3/24/2023 0 Comments Elements of naturePhrases like “raging anger,” “tempers flared,” “hot-headed” come to mind. The fire roars right out of your mouth, biting, and hot-tempered. When we are motivated and energized in our daily life we are connected to our fire. It generates our energy and highlights our burning life desires. It digests all that we take in each day, through food and our senses. The Gunas of Fire are Hot, Sharp, Spreading, Light.įire is metabolizing. Avoid dry foods and infuse your diet with soups and stews.įire governs transformation digestion, absorption, assimilation, comprehension. Nourish your skin with Abhyangha, ayurvedic self-massage, and oil your dry skin. Find fluidity and motion in a swimming pool or body of water, dance with joy. Remedy this with water hydrate, drink it as water, tea, or broth. You feel stuck, unmotivated, and needs a shove to get off the couch. We lose our fluidity, become too dense and hard. Often for me, this means saying no to something or someone. Find a place where you can stand solidly and take a deep breath, not feeling pulled by undercurrents or gasping for air. Find your feet and reach up to fill your lungs. We may need air to dry us out and/or earth to give us solid ground. Water can pool in the ankles, calves, the bowl of the pelvis, and fingers and hands when we get too much of it. We are all over the place, spilling into too many areas, or drowning. When our movements are flexible and supple, and we feel fully nourished we are connected to our water. The Gunas of Water are Cool, Liquid, Dull, Soft, and Cloudy. It is thought to govern our pelvis, although the water element is found almost 80% of our biology and is found everywhere. Water governs cohesion it is our lymph, plasma, cytoplasm, and saliva. You can meditate, allow your breath to settle, get enough sleep, have warm baths, and eat nourishing meals. Additionally, allow yourself to slow down, be still, find silence. The feeling is cueing you to connect to elements low in your body, to earth and water. We feel unstable, ungrounded, and our balance is off. Do something new, devise ways to add warmth, softness, and easy, joyful movement. Invite your awareness to rise up your body offering sunshine, fresh air, laughter, light-hearted company. The remedy is to ignite your fire, add bellows of air, create activity. You feel stuck and unmoveable, perhaps weighed down. When we can plant our feet on the ground and allow our legs to hold us up, we are connected to our earth. The Gunas of Earth are Heavy, Dense, Thick, Hard and Stable.Įarth is grounding. Here is what nature might be nudging us to counter with to regain balance:Įarth governs structure manifesting in our bones, nails, hair, teeth, skin. Being able to connect elements to parts of our body, and understand these sensations helps us uncover the innate balancing principle.Īny time we feel off we are experiencing too much or too little of an element. It feels sometimes like we have too much of something, other times not enough. For some, it can be visceral, for others metaphorical, but when we can describe our experience, our awareness helps regulate them. We experience these elements in our body and put words to our experience. In the most basic understanding, we can feel those qualities as heavy and dense at the legs, moving up our body to formless and clear in the head. Ayurveda calls these traits Gunas, and each element is ascribed specific qualities or Gunas. Within these roles, there are qualities on a continuum from solid to formless, hot to cold, heavy to light, clear to cloudy, etc. Every element is an innate instrument of balance – creating structure, cohesion, transformation, movement, and space. Earth at the structure, Ether at the cavities/spaces within the structure. Ayurveda would see that each cell houses all 5 elements in different combinations to create the specific purpose and vitality of that cell.Įarth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether are the 5 elements, and each is said to govern part of our body. The Yogic model would even say that each element finds a natural home in a certain part of the body. These natural elements work in a dynamic relationship with each other for our optimal health and vitality. Can you picture parts of your anatomy as water or fire or earth? Feel the fluidity of water and vitality of breath? It is an interesting thing to picture the elements of the earth as part of your being, and it gives a rich and juicy metaphor to play with.Īyurveda and Yoga see the body the same way they see nature, comprised of the same elemental qualities: Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether.
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