China was a lesson in “Sara, you don’t really know anything.” But strangely, that was not discouraging. It was clarifying. It made me realise that what I do know, I need to get better at communicating.
In this post I explore:
why disappearing to China changed how I think about health, communication, and frameworks
using Western diagnostics, including a DNA methylation age test, to explore Eastern methodologies
why complex ideas need to be translated into simple, usable language
the difference between the Chinese and Western Five Elements
a personal example of how Five Element thinking helped me understand grief, anger, and healing
why I think the Western Five Elements can be modernised rather than treated as a fixed ancient system
how I am beginning to organise ideas from quantum biology, energy, and health into a more practical framework
I vanished from the internet for a while because I unexpectedly went to China with Professor YK Leung, and the whole experience changed my life on many levels for the second time in two months, as I had life-changing experiences hosting retreats in Vernet-les-Bains in April 2026,
Finally, our September and October in-person retreats are all finalised and brief details of each one during the post as one of them in Oct includes TCM alongside Quantum health.
Sara’s Quantum Retreat with nnEMF Expert Olle Kitsing. Brochure Here 👇👇
Discounts For Founding Substack Members, Group Members, Helpers, Cooks/Chefs
Details of the Quantum Consciousness and Quantum Biology 7 Chinese Medicine Retreats are here
To be honest, I had already become deeply fed up with social media, fakery, noise, and what I can only call the food wars or quantum wars. Going to France and China pulled me right out of that atmosphere. It gave me space to think again, and it reminded me of something important: most of us know far less than we think we do.
There are millions of people in China and all over the world who may know nothing about light, nnEMFs, water, biochemistry, magnetism, or consciousness, but who would still be deeply interested if these subjects were explained in a way that felt simple, grounded, and usable. That is the challenge now: how to share complex ideas without confusing or overwhelming people.
I was delighted to be invited to participate in the Sunspiracy film made with David Icke and Ickonic Media. Chrissy Van Wyk did a superb job putting it all together in a way that is easy to understand and scientific. Great idea for a film, Dr Vanessa Ingraham, and it was filmed in New Zealand.
Sunspiricy 48-Hour Free Viewing
Beginning 21st June 2026 at 7:00pm (UK time)
Register at: www.sunspiracy.film
This post is not really about travelling in China, as we went to several areas and Hong Kong, or about what happened in France. That will all come in later posts in a way that is also educational.
But this post does have a Chinese flavour, because the trip shifted something fundamental in how I think about health, communication, and frameworks for understanding reality, and I was able to deal with a long-term issue that I didn’t know I had, which I will go into when I go over the 5 elements in this post.
What I can say for now is that I found people in China to be kind, helpful, curious, and eager. The country was far more progressive than most people in the West are led to believe. I saw some of the best hospitals and infrastructure I have encountered in a long time. I made new friends, met potential collaborators, and had fascinating conversations, including with Chinese UFO enthusiasts, which was fun in its own right.
The Chinese are not our enemy, and the gap between media narratives and lived reality felt enormous to me. But we all know the news is full of lies and encourages fear mindsets that make us more controllable and lower Qi/lifeforce.
One of the biggest things I have been working on is my n=1 exploration: using Western diagnostics to study Eastern methodologies, in this case NeiDan, or internal Daoist medicine. Professor Leung now refers to this as quantum medicine using altered states of consciousness. I have written a much larger Substack post on that side of things already, including why I think people should become their own scientists and start learning how to observe themselves properly, test ideas, and build data around their own experiences.
That matters to me because internal Daoist medicine makes some extraordinary claims: new blood formation, embryonic breathing through the skin, stem cell release, longevity, stronger bones and ligaments, and cognitive enhancement. I am a skeptic who didn’t believe all of that immediately. I am interested in testing what can be tested. I know every test has caveats, but data is still useful, and the more data points you have, the clearer a picture you can build.
Procedures, blood tests, and scans such as MRI in China can cost a fraction of UK prices. That makes serious self-funded research far more possible. I had already collected one month of data and presented some of it in China, which meant boiling down quantum biology, negentropy, TCM, and biochemistry into bilingual slides that were concise, accurate, and simple. That exercise alone taught me a lot.
I will put the English slides with the data I have collected so far, alongs with new data in my next substack with an explanation for paid subscribers.
