FIRE ELEMENT:

Emotions: Joy/overindulgence and Sadness
Related organs: Heart (yin)/Small intestine (yang) , Pericardium (yin)/Triple Burner (yang)
Season: Summer
Movement: Upwards
Taste: Bitter
Body tissue: Blood vessel
Direction: South
Change: Growth
Color: Red
Climatic Qi: Hot
Sense organ: Tongue

Our truth is spoken from the heart through the tongue. Issues that deal with aphasia (inability to speak) can be healed by treating the heart.

When I was a student, I worked at an upscale marina on Shelter Island in beautiful San Diego. The president of this marina found out that I was a student of Chinese medicine. He was quite pleased to know of my endeavors and shared with me a very special story:

In the 80s, he lost his ability to speak. He absolutely had no voice. The western medical doctors wanted to help him by doing surgery. They emphasized that this very delicate operation was his only option. My boss chose a very different path to regain his ability to speak.

He looked into the option of acupuncture.

He and his wife went to a Chinese medical doctor’s “office." He didn’t have much faith in the doctor initially because of the desolate building the doctor worked in, so I could safely assume that the practitioner’s office looked very different than what a typical acupuncture clinic looks like now. He was committed to not getting surgery, so he put his faith into Chinese medicine, despite what the doctor’s office looked like.

My boss showed me the areas where he had been needled. Over 10 years had passed and this man still remembered very clearly where the needles were placed. The meridians that the doctor had chosen made much sense to me-he had chosen fields of energy along the heart meridian. My boss received this ONE AND ONLY treatment in his entire life. Due to this treatment, his voice immediately returned. He has been able to speak very well since then and adamantly testifies that it is because of the acupuncture treatment that his ability to speak had returned permanently.

Had he never shared with me the story, I would never have known that he had lost his voice. It is truly amazing that he regained his voice through Chinese medicine whereas his only choice was to receive surgery from the western medical model.

This story moved me to relentlessly
pursue my dreams as a healer of Chinese medicine.