Welcome to A Top Down View of the Five-Elements

Learn Five-Element constitutional diagnosis with Lonny Jarrett, one of the traditions most engaged and experienced practitioners, teachers, and scholars. 

This is an 8 session class meeting for an evening every three weeks. Participants will watch videos on the content, read on each element in Nourishing Destiny, Clinical Practice, and Deepening Perspectives and then have an opportunity to hear Lonny teach on each element in a 1.5-2 hour Q&A session. Class 8 will involve a three hour session with Lonny diagnosing a patient for one hour in front of the class with 2 hours of presentation afterward including Constitution, diagnosis, prognosis, Chinese physiology, and herbal, acupuncture, and “lifestyle” prescription. 

The intention of my teaching is to give the student a core grounding in the “inner tradition,” a depth approach to Chinese medicine. Constitutional diagnosis will be examined as an organizing framework that yields deep insights into each patient’s destiny and path of healing. The imagery contained in the acupuncture point names will be discussed as it relates to the points inner functions. We will come to understand Chinese medicine as a fully holistic/integral science as well as appreciate the key role that the practitioner’s own level of development plays in achieving this goal. Participation in this class is suitable for students and practitioners from any tradition and level of training who wish to deepen their perspective on their art. 

Nourishing Destiny lays out the philosophical and functional basis of each elemental constitution in terms of the transformation of a disordered relationship to thought and feeling into the cultivation of virtue.

Clinical Practice elaborates the constitutions through the function of each channel’s points.

Deepening Perspectives looks at the elements from a developmental and cultivational perspective that places each individual’s evolution in their own hands. It considers each element from a constitutional and cultural perspective.

Remember when reading, Every term in Chinese physiology had gross-physical, subtle-psyche/soul, and very subtle spiritual implications. When we see a physical sign we must ask, “How is this present in psyche, soul, and spirit?” and when we see a very subtle sign in spirit “shen large S” we must ask, “how is this present in mind and body?”