The Five Elements of Chinese Medicine

The Five Elements are foundational tenets to the theoretical groundwork of Chinese Medicine.

Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water describe different kinds of movement and function within a living system: how we grow, connect, nourish, refine, conserve, adapt, and change.

I learned them first as a way of understanding health and pathology in the treatment room. But after years of watching those patterns play out in actual human bodies and actual human lives, I started seeing them everywhere.

Because apparently I cannot leave well enough alone.

And so, my own theoretical background, Proof of Life®, grew from taking those elemental ideas seriously outside the treatment room, too: What does healthy function look like when we zoom out from the individual body? What happens when necessary human capacities are recruited by families, relationships, workplaces, cultures, and larger systems? And perhaps most importantly:

What is all of that functioning in service of?

That’s what I’m exploring here.