Living the Elements: Fire
Summer!
Summer is a time when it is safe to blossom, because all danger of frost is past. What a relief! We can shed our protective layers, and stand in the open, to see and be seen as who we really are. Summer is the time of extended light and warmth, and this is the basis of its capacity to invite us into the openness and exposure that allows us to create fulfilling connections.
The gift of Fire is lightness of being. Humor, playfulness and the ability to be silly are crucial to the health of Fire. Fire understands that in order to be truly sane, you have to be a little bit crazy — and not be afraid to let that show!
Between social distancing and social injustice, it can seem like this particular summer is not an easy time for joy and connection. Actually, the ability to show up with love in the midst of chaos is exactly what is needed right now. The energy of summer supports us in unabashedly refusing to let anything shut down our capacity to make connections and create fun in even the grimmest circumstances. How else can we come through our difficulties still healthy, still able to love and laugh?
I’d love to hear from you: Are you listening to, looking at, or reading anything that moves and heals and awakens your Joy this summer? Please share in the comments section below. I’m always up for more healthy Five Element nourishment through the arts. Meanwhile here are some of my favorites, just to get you started.
Song: The Beatles – Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
I love this song for its happy “faux reggae” upbeat sound that raises the heart rate into buoyancy, yet prevents Heart qi scattering with its genuine, heart-felt joy in the enduring bonds of loving connections. A great example of the transformation from Joy to Propriety!
(For more about Joy and Propriety, see our Intro to Fire CEU.)
Song: Janis Joplin – Summertime
What would summertime be without Janis, without her utter Heart Mediator vulnerability, like a fully open flower in the sun, wind, and rain? Summertime is our teacher for what it feels like to be truly open to each other, capably of deep intimacy, able to share in the nakedness of love.
(For more about intimacy, vulnerability and the Heart Mediator, see our Heart Mediator: Love Beyond Betrayal CEU.)
Song: Pete Townsend – Misunderstood
So silly! And funny… And sad. So Small Intestine. Ah, the lament of simplicity for the love of a really complicated personality! Do we want to connect—or don’t we?
(For more about the fascinating and complex patterns of the Small Intestine, see our Chinese Herbal Treatment of the Small Intestine CEU. You don’t have to be an herbalist to get a lot out of it!)
Image: Chihuly Boat
I can always turn to Dale Chihuly, especially his boats, to cheer me up. All that glorious color and light! I feel a child’s joy and delight. Does it raise your heart rate when you look upon this wild, chaotic extravagance? Can you think of other art that speaks to your Fire Element?
(For more about the relationship between joy and chaos, see our Heart 6-7-8: Sovereign in Life CEU.)
Poem: Mary Oliver – Peonies
Oh, for a Heart Mediator like a peony! God grant me the courage always to love like that, with passion and intimacy undeterred by the shadow of death.
(For more about love undeterred by the shadow of death, see our Heart Mediator 7: Love and Ghosts CEU.)
Peonies
This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers
and they open —
pools of lace,
white and pink —
and all day the black ants climb over them,
boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls,
craving the sweet sap,
taking it away
to their dark, underground cities —
and all day
under the shifty wind,
as in a dance to the great wedding,
the flowers bend their bright bodies,
and tip their fragrance to the air,
and rise,
their red stems holding
all that dampness and recklessness
gladly and lightly,
and there it is again —
beauty the brave, the exemplary,
blazing open.
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?
Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,
with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?
Add your favorite Fire/summer Five Element resources in the comments below. And for a more in-depth experience of the Fire Element, join me at the Summer Fire Retreat later this month.
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With the best of intentions, it is still better just to listen and learn from those whose experience is different than our own. When we make it clear that we are not assuming that we are all the same, we open space for others to speak more freely. This is important in the treatment room when there are differences in skin color, so that we hold space that is clearly open to what we do not know.
We can say, “What you are telling me is so powerful and painful that I am shaking inside. Can you please give me a moment to center and ground myself?”
It’s hard to know, with only a white scale of reference, whether a someone’s degree of anger is a sign of Liver pathology, or a completely reasonable response to outrage. If we don’t know what it’s like to be living through someone’s daily life, we might consider them to be a Water-type when actually they are legitimately afraid. If we do not understand the magnitude of a community’s level of grief, we might consider the client to be dramatizing, rather than considering that we ourselves might be out of touch.
Despite having genuinely good intentions and some level of awareness of racial issues, I am continually amazed by how clueless I am about things that I didn’t even realize that I was clueless about. Whew! It saves a lot of wear and tear just to assume that I am fairly ignorant, like a foreigner in an unknown land, right in the middle of America. Beginner’s Mind is our greatest asset in the treatment room—and that includes opening to how issues of race are affecting all of us.
Moral injury also occurs when we witness harm being done to another, and we do nothing to stop it. This includes harm that we have no idea how to stop, nor any direct means to interrupt (for instance watching a video of a harm taking place). The pain of this kind of moral injury cannot be underestimated—it has left many of us devastated and immobilized.
