Some Thoughts on Earth Element
A few weeks ago, I started to tell you about how my background in yoga and Ayurveda inspire and inform my choices when I design jewelry. How the 5 Elements of these systems— Earth, Water, Fire, Wind and Space—show up in everything we do, touch or see.
During my early years of motherhood, when I squeezed my work as a yoga instructor and Ayurvedic health counselor around the edges of the never-ending, glorious and exhausting tedium of every day life with a toddler, I dreamed about a time when I might get back to crafting with my hands. I wanted to make talismans and “awareness reminders” to help us stay in touch with beauty, intention and playfulness. But I felt guilty at the thought of setting aside a profession that was so clearly about service and care, in order to sit in my studio and craft what I wanted to. For awhile, I settled for allowing myself to get more creative with how I related to the concepts I worked with in my healing practice.
Last week I started to tell you about how my background in yoga and Ayurveda inspire and inform my choices when I design jewelry. How the 5 Elements of these systems— Earth, Water, Fire, Wind and Space—show up in everything we do, touch or see.
During my early years of motherhood, when I squeezed my work as a yoga instructor and Ayurvedic health counselor around the edges of the never-ending, glorious and exhausting tedium of every day life with a toddler, I dreamed about a time when I might get back to crafting with my hands. I wanted to make talismans and “awareness reminders” to help us stay in touch with beauty, intention and playfulness. But I felt guilty at the thought of setting aside a profession that was so clearly about service and care, in order to sit in my studio and craft what I wanted to. For awhile, I settled for allowing myself to get more creative with how I related to the concepts I worked with in my healing practice.
Earth Element expresses as cool, stable, heavy, dense, and hard.
When you express a healthy connection to earth element, you feel stable and rooted. Emotionally you are grounded and confident, but flexible. You make well-considered decisions and do not waver in carrying them out.
Earth element supports commitment and confidence.
A deficiency of Earth element can leave you ungrounded and undependable. You may become anxious, emaciated, and flighty. A lack of stability makes you “spacy” and unreliable and can make you lose touch with basic reality.
A surplus of Earth element can make you feel dull, stubborn, depressed, or despondent. The hard, dry quality of Earth may block the channels of your body, resulting in poor digestion and an inability to perceive the world clearly.
Remember that Earth element is essentially about stability. Finding more stability in your life mostly boils down to regularity. When your schedule has a regular rhythm, your body and mind can anticipate the movement of the day without fear. Your nervous system expends much less energy just getting through the day.
If you discover that you experience too much Earth element in your day-to-day life, creating rhythm in your schedule will still support you—as long as you make exercise part of your daily routine. In its simplest form, a daily routine includes a regular waking time, regular mealtimes, and a regular bedtime.
There is so much more to say about Earth Element, and how it shows up in our lives (and how to work with it when it is showing up too much or too little) but I’d love to give you a little FEEL for it. Here is a little yoga sequence video I made some years back for my students when I was still regularly teaching yoga. Check out these song links and see if you can sense some of the qualities of Earth Element folded into the melodies.
This one is a good balance between Earth and Water…And maybe it will get you in the mood for next week’s mini lesson on Water Element.
DNA, by Ludovico Enaudi and Marco Decimo
There is always more to say about the Elements. I hope this little introduction gives you a little boost in understanding. And tune in next week for some words on Water Element.