it was fated, meant to be.

Because of the trouble in this country in terms of complementary medicine and orthodox medicine and the trouble within the acupuncture field, where five-element acupuncture suddenly seemed to be considered to be ‘too airy-fairy’, which I found ridiculous. Somehow, that pushed me to look further afield. I met Mei Long at a lecture I was giving in the Netherlands. Mei knew Professor Li Hong in China, who had written a book about the fact that traditional Chinese medicine was badly served in China, that, in fact, it had lost its roots. Li Hong’s book is a bestseller which has sold millions of copies, and it opened the door to somebody like me who believed that five-element acupuncture, with its roots in traditional acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, had a role to play. This development came at the right time because SOFEA had just closed and I was ready for something new. I was beginning to say: ‘What am I going to do next?’ And it seemed that China was next.

Sarah: In your opinion, what is the future of five-element acupuncture in China?

Nora: Well, I think it is absolutely infinitely possible that it will just carry on growing and growing. The interest is extraordinary. And remember that China is based upon a deep understanding of the five elements. That understanding is part of the philosophy of life with which each Chinese person grows up. They understand the elements in a way no Western person does. You don’t have to explain things like energy or Officials or the Elements or that the Elements have an effect upon the climate, the year, the season or anything, because they understand that and they know it already deep within themselves. It’s much easier for them to understand five-element acupuncture than anybody in the West. In the West, you have to persuade them that there are things called Elements, whilst in China that is taken for granted. So there are infinite possibilities there, depending on how many people are prepared to teach.

And how many teachers of five-element are there in the world? This is my greatest worry – that there are not enough teachers of five-element acupuncture. The Chinese are doing the best they can to create teachers. They have about 40 or 50 people who have been coming to our seminars whom they call teachers. These are people who do elementary courses for people, which they do all over China. I mean, I think something like four, five, six hundred people go to these elementary courses all over China. Thus the original number of students of mine – maybe we began with something like 10 – has increased and increased. There must be about 40 people now who have done a lot of the seminars with me, have done a lot of work on the five Elements within themselves, have treated using the five-element approach and are then assessed. These students are absolutely dedicated to following exactly what I have written in my handbook of five-element practice. They follow that like a Bible. Therefore, they are trained traditionally.

Sarah: Nora as far as you’re concerned, five-element acupuncture will continue to expand in China?

Nora: Yes, I think it will. It fits very well with the Chinese for they need to have a place where they can start talking about their emotions. It isn’t a culture that does that at all – in fact, quite the opposite.

Something else very interesting happened when I was last in China before the Covid-19 pandemic locked the world down. A very senior local politician came for treatment and I remember him saying: ‘We need this treatment in China, as we’ve lost our soul!’ And I thought: ‘Would any politician in this country or Europe say: “We’ve lost our soul!”’? They wouldn’t know what ‘soul’ means. That demonstrates that, in a sense, the Chinese have still got an understanding of the spirit. It’s there, but it’s been abused for years politically, of course, and this is where five-element acupuncture is so welcome – because we are talking all the time about soul, spirit and emotions. What I love about five-element acupuncture is that it touches the deepest part of us. It doesn’t just touch the physical and the mental levels but it touches the deepest level, as I experienced after my first treatment, when I felt as if I was a different person. So not just on the physical level.

Sarah: Where would you like to see five-element acupuncture in the future in the UK?

Nora: Well, I wish that more of the people who’ve been trained in the past in pure five-element acupuncture were prepared to teach it and practise it now.

Sarah: Maybe it’s because sometimes it’s the most difficult but the simplest?

Nora: Yes, and people like complex, they don’t like simplicity. You can’t believe that it’s just a question of finding the Element and then just doing simple points on that Element to nourish the Officials. That will transform a person’s life. It’s too simple. You don’t need to use lots of drugs; you don’t need to use lots of points. You can use the simplest points and then wait until the Officials breathe a sigh of relief when you’ve hit the correct Element. It is very simple.

As J.R. Worsley said: ‘A child could understand it, but people don’t want to know it’s as simple as that.’ We live in a time of great complexity, when it looks as if being complex is better than being simple. And five-element acupuncture doesn’t feed into that. This is a problem for five-element acupuncture: ‘It can’t be that simple’, people say, ‘but it is that simple’. I don’t know why anybody has got any problems with it. I’ve found it the simplest. I mean, if I can understand it, anybody can! I do what I was taught by my teacher J.R. Worsley.

Sarah: What advice would you give new practitioners about building a practice and about treating?

Nora: Well, one is enthusiasm – to be enthusiastic about what you do! Believe that five-element acupuncture works. If you don’t, forget it. If you haven’t yourself had proof during your apprenticeship when you were learning it, or through your own treatment as I did, that it works – if you’re in doubt whether it works, then the doubt comes through in your practice. So, that’s the first comment. Secondly, you cannot hurt people with five-element acupuncture. I think the practitioner can hurt the patient by being so worried about treating the ‘right’ Element that they don’t help the patient. That hurts the patient. But it’s not the treatment; it’s the practitioner who is not getting it right. Lastly, be humble. Don’t worry if you’re not sure about an Element, give yourself time. Patients are never in a hurry. The patients are in a hurry if the practitioner appears to be in a hurry. Give yourself time to get to know the patient. You’ve got to see their colour, hear the sound of their voice, get to feel what emotion is going on and get the odour. You’ve got to get over your own problem of dealing with a new person, which is always a bit threatening. So give yourself time to understand the patient’s nature, to listen to what the patient’s Officials are telling you about their disharmony.

Sarah: And then the Element will do the healing?

Nora: Yes, that’s exactly it. The five Elements, one’s nature does the healing. That would be a good way of ending this interview by saying that it’s the Elements that do the healing, I think that’s true.

Sarah: And, finally, how do you feel five-element acupuncture has touched your life?

Nora: Totally, and happily in every way, practicing five-element acupuncture has touched my life! I think I’ve been incredibly lucky to be able to practise and teach at my age. To feel that I’m still offering something by teaching and practising is a bonus. I feel that I’m blessed.

Sarah: A gift?

Nora: Absolutely a gift.

‘It opened the door to somebody like me, who believed that five-element acupuncture with its roots in traditional acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, had a role to play.’ (Nora Franglen)

Nora Franglen trained as a five-element acupuncturist under J.R. Worsley at the College of Traditional Acupuncture (CTA), Leamington Spa. She was Founder/Principal of the School of Five-Element Acupuncture (SOFEA) in London from 1995 to 2007. Nora continues her teaching through her practice, writings, and her postgraduate training in the UK, Europe and China. She writes a very successful blog and has written seven books about five-element acupuncture which are published by Singing Dragon Press. Her books on five-element acupuncture have sold thousands in the UK and over 40,000 In china. Nora lives in London.

Sarah Matheson completed her five-element acupuncture training at the College of Traditional Acupuncture (CTA) in Leamington Spa in 1995. She continued her postgraduate training with J.R. Worsley, and has been working in private practice in both London and Brighton. Sarah was previously a tutor and a member of faculty at the School of Five Element Acupuncture (SOFEA) in London for ten years. She also runs postgraduate workshops and is a visiting lecturer at the Academy of Five Elements in Norway. Sarah trained in supervision programme in 1998 and runs one-to-one and group mentoring sessions within the acupuncture profession.