What Are You Feeding Your Fire?

Several years ago I wrote and taught a course called The Five Elements of Fiction, which was all about using the five elements at the heart of Taoism and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to inspire fictional stories.

It keeps coming back to me so I have decided to revisit the five elements in my posts here but not for fiction this time. Now I want to look at how they are playing out in our lives, and how we can use them to live more mindfully and change the stories we tell ourselves about us and our world.

First let’s look at the Five Element System and its place in Taoist philosophy, TCM and Qigong.

At the heart of the philosophy is the Tao Te Ching (also known as the Dao De Jing), written by Lao Tzu around 500 BCE and which I use all the time for inspiration in life and in the Storytelling with the Tao Te Ching series. Taoists (maybe I am one?!) believe that Yin-Qi and Yang-Qi, which are the primordial feminine and masculine energies, produce the Five Elements, which in turn create all of existence. The Five Elements are Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water.

All of the Five Elements work together to support and control each other, within our bodies and minds, within everything on earth, and everything in the universe, to balance the Qi of all creation so that all is in harmony.

When the Five Elements are balanced, we experience health and prosperity in our lives and on our planet. When they’re out of balance — overacting, counteracting, or failing to properly support one another — we experience dis-ease of one sort or another, which manifests itself in our bodies and minds; and when the elements are unbalanced in nature (which is often nowadays because of human activity), the dis-ease is seen in the world we live in too. TCM and Qigong both work with the energies of these elements within our bodies and minds to help us find balance. And when we are more balanced, our relationship with our planet reflects that.

In the book Wood Becomes Water: Chinese Medicine in Everyday Life by Gail Reichstein she says:

“Like other circles since the beginning of time, the Five Element circle symbolizes the continuity of life. Without beginning or end, a circle is timeless evoking the continuous renewals of night and day, the orbits of the planets, the phases of the moon, and death and rebirth.”

Each element within the cycle has many different correspondences connected to our bodies, our spirits, our planet, and the solar system that go through cycles in a day, a month, a year, a lifetime.

As we look around at what’s happening in our world right now — wars, wildfires, rising costs of everything, the confusion and fear about what AI means for us all, governments that are no longer public servants, corporations pillaging everything for profit, the rise of fascism, it’s easy to believe that everything is so completely out of balance that there’s no hope of our world ever being equitable, loving and kind. I have times when this feels like the truth to me.

But at the same time as all of this is happening, there are all of the things stemming from love that provide the counterbalance to it. We just don’t hear about those in the news as stories of love and unity empower people, make them harder to control and manipulate.

But I look at the WOMN stories Teri Leigh 💜 shares about how the people of Minnesota have loved each other in the face of ICE; I go to the Kindred community sessions Lucy - Business of Becoming organises and see women from all around the world showing up for each other and I hold space myself for people where the support and genuine feeling for each other is tangible; I read and watch countless articles and programs and films about people helping others, rescuing animals, doing what they can to conserve and restore our wild places. I travel a lot and see firsthand in every country I go to all the ways we’re loving each other, supporting each other, and welcoming each other.

And when I see all of that, I see that qi, which flows out of unconditional, selfless love, and is considered the source of all existence, so where the five elements arise from, I know that things are not as out of balance as they’d have us believe.

Here in the northern hemisphere it’s the height of summer (although here in southwest Scotland you’d never know it!) and summer is peak Yang season. Peak fire energy of expansion and light and heat. It represents transformation, consciousness, and connection and is the most expansive and active phase for linking our physical bodies to our spiritual selves. Fire is also the seat of the Shen (Spirit), which encompasses our consciousness, mental activity, memory, and emotional balance. It dictates how we relate to ourselves, others and experience joy.

For our fires to burn brightly and steadily in this season of expansion and connection, we need to feed them the right fuel. The fear-filled news, doom-scrolling, and constant bombardment of messages focused on all the things that are wrong with us and in our world, is not feeding the fire with the fuel it needs to thrive. It either makes the fire rage or almost puts it out, depending on how other elements are at play within us and the universe. And fire out of balance can express itself as depression, apathy, social withdrawal; or as anxiety, mania, restlessness, and hysteria.

So we need to feed our fires with stories and activities of love that counterbalance all of that.

The Fire element also governs how we relate to others, how we’re seen, and how we connect and feel a part of something, so if we feed it the wrong fuel we become a part of the despair, the anger, the fear, along with so many others. But if we feed it the right fuel we become part of the change, the solution, the love. Fire corresponds to the heart too so if we keep it burning nice and steadily, our hearts will be open and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and our world and our future will be positive and freeing, and then the reality we create will be the same.

Tell me, what have you been feeding your fire with this week? What have you been feeling a part of based on that fuel?

I love finding connections and the ways that ancient wisdoms apply in our lives today and I hope you have enjoyed this first in my my new posts exploring the five elements. There will be more. Please click the heart, leave a comment and share with others to help my posts reach more people and spread the mindful living and writing word.

With love,

Amanda 💙

Journalling Prompt

Think back over the last week. Write down everything you can remember feeding your fire — the news you read, the conversations you had, the stories you sought out or scrolled past. Be completely honest with yourself.

Now go back through it and mark each one: did this fuel make my fire rage, gutter, or burn steady? Sit with whatever you’re seeing. (I foolishly Googled “Iran War News” the other day and it made me afraid, angry and so desperately sad for the innocent people in the Middle East who are caught up in this. My fire sputtered and needed tending with love.).

Then use this starter sentence and write until it comes to a natural stop:

If I fed my fire only what I chose consciously and mindfully for the next week, what would I be choosing, and what would I stop feeding it?

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