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In last week’s article on the origins of Mother’s Day, I mentioned connecting with the earth as a means of feeling supported in a motherly way. This week I’ll explain more about that earth/mother connection.
The earth is a mother to all lifeforms who live upon her. She births them and sustains them. In animistic traditions, the plane above us – sometimes known as Father Sky – tends to have a rather ethereal influence on our lives. But Mother Earth’s role is decidedly tangible. She gives physical form to a soul and feeds her young from her own body.
In Five Element philosophy, the Earth Element governs nourishment and growth. The internal organs corresponding with Earth relate to food intake, digestion, and distribution of nutrients to all parts of us, like our inner mother. Earth also presides over our ability to give and receive nurturing, support, comfort, and understanding – to others and ourselves. Compared to Fire, Water, or Air, Earth is very slow to change, and such is the quality of a mother’s presence – like the solid ground beneath our feet, her support is constant, enduring, unconditional.
The Earth season is late summer – the time of harvest – and the Earth phase of any process is when we reap the fruits of our labors. It offers us an experience of abundance, of fullness, of having all our needs met. It’s the role a mother serves for a baby. And a woman’s pregnant body – round and full in the belly and breasts – parallels this phase beautifully.
Just as the Earth has a powerful gravitational pull that keeps us rooted, our mother, too, has a certain gravity. We are drawn to her through a bond that began nine months before our emergence. We run to her as children for comfort and nurturing. And after leaving home to strike out on our own, we are drawn back to visit her and recharge this link. Like the earth, she provides us a sense of home. Throughout our lives, our mother is often the one around which all the children and grandchildren gather, for as the Earth, she is our center.
Speaking of the center, our navel marks our personal center of gravity, and it’s a permanent reminder of our oneness with our mother – the closest connection two humans can share. It’s also a vestige of the most perfect nourishment we have ever had. As such, it is a very important point in acupuncture, Qigong, and other systems of traditional healing.
A woman once came to me for help with incessant vomiting and diarrhea. It was as if the Earth Element within her was in utter turmoil. She had tried a wide range of drugs, but nothing made a difference. She was emaciated and lethargic – at five feet eight inches, she weighed only seventy-eight pounds. Her cheeks were hollow and her eyes were sunken. The acupuncture and herbs I gave her barely helped. Eventually, I decided to try a somewhat obscure treatment: centering the umbilical pulse.
If you press the fingertips of one hand into your navel, you’ll probably feel the pulsation of your abdominal aorta. And if you feel more closely, you may notice that the pulsation is strongest above or below, or to one side of the navel. The goal of this treatment is to use physical manipulation to move the pulse so that it’s most powerful right in the middle. I succeeded in moving her pulse, but to be totally honest, I had little belief that it would do anything.
So, I was astonished when she reported the next week that her digestion had improved dramatically. Over the coming months, her episodes of diarrhea and vomiting diminished almost to zero, and she began gaining weight. When I last saw her, she was strong and muscular and weighed 135 pounds. Such is the power of restoring our center – our Earth, our inner mother.
Each of the Five Elements is expressed as a virtue when we embody it in a healthy way. The virtue of Earth is integrity – meaning a quality of being whole, entire, and undiminished. When the earthen banks of a river have integrity, water rushes through them but they remain stable without eroding. When an earthen building has integrity, it can be battered by wind and rain for centuries without crumbling or washing away.
The initial shock to our sense of wholeness occurs through separation from our mother in the act of birth and the cutting of the umbilical cord. Our mother’s womb is our homeland, and we will never return to it. After the fundamental separation that occurs through birth, we are usually cared for and held closely, but gradually this connection becomes more distant. Can you remember the feeling of being always held, enveloped in your mother’s arms, cradled, protected, understood, comforted, and safe? Can you imagine how it would feel to let yourself be held again by someone big enough to carry you easily and take care of all your needs? Even though this separation is completely natural and, as children, we play a role in the distancing process, there’s no guarantee that it will leave us feeling capable of recognizing and meeting our own needs, or able to ground and center ourselves.
