Creating with the Five Elements: A Roadmap for Manifesting Our Vision for the World
In unpacking the multitudinous aspects I have learned about and discovered over the years, along the journey to manifesting, bringing forth my own calling into this world, I can see (as of this morning), a way to use the four elements (plus a fifth, which we will start with), as a framework to make sense of the process:
Spirit. We are guided, we follow something, we sense and connect with what wants to be created. This aspect includes:
Surrender, tuning in to what wants to be created, and allowing that to come through.
It also includes creative process, in as much as this is actually a process of setting up the conditions that allow aliveness to come through, from the zero-point.
It can also be spoken of as allowing, channeling, or tuning in to the flow of the universe.
Out of balance:
Spiritual bypassing
Lack of personal will or deciding
No sense of personal ownership in the co-creation of what we have chosen to play in and participate in
Fire. Connecting with our personal heart’s passion, energy, and desire. This could include:
Tuning in to our own desire, “fire”, passion, and love — for what turns us on, what lights us up, what keeps us motivated. I believe this is the apparently paradoxical flip side of the surrendering to spirit aspect: It is as though without finding the spark of us within everything, we lose the thread of our own inspiration; yet, without letting go and tuning in to something beyond us somehow, we can almost get consumed by our own, personal passion.
Anger at injustice can fuel us, if it does not burn us up
The heart's passionate love for this planet can keep us going, seemingly without end
Out of balance:
Anger consumes us (self-righteousness)
Manic behavior
Ungrounded excitement burns itself out
Water. Staying in our feels. Learning to flow, with the wu wei of life. To be with what-is. This can include:
Learning to emotionally navigate the challenges and growth involved in creation
Learning to be in feel, to center in feel; to allow
Learning to sense, in the field
Learning not to resist feeling states, but to learn from them; non-resistance is an aspect of mastery
Out of balance:
Heart too dominant over head, no access to rational analysis
Hard to plan
Wants to just flow, but not make decisions or have agency
Air. Reason, structure, plan, analysis, and objective reflection ("What worked? Why did it work? What didn't work?" etc.) Includes:
Using mental frameworks
Accessing best practices (the vast reservoirs of accumulated knowledge) to help accomplish goals
Flexible mind, connected with spirit and intuition, rapidly sees solutilons, and can make simple, actionable decisions
Out of balance:
Mental activity becomes the dominant, central mode, to which all else is subordinated
Experience takes a back seat: one labels rather than feeling, experiencing
Mental simulation becomes reality, leaving the real world behind
Earth. We require grounding. Some of the elements could be:
Having a “day job” that helps us keep the lights on. When we disconnect from spirit, that can be the most dispiriting ever, but at the same time, in the right context — when we feel filled with spirit — we could be cleaning toilets and still be super inspired.
Grounding our work, inspiration, and ideas into physical actions that interact with the world. Getting out of our heads. Grounding into reality. Getting our hands in the soil. Turning big, beautiful ideas into solid actions — however small they may feel to the big vision in our spirits or hearts. Earth knows that there are no small actions, as every blade of grass is sacred.
Balancing our nervous systems. Relaxing. Resting. Quiet. “Downtime”. “Wintering” (no matter what the season). Meditation (which, then, circles us right back to spirit).
Finding the money. Dealing with “on-the-ground” realities. Embracing that which is created already — loving, say, commerce, or the current rules of the systems we have co-created thus far, or otherwise “making friends with what is.” (For some of us, this is the hardest part. We feel that making friends with the current systems — which we see as flawed — is somehow condoning the things we find objectionable. But learning to stop resisting the creations we have chosen to engage with — in one way or another — begins to allow those structures to transform, when approached correctly.)
Out of balance:
This is all there is
"Get real" — ignore your heart, your passion, and things that are not immediately relvevant
"Practicality" devoid of spirit
Using this ancient framework can help us navigate what is required, taking in what is wanted and needed now, and keeping these aspects in balance, without getting overwhelmed. How might you make use of some aspect of this to enhance your bringing forth of your own calling, your own vision to contribute to the enrichment of life?