I got the results of my DNA methylation biological age test back, and it was 37.5 years old, I ran the test in Germany and an average of 3 runs are done ideally, only two are shown 34 and 41. This was after a month in France, but I continued to train daily, and Nancy Wong assisted me in my April retreat with cooking, teaching movement to participants, and also putting me into spontaneous, or as we say, “zapping”. This is the part of Professor Leung’s work that uses altered states of consciousness for triggering self-healing.
With DNA methylation tests, like any data, it has uses, but is a tool not a rule. As now I have got more results its 29, 32, 34, 41 so a big spread! I am ??
oes depend on which genes are being investigated, as sirtuins and genes involving NAD+ are important in how we age. This test doesn’t assess telomere length, as that is loosely described in 23andMe data (I regret getting this test 10 years ago), and there is now a telomere length test, which is about £400-500, so I began with the DNA methylation test. I will order the telomere test in the next few days. The result from April will have to serve as a baseline for my study on internal Daoist medicine, which is fine.
I have not shown my metabolic age data to Professor yet, but he is very keen on DNA, especially the telomere test, as that is easy to explain to all. DNA methylation is somewhat more complex, along with how such tests are performed. I will run more DNA methylation tests to monitor my progress.
I think ageing or longevity encompasses A LOT MORE then just what biohackers do and ‘Biological age tests’. I am also not interested in surgery or other ‘treatments’, but I don’t care what other people do.
Detailed ‘Ageing and why we don’t need to fall apart at 50’ coming.
I have been interested in health since I was about 16, so I cannot give a definitive “exactly what to do” for my attempts at better health span, as that would require me to explain 33 years of my life, and I am the type of person who hates wasting a day and I am NOT an anti ageing guru . I have done many things in my life, and I am distrustful of the internet, and I am an introvert, so I do not share much of my private life online. You have to get to know me in person. I try my best to share science with people, but more of my behind-the-scenes is reserved for in-person events.
I also did lots of things wrong in the past, as most people know I worked in labs and on a PC for over 10 years after my degree. I’ve done other things wrong too, so if you have too, it’s fine, nobody is perfect.
I also do not do, or have done, any of the Dave Asprey or Brian Johnson style anti-ageing as I do not like how Bryan has demonised the Sun. What goes around comes around with his GI issues.
I like doing things which are affordable and use time and discipline instead, as this means anybody can do it.
I am also a huge closet woo-woo and have been since I was about 18, so I do not share much about my spiritual activities over the past decades and I also change my mind and dont know how the universe works anyway, nobody does.
This is a torus shaped crypt for one of the sacred site that we visit on our retreats. Who needs psychedelics with the energy you get there! Great place for bliss states, flow states, Eureka moments or just meditation.
I am doing combined Quantum Biology, Science of Consciousness & Plasma Retreat with Tino Barber (Fluent in Spanish, English & German) 29th Aug - 5th Sept. Cost and locations is the same as my Quantum retreat £595 for 6 days and £275 - £500 for accommodation depending on room.
I am hosting a group zoom with Dr Ralf Otterpohl where you can ask about the retreats, psychomancy, geomancy and France
Tue July 7th 6pm UK/ 7pm CET 1pm EST
It forced me to think much harder about communication. I found a great place to do that.
I placed my wish, which was “To be able to be understood” and “More people like Tommy Ko in my life” (the most helpful man I’ve ever met and a tree expert), at Danlu Mountain (Alchemy Furnace Mountain), an ancient Daoist alchemy site in Guangxi, China, where alchemists once sought to transform minerals into elixirs of immortality.
The area is renowned for the healing that happens, as it is a very high-energy, implosive environment with the “5 elements”, or I would call it a good quantum health location. It is at the 25th latitude and pretty remote.
It was very similar to Vernet-les-Bains in France in terms of its energetics and nature offerings, but it is much sunnier in France. Vernet is at the 42nd latitude. I prefer Vernet as it’s very humid in China, but all that sweating has uses.
How do you explain something complex without overloading people with jargon? How do you make ideas accessible without making them childish? How do you give people a framework that lets them organise information and actually use it?
That question led me back to the Five Elements as I wanted some kind of theme or framework for our retreats in France
I want to introduce both the Chinese Five Elements and the Western Five Elements, because I think they can be useful in different ways. We could also use more modern Western language and talk about quantum biology, redox, life force, polarity, motion, process, entropy, and negentropy. To me, these are not necessarily separate conversations. They are different languages, or vocabulary, or concepts describing overlapping aspects of reality.
In simple terms, joining the dots or looking for common denominators.