When Earth is out of balance in us, we may experience it as a feeling of neediness or hunger. We may have an erratic routine, erratic energy, or erratic digestion. We may feel insecure and become excessively clingy. We may feel a need to mother everyone – every injured worm in the garden, every guy whose mother never taught him to cook – and we may do so at the expense of nourishing ourselves. We may use consumption of all kinds (food, clothes, data, etc.) to ground ourselves. We may try to elicit sympathy from others, feeling a need to always tell our story, yet never being fully understood. Underlying all these feelings and behaviors is a belief that we’re not quite whole, and as it drives us to search for something outside ourselves to fix us, it greatly undermines our freedom.
But it’s not true. What you are is undiminishable. The hole you feel is an illusion created by a misunderstanding about what you are and how you’re nourished. Perhaps you’ve closed your eyes to your resources and given away your power by buying into the idea that you need approval (maybe your biological mother’s, maybe your own) to be complete. Perhaps you’ve hardened your spiritual “stomach” or locked your spiritual “teeth” – refusing to accept nourishment and even creating something that looks like a hole in yourself. But there’s really nothing missing.
It’s fully possible to restore your integrity, to feel whole again. As I wrote last week, an important step is to recognize that your ability to access the qualities of Earth (wholeness, nourishment, groundedness, stability, sufficiency, belonging, being understood and at home, etc.) doesn’t depend on anyone else. If that seems like a giant philosophical leap, you can begin by opening yourself to the idea that at least it doesn’t depend on any single person. You can be supported in these ways by any good friend or family member, and by your own Higher Self. You can nurture yourself and get your own needs met. Observe a practice of gratitude. Notice all the ways in which you are held and provided for. Notice all the ways in which you have enough and are enough. And open yourself to receiving all that’s coming to you. You are worth it.
Be well,
Peter
[post_title] => There Isn’t Really a Hole Inside You: The Earth Element and Your Inner Mother
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Don't deprive the world of your warmth and light!
How can you share your acceptance and love with those around you? Let us know in the comments below!
[post_title] => Talking Wellness with Peter: The Fire Element
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[post_content] => Briana and I have spent the last year developing the curriculum for our coach training program, and I was recently fine-tuning the section on applying the wisdom of the Five Elements when it occurred to me to share the “three treasures” mentioned in the Daoist classic, Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching). I’ve written about these treasures in the past, but after speaking about them to our future coaches, decided they’re worth revisiting.
Like the rest of the words in this 2500-year-old book, the names of the three treasures have been translated in a variety of ways, but I think the most accurate terms are: compassion, simplicity, and humility. These qualities can help us lead lives of greater joy and deeper peace.
Before we get into them, I’d like to share just a few words on what I feel is the overarching message of Daoist philosophy. Dao is most literally translated as “way,” as in “the way of things” – AKA, reality. Daoism is primarily concerned with (1) perceiving this reality with great clarity and (2) abiding by it. That is, living in harmony with reality rather than trying to avoid it, fight it, or manipulate it.
The first treasure is Ci (“tsuh”) which means compassion, gentleness, benevolence, or love. Life is sweeter and easier when we practice compassion for ourselves, other humans, and the world. Grievances, which often comprise a large portion of our thoughts and speech, dissolve in the presence of compassion. Compassion implies an openness to our shared experience with another; in practicing compassion, our world becomes less fragmented. The pieces, formerly viewed as separate and unconnected – or even adversaries – are seen instead as a unified whole.
When we’re dominated by the scared, animalistic mind, we frequently seek to attack and assign blame – ourselves, others, and the world. Consequently, it’s only natural to expect retaliation. Somewhere in a mind that attacks lives a vigilance for the counterattack. But when we embody this treasure of compassion and gentleness, there is neither attacking nor fear of counterattack. When we recognize that change needs to occur, there is no blame, just compassion and purposeful action.
The second treasure is Jian (“jee-ehn”) which means simplicity or frugality. It’s the antithesis of the trend in the West (and increasingly in the East also), where there’s ever more stuff, more complexity, and more information. We tend to believe we need to acquire more – of whatever we think we’re lacking – in order to be safe, in control, and happy. In actuality, however, it’s usually a subtractive process to clear away the veils that cause us to forget that happiness and freedom are our native state.