This is why I have begun teaching an anti-racist version of Whole Heart Connection that I am calling 
As you can see, this is not about beating ourselves up or bleeding to death. This is about creating a safe and compassionate healing space so that we are able to receive the love where we need it most: in the places that have been ready to heal for a long time, ready to return to ease and wholeness—and healthy change.
It’s not just about putting down the phone. That is part of the picture. It is true that silence has its use in the revitalization process, but silence alone won’t do it. You could spend a lot of time in silence and just feel anxiety. So the silence definitely isn’t the answer. We’ve all seen that not work. There is something to it, but what is it?
We live in a very momentum-driven culture. What do you mean, “Stop”? How about I’ll just pause instead? “Okay, we might have to put that on hold. We’ll put it on hold.” I’m hearing that all around me these days… fine, it’s on hold. There it is, on hold. But that’s really different than full halt.
Now, there are five elements, and there are many different kinds of healing processes. Earth is really good for those slow transformative healing processes. Wood is really good for those healings that are about course correction and growth. Of primary importance for the Water element healing process is that sometimes, in order for anything to change, you have to get off the bicycle. Stop the wheels. Get out of the car. Lift up the hood, with the engine OFF, and just look at the marriage, just look at your acupuncture practice, just look at the economy, the environment, the state of your own soul.
It’s not nihilism. When done with tremendous love, this kind of questioning revitalizes a commitment by bringing it back to its true root—by making it clear what is dead wood ready to be pruned and what is LIVE down in ming men (our Life Gate Fire or root of life in our depths), ready to bring forth new branches. It’s not an unloving thing to question—although we fear it is—if our loyalty is more to ‘things as they are right now’ than to the longevity that only comes with that stark honesty of winter.
There’s a deep vitality that comes only from having gone all the way down, in that silence and stillness and ability to stop, in order to find the vital “yes” to my own nature and the life that springs forth from it.
Teachings from the Water element can give us what we need, to stand like a lighthouse in the storm of strong emotions. These are practices that affect the body, mind, and spirit, and what’s best about them is that you don’t have to master them in order to receive significant benefit. They all work according to what I call The Law of Half-Assed Three Percent—meaning, you don’t have to be perfect. You don’t even have to be good at this. You just need to accomplish a half-assed three percent attempt, and clinical benefits will start to accrue in your body, mind, and spirit. Of course, more is better, but often it starts with just three percent and builds from there.
Every time anyone tells me to breathe more deeply and slowly, I get so annoyed. I don’t want to! I always feel initially resistant to this amazingly simple piece of advice, and yet it really does make a difference. I have come to suspect that my resistance is precisely because it is so powerful. It is akin to a small ego-death, to allow my deeper slower breathing to dissipate the momentum of freaking out.
One of the most important practices that we can take on during uncertain times, after starting to breathe more slowly and deeply into our low belly, is vetting our inner fear voices.
Unhealthy fear uproots us, propelling us into unhealthy actions and decisions. This is why remaining rooted is important. This is why we are breathing into the low belly, and why we are staying in touch with our feet. Check right now, do your feet seem very far away? If so, that is s sign that you are in your head. It’s time to begin settling. Let’s do it together.
Let your feet rest firmly on the ground with weight equally distributed on both the back and the front of your feet (toes and heels). This is very important for calming the nervous system in times of fear. Putting our weight on the front of the feet is the position for movement and action; if we do this when there is no action to take, or while we are still considering the healthy course of action, this will just cause useless anxiety. Giving more weight to the heels is the position for stability and rest.
Consider practicing with an actual utility belt. I’m not kidding; I’ve suggested this to many people who were having anxiety and lack of confidence, and it can be life-changing. Buy or create a make-shift tool belt, and walk around the house wearing it. Hang a bunch of “tools” on it—it doesn’t matter what they are—kitchen stuff, whatever. The feeling of the weighted utility belt on the hips, sinking the pelvis, changes a person’s posture in a very specific way. Some studies have actually shown that this postural change raises testosterone levels. Walking as though wearing a tool belt really tonifies a person’s Water element, and helps transform fear to wisdom (also translated as “basic life know-how”). Try it.
When sitting, don’t cross your legs! Be aware that your feet and other people’s feet have “tree roots,” and are communicating through these roots that go deep into our common ground. This awareness is an important part of creating a sense of security in our connection with others, even when we are alone—perhaps especially when we are alone. When our roots are connected, then even when we are alone we are not isolated—we are connected to the shared roots of life.
One of the best things about the Me-First School of Global Healing is that it is so motivating for my own health-care. As I sit here alone in my living room, I am deep in practice for the sake of everyone that I love, and even people that I don’t know yet. Every time I catch myself turning into a flustering, clucking Anxiety Chicken, I come back to my practices as an act of love for the whole community. This feels good!
Fear is the acute awareness of the unknown in its rawest state. People who do not have a significant Water element tend to ignore what they don’t know: “Hey if I don’t know, it doesn’t matter.” When we don’t think about what we don’t know, how much easier it is to get to sleep at night! But it is not as easy to acquire the subtlety of wisdom.
