What is your great movement?
One of the five elements dominated the year you took your first breath. In the Stems and Branches system that element is called the great movement. It does not act alone: it provokes a reaction in a second element, and that reaction is what the person spends a life learning. Put in a date of birth, yours or that of the patient you are seeing this afternoon, and you get both.
Take a patient you are seeing this week, put their date of birth in, and read them what comes back. Nothing more than that: the dominant movement, the reaction to it, and the one thing that strengthens it.
It does not land with everyone. When it does, what usually happens is this: after two sentences the patient stops listening and starts talking. They tell you their own story, and that story explains those two elements better than any description in a textbook, mine included.
Say it as a hypothesis and let them correct you. This is where the system is actually learned. Twenty-five years in, I still learn more from patients than from books.
What this system does in your treatment room
1. It shows you how the meridians lean on each other.
Take the liver. Through the heavenly stems it is paired with the large intestine. Through the earthly branches, with the small intestine. In jue yin, with the pericardium. I know no other system that lays these connections out as clearly. With your fingers on the pulse you can tell which of these levels the imbalance sits on, and you treat on that level. That is what makes a treatment personal in the literal sense, and in my clinic it is where the better results come from, though not in every patient. Working on that level from the pulse is what the 2-Point Acupuncture course teaches.
2. It tells you which points of a combination belong to this patient.
A date of birth shows a person's tendencies, and those tendencies show up as meridians that run toward excess and meridians that run toward deficiency. When a textbook gives you points on four meridians, you keep the ones on the meridians that match this person. In my clinic the great majority of patients fall ill along their own meridian tendencies, so that is most likely where the illness began. The chart stays a hypothesis: if it does not agree with the pulse, the pulse wins.
3. It gives the patient something to take home.
You can tell the patient, in plain words, which level is involved and which meridian is struggling, and give them one thing to practice every day. The three minutes above are exactly that. That way they keep using, in their ordinary life, the energy the needles just strengthened.
The six volumes take the four levels one at a time, and the series page shows what each volume adds.
This is one level of four, and it describes tendencies, not determinants. It is not a diagnosis or a treatment plan. In the clinic the pulse decides. What the other three levels are, and what you do with a reading like this in front of a patient, is Volume 1 of the series.
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If the reader gave you or your patient earth, the earth chapter of Volume 2 is open in full: what it is, what it looks like, what helps. Two stems and two branches from Volumes 3 and 4 are open the same way.
Earth in full, plus two chapters of Volume 1 (PDF)
Jia and Ji, Zi and Wu: four chapters from Volumes 3 and 4 (PDF)