Chapter forty-eight of the Dao De Jing (DDJ) starts, “In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is acquired. In the pursuit of the Dao, every day something is dropped.” Frugality isn’t just a matter of being economical with money. It means not seeking to acquire what we already have. It means curtailing useless expenditures of energy. It means not doing more than what is needed to make our lives work. It means utilizing the currents of life to get where we want to go. Dao, like water, takes the simplest path – the path of least resistance; and like water, says the DDJ, “It is content with the low places.”
The third treasure is called Bu Gan Wei Tian Xia Xian ("boo gahn way tee-ehn she-ah she-ehn"), which literally means “not daring to put oneself ahead of the world.” A common interpretation is that this is simply a pragmatic survival tool: if we don’t stand out in a crowd or take the lead, we will stay out of harm’s way and therefore avoid premature death. But this is inconsistent with the other parts of the Dao De Jing which advise on how to be a superior ruler. If everyone held back out of fear of death, there would be no leaders.
Instead, I believe that “not putting oneself ahead of the world” is an admonition to stay humble and innocent, and internally, not allowing one’s thoughts and judgments to become more important than reality itself. It is a reminder to see the Truth beyond our labels and beliefs. To always engage with the world in the present, with fresh eyes, rather than being a backseat driver. It’s a call to transcend our little personality and open to the whole that encompasses us.
A hundred years ago, the Russian philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff lamented that in the humans of his modern world he saw “more personality than essence.” He explained that through our imitation of others and their intentional influence over us, through our resistance against what we see, and through our attempts to conceal from others what is our own or real – we hide our essence. And I feel this is exactly what
bu gan wei tian xia xian is advising us to get back to. If Gurdjieff had worded it, perhaps it would have said, “not daring to put the personality ahead of the essence.”
This week, I encourage you to start with one of these treasures and try it on. What is your life like when you practice radical compassion? How do things flow differently when you choose the simple course? And who are you when you relinquish the know-it-all self and instead experience life with innocence, from your essence?
Additionally, we are now offering sessions with the committed individuals who have gone through our training to become certified Dragontree Well Life Coaches.
You can learn more or book a session here!
Book your session with a Dragontree Illuminator
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In last week’s article on the origins of Mother’s Day, I mentioned connecting with the earth as a means of feeling supported in a motherly way. This week I’ll explain more about that earth/mother connection.
The earth is a mother to all lifeforms who live upon her. She births them and sustains them. In animistic traditions, the plane above us – sometimes known as Father Sky – tends to have a rather ethereal influence on our lives. But Mother Earth’s role is decidedly tangible. She gives physical form to a soul and feeds her young from her own body.
In Five Element philosophy, the Earth Element governs nourishment and growth. The internal organs corresponding with Earth relate to food intake, digestion, and distribution of nutrients to all parts of us, like our inner mother. Earth also presides over our ability to give and receive nurturing, support, comfort, and understanding – to others and ourselves. Compared to Fire, Water, or Air, Earth is very slow to change, and such is the quality of a mother’s presence – like the solid ground beneath our feet, her support is constant, enduring, unconditional.
The Earth season is late summer – the time of harvest – and the Earth phase of any process is when we reap the fruits of our labors. It offers us an experience of abundance, of fullness, of having all our needs met. It’s the role a mother serves for a baby. And a woman’s pregnant body – round and full in the belly and breasts – parallels this phase beautifully.
Just as the Earth has a powerful gravitational pull that keeps us rooted, our mother, too, has a certain gravity. We are drawn to her through a bond that began nine months before our emergence. We run to her as children for comfort and nurturing. And after leaving home to strike out on our own, we are drawn back to visit her and recharge this link. Like the earth, she provides us a sense of home. Throughout our lives, our mother is often the one around which all the children and grandchildren gather, for as the Earth, she is our center.