I am learning Chinese ancient philosophy and TCM from the basics so that I can compare them with what I know from ancient Western ideas and modern science. I like testing things where I can. I am a huge sceptic, but also very open-minded. I am not a mathematician or a physicist, but I have found that some of Dan Winter’s work, which often seems confusing on first encounter, began to click into place for me once I focused less on the abstract theory and more on the practical question of “how do you do it?”
That shift helped me explain parts of it much more simply during my retreats and during my time in France before China.
The Chinese Five Elements/actions/states system is far more complex than the Western one. It is not just a set of static categories. It describes movements, transformations, interactions, states, cycles, biological processes, emotional patterns, health tendencies, and relationships in nature. It is dynamic. It is process-based. It is alive.
I have been working on my training with Professor Leung and his 3 great teachers since October, and I do Tai Ji, Tren, Wu and Gong, as the movements we do are done at different speeds and each offers different medical or practical benefits. Tren is also the martial art, which is important too, especially for women.
I have had the experience of being put into a spontaneous reaction by Nancy Wong, with Professor Leung assisting so he can teach (he doesn’t see patients). My reaction of the 5 animals was explosive, and there was a particular dominance of the Tiger (lung, metal) and the Deer (liver, wood). I can have explosive anger outbursts for 1-5 minutes, then just calm down, those “For F**k Sake” moments.
If you want to learn more, Nancy & I are doing a combined Quantum Health, 5 Elements & TCM cooking retreat in France Oct 3rd - 10th Meals and cooking lessons provided. (Zoom links to learn more earlier in post but I will put them again at the end)
If you know you would like to attend a retreat and would like to speak to me one - on one this is the calendly link to book a zoom call with me.
Private Zoom Call To Book Retreats
To cut a long story short, after the initial benefits of the treatment, as I felt amazing, a bit after getting back to the UK I felt really awful and angry and thought I had depression. When I looked at the 5 elements more deeply, I realised I had a huge amount of grief that I was suppressing, and then the liver and lung, or the wood and metal relationship, helped me get to the root of my anger.
As we all have to just let grief work its way out on its own and not interfere with the process in any way, I allowed, and am allowing, this to happen. Then I found the liver meridian and anger issue significantly subsided.
Onions, leeks, duck, and bone broth, according to TCM, are supportive of the lung, so I made a soup with onions from my dad’s garden, red onions, leeks, and spring onions as I am very keen on TCM cooking after seeing it in action in China.
This is how the experts do the TCM cooking. All of this was home grown or home reared in China.
The Western Five Elements, by contrast, are simpler and more descriptive. That simplicity is not a weakness. In some ways, it is their strength. Simple frameworks can be easier for people to grasp, remember, and apply. But they can also become vague, overly mystical, get associated with religions or the occult, or get stuck in the past if nobody updates the language around them.
While talking with Professor Leung about both Western and Chinese 5 Element systems, I pointed out that although Thales of Miletus discovered static electricity around 600 BCE, widespread electrification did not begin until the late 19th century with the development of generators, electric lighting, and power grids.
The ancients may have understood many things differently, and both Professor Leung and I are open to a range of possibilities about lost knowledge, advanced civilisations, and the true history of human understanding. But even staying within a conservative frame, it seems reasonable to say that our modern understanding of electricity, magnetism, charge, and biological energy gives us new tools for interpretation.
As I am learning the physics of electroculture at the moment, Professor Leung said something very simple to me: why not modernise the Western Five Elements? “The 3rd law of yin yang, the study of change.”
That landed immediately.
Nobody owns that framework. I did not invent it, and neither did any modern person claiming authority over it. Like many old systems, its exact origins are unclear, like the Kabbalah, the Emerald Tablet, alchemy books, and some of the ancient Chinese inscriptions.
It has become associated in some circles with paganism, mysticism, or New Age spirituality, but that does not mean it has no value or is not true. The same is true of many old frameworks. Their origins may be uncertain, but their usefulness can still be real.
So the question becomes:
What if the Western Five Elements were not treated as esotericism, but as a living framework?
What if they could be updated to reflect what we now understand about electricity, magnetism, redox, biological charge, polarity, and process?
What if they could become a simple bridge between ancient symbolic thinking and modern scientific language?
What if they could help people organise ideas about health, energy, environment, mitochondria, and consciousness without needing a PhD in biophysics?
That is what I am now exploring and why I am keen on in person events and experiential learning.
