The Elemental Awakening

The Elemental Awakening

Learning to experience your Wholeness requires recognizing that we are not just human, we are simultaneously human, nature, and Spirit[1].In our society’s modern religious and spiritual landscape people are likely more comfortable with the idea of themselves as Spirit than as nature.If we want to be truly widely and wildly awake, recognizing the aspects of ourselves that are in fact still wild or if they are not still wild – starting the process of rewilding them is a necessary step.

What does it mean to be wild, or to be nature?In the same way that spiritual awakening is considered an ascendent path, the path of the wild could be considered a descending or immanent path.We need to be careful with the word “descending” because that commonly has a negative connotation, but in this case we mean to be fully present, connected to the totality of nature, as nature.

One of the natural ways to explore this was mapped beautifully by the Daoists.The Daoist five element system eventually became the foundation for their healing system, but it’s based on a realization that the fundamental forces in nature can be simply categorized into 5 natural energies.Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water.These five elements in balance form harmony, health and vitality. When imbalanced they form stagnation, illness and disharmony.

This is true in humans as well in. Each of the elements can be represented in the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects of self.We are all naturally predisposed to have a primary and secondary nature of each of these elements and we spend our life creating greater harmony by learning to amplify or relax the other elements.

Healing

True health and wellness comes from a balanced, harmonious and adaptive system that can handle the ability to adapt to it’s environment. When a person can do that, they can experience health and wellness. When an environment (physical, emotional, mental or spiritual) overwhelms our capacity to stay balanced, and adaptive over a significant amount of time that harmony between the five elements is challenged and at least one element is over or under expressed resulting in symptoms.

The wood element leads us to expand, rise and grow but when overactive can create anger. The fire element leads us to experience passion and joy, but when overactive can create mental imbalance or madness. The Earth element is stabilizing, solid, steady and plans step-by-step, but when out of balance can become anxious and worried. The Metal element helps create structure, discipline and order but when out-of-balance can create grief. And the Water element helps us to feel our feelings and notice intuition but when overactive creates fear.

In our goal of helping people to move towards greater wholeness, we’ve recognized that some things cannot be resolved from biological medicine and psychology alone. Those are incredibly useful fields with many tools, and while they might suggest being in nature, to learn to recognize yourself as nature is a very different journey.

Practice: As you read through this list of descriptions of the five elements, which element do you feel you are naturally embodying most? What element do you feel like might be over-utilized? What element do you feel like is under-utilized. Remember, the goal is harmony and synergy that leads to increase in embodied vitality, presence, beauty, strength and wisdom.

Awakening

Now that we’ve seen what the application of the five elements looks like in the healing domain, let’s explore what it looks like in spiritual awakening. To recognize the elements within ourselves is to recognize the fundamental essence or quality of the element and to be able to feel that quality within ourselves.

When you can feel the natural drive to grow, expand, stretch and evolve you are feeling the quality of the wood element. When you feel your own integrity, steadiness, rootedness and stability you are feeling the earth element. But what does “feel” mean in this capacity? Most people hear “feel” and don’t feel at all, they conceptualize. To feel this in the body and energy, you must be able to feel your body and slow down enough to feel the subtle energy. This takes training, most commonly with some version of meditation or contemplative type practices.

The gift of coming into authentic connection with each of these elements is numerous. One valuable application is to be able to recognize and increase or decrease the expression of these elements intentionally. A healer might suggest we stop certain behaviors as part of a five-element diagnosis and intervention. For instance, they might tell you to stop arguing with your family because it over activates the wood element and taxes the liver (the organ associated with wood).But to be able to feel the fundamental nature of wood is quite different and allows for the felt energetic expression of wood in your body to change.

Practice: Pick an element and imagine that element in nature. Visualize that element in your mind, in context and notice how you feel as you sit and observe this element in your mind’s eye.Do you start to notice there is a difference in how you feel? How would you describe the qualities of that change in sensation?

[1] This is a triple from Forrest Landry’s Immanent Metaphysics. This metaphysics forms a significant foundation of the doctrine of the Temple of Wholeness.