Transforming the Fire Element:

Your Role within the Whole

In a world of polarities, humans too often create limiting options that appear as opposing extremes: introvert vs. extrovert, happy vs. sad, dark vs. light, open vs. closed, etc.

We can criticize the superficiality of “look on the bright side” spiritual bypassing that’s devoid of shadow integration’s true healing.

We can also recognize patterns of lingering in heavy emotions in the bodymind, behaviors, and thus the world at large, holding humanity in highly destructive and outdated patterns.

Both suppression and rejection of emotions, and dwelling within them, trap us in chronic, and in turn illness-forming emotional states. Emotions are meant to move, to rise to the surface and pass in a cycle of their full expression.

The answer to this dilemma of extremes is softening into presence, where emotions can arise without attachment to the past’s stories from which they surfaced.

Within this presence we discover versatile discernment of boundaries — with whom and how we connect, and with how we genuinely express ourselves in any given moment — guided by our intuition and felt sense of spirit.

Boundaries are an expression of love, first in respect of Self, and in ultimate respect for others. Adaptable boundaries respond to the emotion, the moment, and the interaction.

With loss of fluid presence, boundaries can harden and in aim to protect, shut off the heart, creating a loss of warmth, joy, connection, enthusiasm, and loss of love for Self, others and life. A closed heart holds onto the weight of its emotional past and settles into a melancholic state, losing its capacity to transform its dreams into waking life.

The heavy heart can turn bitter and hoard hatred most evidently for others, but first and foremost for Self. This buildup of hatred is used to justify discrimination, violence, and war, first on a personal level that ultimately infects social systems and the world at large.

In contrast, the heart can be deprived of boundaries, leaving it open to any and all no matter their intention. Excessively talkative and excitable with manic mood swings, a heart without boundaries suffers from an expectation of continual expansion. Always bright and laughing, always “up” and facing outward, it runs the risk of drying up the energy reserves stored in its internal waters.

In attempt to fit social expectations of constant growth and sharing of Self, the modern world produces a rising norm of burnout and depletion of natural resources, both individually and globally.

The remedy is to respect the cyclical need to turn inward and rest into the water element, where our essence resides, for vital energy and depth in the integration and experience of Self.

Only with this restoration can we spring forth into the birthing of our soul’s vision, and from the creative action of wood, we give rise to the fire element that is our own maturation: the sharing of our visions now bearing fruit.

Here the radiance of our spirit, expressed through the heart, can expand with the warmth of summer into our relationships as love and laughter, fun and play, joy and passion, in celebration of ourselves, each other, and life itself.