I made a section for each element and then began to list everything I could think of relating to quantum biology, and now I am putting them into the possible element category. It is also to help me organise my knowledge.
It’s a work in progress, as no matter what I do somebody has a problem with it or says it’s wrong. I don’t really care anymore, as finding a way to convey what I am passionate about to any interested people is what my mission is now.
I am just finding a way to organise myself, as I can’t say I am the tidiest of people. I also like doing retreats, practical teaching, teaching children, teaching dyslexic people, people who hated school and left early, and organising things into colours and themes to match practical activities and outings.
I find doing things like this is fun, helps me learn faster, and categorising quantum biology like this is a way for me to teach children, as I have met many parents now for whom homeschooling is difficult, but who are looking for non-religious, non-dogmatic teaching ideas that help children learn about science that is useful. Families are welcome at our retreats in September/October FYI.
For example, to keep things simple and not draw out lists:
Fire - Light, nnEMFs, heat (sauna), cold (as this causes more heat to be produced in the body and also UV light)
Water - Water, 4th phase water, deuterium, collagen/movement
Earth - Grounding / magnetism / plants / food / minerals
Air - Breath, oxygen, mitochondria
Aether - Unified field, plasma, consciousness
In some ways, mitochondria could also go in the light and water element.
I am not interested in forcing Chinese and Western systems into one confused mash-up. I think that would be disrespectful to both. The Chinese Five Elements belong within a much larger medical and philosophical methodology that has been refined for thousands of years. They should be studied properly and on their own terms. But I do think the Western Five Elements can be re-examined in a way that makes them complementary rather than competitive.
That matters because people need frameworks.
Finding a common ground with cultures such as China, the 5 Elements, West and East, is something relatable to myself and them. Western medicine to them means drugs, and even if I am a decentralised scientist, they do not know what that means really, but 5 elements and nature they do.
Most people do not need more information.
They need better organising principles. They need ways to sort what they are seeing and feeling. They need models that help them observe patterns in health, energy, emotion, environment, and behaviour. They need language that is simple enough to use, but rich enough to remain meaningful.
For me, this sits very closely with the idea of becoming your own scientist. Whether you are exploring light, grounding, water, breath, food, consciousness, sleep, electroculture, magnetism, or internal practice, you need some kind of structure. Otherwise everything becomes a heap of disconnected facts, theories, and opinions.
A useful framework does not need to explain everything perfectly. It only needs to help you see more clearly, ask better questions, and test reality more intelligently.
That is where I am now.
China reminded me how much I do not know. But it also helped clarify what I do know, and what I want to do next. I want to keep learning from Chinese philosophy, TCM, Daoist internal medicine or NeiDan or internal alchemy, and modern science. I want to keep testing where testing is possible. And I want to get much better at translating complex ideas into simple, grounded, practical language that more people can actually use.
So this post is really the beginning of that process.
I am starting to explore what it might mean to modernise the Western Five Elements - not by stripping out the old symbolism, but by making the framework more relevant to the realities of biology, energy, and consciousness as we understand them today.
That feels like worthwhile work to me, and we all need a purpose.
To be practical again..
I am learning electroculture at the moment, as well as the accompanying physics on how the natural magnetism in the earth is used, as magnetism and electricity (or dielectric) are of the same modality. The use of paramagnetic materials like basalt is also part of electroculture, as some people associate it only with unusual shaped copper wire structures.
Gardening, with or without electroculture, is a full 5 elements Western and Chinese ancient or modern example of how we can have a hobby that’s also healthy and stimulates the brain and creativity. Building an electroculture garden is something even a person like me, who is not very good at DIY, can do.
Up and coming posts
First set of results from my n=1 from on Daoist medicine and explanation of the tests and how to read so you can do your own experiments
What I have been working on in the water, magnetism and plasma rabbit holes to help make it less confusing and more practical
China and France stories and how this is key to anyone ‘journey’ and how to do Quantum health in places like Hong Kong.
Retreats Zoom calls for Q&A and mini slide show. Meeeting is rcorded and sent to you by email.
Zoom1: 6.30pm UK/ 1.30pm EST Sun Jun 21st
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/riAi4Yb0R8i_jRp1BC3xHw
Zoom 2: 6pm UK/1pm EST Wed June 24th
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/4sRWRBdgRfWNhJL0Adjdgw
If these time zones do not suit you, you can book a priavte Zoom call with me if you would like to come to one of our events or be added to our waitlist
Thanks for reading
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