Speaking of the center, our navel marks our personal center of gravity, and it’s a permanent reminder of our oneness with our mother – the closest connection two humans can share. It’s also a vestige of the most perfect nourishment we have ever had. As such, it is a very important point in acupuncture, Qigong, and other systems of traditional healing.
A woman once came to me for help with incessant vomiting and diarrhea. It was as if the Earth Element within her was in utter turmoil. She had tried a wide range of drugs, but nothing made a difference. She was emaciated and lethargic – at five feet eight inches, she weighed only seventy-eight pounds. Her cheeks were hollow and her eyes were sunken. The acupuncture and herbs I gave her barely helped. Eventually, I decided to try a somewhat obscure treatment: centering the umbilical pulse.
If you press the fingertips of one hand into your navel, you’ll probably feel the pulsation of your abdominal aorta. And if you feel more closely, you may notice that the pulsation is strongest above or below, or to one side of the navel. The goal of this treatment is to use physical manipulation to move the pulse so that it’s most powerful right in the middle. I succeeded in moving her pulse, but to be totally honest, I had little belief that it would do anything.
So, I was astonished when she reported the next week that her digestion had improved dramatically. Over the coming months, her episodes of diarrhea and vomiting diminished almost to zero, and she began gaining weight. When I last saw her, she was strong and muscular and weighed 135 pounds. Such is the power of restoring our center – our Earth, our inner mother.
Each of the Five Elements is expressed as a virtue when we embody it in a healthy way. The virtue of Earth is integrity – meaning a quality of being whole, entire, and undiminished. When the earthen banks of a river have integrity, water rushes through them but they remain stable without eroding. When an earthen building has integrity, it can be battered by wind and rain for centuries without crumbling or washing away.
The initial shock to our sense of wholeness occurs through separation from our mother in the act of birth and the cutting of the umbilical cord. Our mother’s womb is our homeland, and we will never return to it. After the fundamental separation that occurs through birth, we are usually cared for and held closely, but gradually this connection becomes more distant. Can you remember the feeling of being always held, enveloped in your mother’s arms, cradled, protected, understood, comforted, and safe? Can you imagine how it would feel to let yourself be held again by someone big enough to carry you easily and take care of all your needs? Even though this separation is completely natural and, as children, we play a role in the distancing process, there’s no guarantee that it will leave us feeling capable of recognizing and meeting our own needs, or able to ground and center ourselves.
When Earth is out of balance in us, we may experience it as a feeling of neediness or hunger. We may have an erratic routine, erratic energy, or erratic digestion. We may feel insecure and become excessively clingy. We may feel a need to mother everyone – every injured worm in the garden, every guy whose mother never taught him to cook – and we may do so at the expense of nourishing ourselves. We may use consumption of all kinds (food, clothes, data, etc.) to ground ourselves. We may try to elicit sympathy from others, feeling a need to always tell our story, yet never being fully understood. Underlying all these feelings and behaviors is a belief that we’re not quite whole, and as it drives us to search for something outside ourselves to fix us, it greatly undermines our freedom.
But it’s not true. What you are is undiminishable. The hole you feel is an illusion created by a misunderstanding about what you are and how you’re nourished. Perhaps you’ve closed your eyes to your resources and given away your power by buying into the idea that you need approval (maybe your biological mother’s, maybe your own) to be complete. Perhaps you’ve hardened your spiritual “stomach” or locked your spiritual “teeth” – refusing to accept nourishment and even creating something that looks like a hole in yourself. But there’s really nothing missing.
It’s fully possible to restore your integrity, to feel whole again. As I wrote last week, an important step is to recognize that your ability to access the qualities of Earth (wholeness, nourishment, groundedness, stability, sufficiency, belonging, being understood and at home, etc.) doesn’t depend on anyone else. If that seems like a giant philosophical leap, you can begin by opening yourself to the idea that at least it doesn’t depend on any single person. You can be supported in these ways by any good friend or family member, and by your own Higher Self. You can nurture yourself and get your own needs met. Observe a practice of gratitude. Notice all the ways in which you are held and provided for. Notice all the ways in which you have enough and are enough. And open yourself to receiving all that’s coming to you. You are worth it.
Be well,
Peter
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