Fire Slammed

A student in my 5 Element mentorship program, asked this question:

My Fire element gets slammed by my older sister. When I am affectionate and playful, she frowns and treats me like a child that needs to be disciplined. It hurts. What can I do?

I think you have choices here–more than I can think of. It’s like a crossroads with several ways that you could go. One is towards personal healing, to clear your preconceptions in order to be able to receive, directly from the Divine, the truth of who you are, so that you can be in the situation without it meaning something that it actually doesn’t mean.

Another way that you could go is a Flower and Sun healing from within yourself, so that you are in satisfaction with the balance of Fire within yourself, such that if your Fire is rejected by your sister, you won’t fall over.

Another path is to be a practitioner to your sister and say to yourself, “Okay, I’m not getting what I need here. But what does she need?” She might be acting a little bit like somebody who’s not getting what she needs. What element or gift could you presence on a Me-First basis?

This is not an accommodation. The question is, what healthy element, as a healthy gift, could I give on a Me-First basis, that might help my sister to find her way back into her heart? It certainly doesn’t seem like it’s the way of Fire! If the person is Fire, that tends to be where they want to start making heart connections, and then everything else comes from there.

I have a friend with whom our beginning was rocky, because she would not talk about serious matters until we’d been joking around for a while. Meanwhile I didn’t want to joke around until we’d talked about serious matters. Hey, I need to know that your value system is one that I respect; then I’ll become a total goofball with you.

The question of “Which doorway into the heart?” is the bottom line of the Living the Elements work. What do I need to offer to this person, to help them get into their heart–because once they are in their heart, they can walk the circle.

When a person is not in their heart, they are generally stranded in a particular element. I don’t know, with your sister, which element. If it’s Metal, then the gift is to present Metal with heart, so that there is respect and spaciousness and security, enduring values that are not going to be fluffed away. Then it’s okay for a playful puppy to be around.

Or is she Wood? Does she need to know that we’re going to make progress; we’re getting things done. We’re not just having a great time; we’re actually accomplishing things, and making the world and our lives a better place. Then, if she’s Wood and she’s assured that progress is happening–we’re getting somewhere–then she can joke around.

I don’t know what element she’s stranded in. But presencing that element with heart brings it to where it can move.

I’m thinking about a little boy… He’s not a little boy anymore. He’s a teenager now, and a glorious one. But when he was a little boy, I used to play with him quite a bit. We had a lot of fun with rockets and dinosaurs, and they were both in outer space. His parents, who were both Fire types, came to me and said, “He never plays with us. We thought he just didn’t play.”

He was a very intense Metal child, and in order to play he first needed to have established between us a deep mutual solemnity in relation to all of life. From that solemnity, therecame wonder; and then through that wonder, a kind of exploration that eventually became quite a bit of fun… But his doorway had to be through Metal. So that’s another possibility.

Another possibility of what you could do with this opportunity between yourself and your sister is go into shock, on purpose. You can take life and use it to whack yourself over the head with a slipper like a Zen master and say, “All of my preconceptions about what is real and what is true, I have no idea what they are. My sister said this thing, she did this thing, and now, oh my gosh…” and throw it all to the winds. Then stay there for a little while, out beyond our own ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, to see what happens if you don’t hurry back in again, and just stand there looking at your sister.

Another thing you could do with this opportunity is say about the whole dynamic, “I’m not even going to address it. I’m going to stay with the heart-to-heart twoness through the whole thing. That way my sister has got a point of connection with me that is deeper than my behavior and hers, to feel assured of connection.”

Given my social skills, or lack thereof, that is totally how I navigate. I don’t know what to say or what to do. I have no idea what good behavior is. I’m just going to show up with a heart that you can connect with, despite everything. That goes pretty well.

With your sister, that means letting her go through whatever she’s going through, as she’s getting used to the sense that there’s a steady heart here. There’s another heart beating nearby, and it’s unwavering.

That’s perhaps five possibilities of some cool things that could happen, some of which are Fire responses, and given that it’s Fire season, they’re worth trying. Some of the possibilities involve taking on being a practitioner for life, and Living the Elements. I guess the real secret is that you could do all of them, and more.

Would you like to join this year’s Fire seasonal mentorship? You can join the first hour for FREE. For more information, click here.