Fear is the entry-level of the awareness of the mystery—usually the most physiologically disadvantaged version of awareness of the mystery. How fear manifests can be incredibly various, and these manifestations give rise to the various disharmonies of the Water element. There’s a jibbering agitated kind of fear, and there’s the elevator shaft of doom kind of fear. There’s quivering jellyfish, there’s frozen, there’s peeing on the floor. I can get all revved up and say, “Oh my gosh, I have to be incredibly smart, incredibly clever, and never be caught without my utility belt on so that no matter what the universe throws my way, I will have a tool for it.” This kind of fear keeps us in turbo-overdrive. Attempting to reach an unattainable certainty, we never rest, and develop yin-deficient patterns of disharmony.
Potentially, our awareness of the mystery brings us into progressive empowerment, rather than exhausting us. Only those who have awareness of the unknown are capable of the journey into the sustained awe that leads to wisdom. Wisdom is not knowledge. Wisdom is not data. Wisdom is not a smarty-boots thing. The Tao Te Ching says: “Every day in the pursuit of knowledge, something is added. Every day in the pursuit of Tao, something is let go.” Wisdom requires a journey of listening to the silence, in the darkness, with Heart.
For example: sometimes before teaching a class, I feel fear. I think to myself, How did I get myself into this? What made me think I could teach this class? If I voice that out loud to others, they usually say “Oh, you’ll do great!” or some other such utterly meaningless and unhelpful utterance. I think to myself, Yeah, giving that kind of reassurance will help you sleep better at night. It doesn’t do a thing for me. I call this response “symptomatic” because it’s another way of saying, “Oh, don’t face the unknown; never mind the path to wisdom. Just ignore the unknown; then you’ll feel fine.”
Because often, we don’t have that luxury. We can’t ignore how much we don’t know; it is still impacting us, and others. When the waters of fear are rising all around us, we all need to learn to give only real reassurance, on a “me-first” basis. Even if you are not practiced at this, you’ve got that capacity, and you will feel so much better when you begin to use it.
If we sit in the darkness with Heart (which is very different than sitting there in Loss of Heart), something slowly begins to emerge out of the dark that comes without any definitive sense of having the answer, but with a sense of having identified something that feels right for us. We know that this is the next step on our path, even if we do not know exactly where we are headed.
To communicate reassurance with body language, we need to settle into our chair with full weight, with a sense of physical density; really give your chair a lot of you to hold up! Let your pelvis be heavy and full like a bowling ball. Let it be wide like the base of a pyramid. Sit as though at the bottom of the fish tank, or the bedrock at the bottom of the ocean, making the dark an acceptable place to be.
The voice of reassurance sinks down; the sound is a groan, but it’s a powerful groan, the groan of the bottom of the ocean. It’s the groan of the silence that contains all noise, a kind of deep, holding sound. And then, whatever it is that we’re saying (to ourselves or to someone else), what we’re really saying is: there’s an entire ocean of Tao supporting you. Just as this chair that I am sitting in now is supporting me, and just as the place that you are seated is supporting you, we are supported by Tao. The unknown that you sit in the midst of is your resource, and what is inside of you—much of which is unknown—is your other resource. With our voice and body language, we are conveying the message: There is bedrock at the bottom of this ocean; you will not drown in your life.
The points are like a well; at the bottom of the well is the deep truth about life. Floating in the well, layered on top of the sweet water of truth, are little round pictures of first-grade teachers saying, “NO,” or old girlfriends leaving; there are pictures of cold, dark nights, pictures of jeering faces, all stacked up in the point like debris.
On the other hand, a conviction of disbelief—especially when accompanied by distrust—may limit or in some cases completely obstruct our ability to contact the qi of the acupuncture points. Acupuncture is a consensual modality; we make energetic suggestions only, and the client may override or simply make themselves energetically unavailable to our puttering and poking.
Just so, I find that it is much easier to contact the deeper Universal life-stream of the point through the client if I am aware of myself as Universal Messenger. I often feel physically larger, lighter, and more hollow in those moments. Yes, the needle is in my hand; and this is of no greater and no lesser importance than that the point is on the client’s body. It is simultaneously a dual relationship between client and practitioner, and each of these aspects of relationship has its importance. We are the Universe delivering a message of awakening (yang) to the universe of sleeping hidden potential (yin). At the same time, we are also human and particular, and every message takes on the fragrance of the messenger. At the very least, if the messenger looks scary—or even just like too much of a risk or too much of an unknown—the client may choose not to open the door (of the acupuncture point) to the messenger, and thus will not receive the message.
I don’t rescue; I don’t intervene; I have nothing to add, but I stand as loving witness in the midst of the chaos now breaking open. I affirm with my presence the deep note of life’s truth as the fundamental basis for the client’s new sense of integrity. As with any time of great transformation, a little bit of extra holding as the seasons shift can make all the difference in how much a client is capable of truly changing in a moment.
