The Five Elements
Wood, Fire Earth Metal and Water are the different sources of energy feeding the three levels of our being. Each energy pathway is identified with one of the five elements and with a specific organ and function of the body. The elements reflect the forces we see in nature outside, and have our daily and seasonal resonances within us. The Wood element is our spring energy. Earth represents the energy of harvest time.
Wood’s function is to structure, Fire’s to relate, Earth’s to sustain, Metal’s to extract and Water’s to unite.
The elements imprint themselves physically upon our bodies, by giving a certain colouring to the skin, a certain smell to our bodies and a certain cadence to our voice. Each is asscociated with a particular emotion, Wood with anger, Fire with joy, Earth with sympathy, Metal with grief, and Water with fear.
Health, whether of body or soul, is maintained by the balanced interplay of the elements within us. Ill health, whether body or soul, is disharmony introduced into this energetic balance as a result of pressure from outside or from within us.
The great wheel of the elements, endlessly moving, rests in turn upon one of its five spokes, each a moment in the cycle from birth to death and on to birth again. And each turn of the wheel echoes the rise and fall of life, the moment of birth finding the little bud of Wood peering hopefully out of the dead land into the new world of spring, before calling on Fire’s warmth to ripen it to maturity. And on the wheel turns, bearing with it the fruit of Fire’s labours to drop into Earth’s ample lap as food to sustain life, where Metal, watching from afar, swoops down to extract one pure and precious jewel worthy of bearing on high.
The moment at which Metal soars upwards to the skies above is the point of our greatest detachment from the whole, the peak of our individuality. And as the wheel turns gently on to float in the water, Metal’s great yearning to find its lost paradise is effortlessly answered, for Water bears within it that knowledge of paradise regained, so vainly sought by Metal. We have reached the moment in the cycle where we merge ourselves in the whole again, drawn down into the watery depths of all that is.
Anon, the School of Five Elements Acupncture