Getting to Know Your Body Through Elements

This approach to meditation on the body is appropriate for two very different groups of people. If you’re an experienced meditator or someone who is looking to introduce something new into your practice, but also if you’re a complete beginner.

From time to time, I encounter meditation students – beginners as a rule – who aren’t able to identify much of what happens in their bodies. They will do a body scan and say “my body was completely silent” or “I don’t know how to describe what’s happening”. I hear statements about absence, “there was no tension” or “there was no pain”, and when I prompt them to tell me what was present instead of what was absent, they struggle to articulate it. In situations like that, we go one step back and learn to recognize different ways our bodies can function.

Think about it: your body can contract or expand. When you’re afraid, it contracts, when you’re calm and relaxed, it expands.

It can be closed or open. If you are tense, your body can feel closed, like there’s a wall around it, when you feel joy, it feels open, receptive.

Then, your body can be hot or it can be cold. It’s cold when you’re full of anticipation, and it’s hot when someone hurts you or when you’re creative. If we feel confident, our body feels strong, if we’re restless it can feel airy. Perhaps your experience would connect these qualities to different emotional states and that’s OK.

If you’re struggling to connect to your body or if you’re missing the language to describe it, this type of meditation can really be helpful as it gives you a general framework that your moment-to-moment experience can either resonate with or resist - both excellent ways to unde

The principle behind meditating on the elements is a very basic one. The idea that everything in the material world is composed of different elements is an old idea, well worn, some might say. At least in Western philosophy, it goes all the way to its beginnings. Elements vary, but because we’re using them as metaphors here, we will use the most frequently considered four elements: earth, fire, air, and water. Four elements, four meditations. I will first explain the structure of the meditation and then give you some details on each of the elements and few other practical considerations.

The procedure is always the same:

1.      Make sure you’re in a quiet, safe environment and if you’re tired do the exercise sitting or standing up.

2.      Take a few deep breaths or do a breathing exercise, then observe your breathing and establish mindfulness.

3.      Feel your entire body at once and stay with that awareness for a few minutes and then slowly feel your body emptying and visualize it completely empty, like an empty container.

4.      As you breathe in, imagine breathing in the element you’re meditating on and see it slowly filling out your entire body. Take your time with breathing in the element and don’t rush it. With every inhale, you bring in some earth or water to fill the empty container that your body is. You’ll notice that some elements fill your body faster than others. As your body becomes fuller with a certain element begin feeling its qualities (more on that below).

5.      As you focus on the quality of the element slowly filling up your body, be mindful of any thoughts, feelings or memories that may come up. Each of these is an opportunity to learn about your body and connect to its qualities.

6.      Once you feel ready to finish the meditation (or you hear the alarm), spend a few moments feeling your body as it is now, without elements or any idea in particular. Focus on your breathing and whenever you’re ready, get up and end the exercise.

For beginners, I recommend that you make this a 10 – 15-minute-long exercise. If you’re a more experienced meditator, make it an hour-long exercise. In my experience with this technique, at least, the longer I do it, the better the experience. Better isn’t a good word – powerful is maybe a better one.

Now that you understand the steps, let’s consider the elements themselves. I will give you a brief description of how  I understand each of them, but don’t take what I write here as the last and ultimate word. Come up with your own associations and ideas, but do so before you try any of the exercises. The quality of each element is the object of your meditation, after all, so it has to be defined in a way that’s clear to you.

Once you “get to know” the elements, you can start observing them in regular body scans and observe how they entwine. Sometimes, one element is on the surface, another element in your chest, etc.

Earth

When I think about the element of earth, I think about solidity and stability. It’s heavy, strong, immovable and cold. It’s the ground beneath my feet, the mountain I look at. Those qualities translate into my body when I meditate on my body as being made of earth. My body is stable and indestructible, heavy and solid like the planet itself, resilient and resolute like a mountain.

When I think of spaces where my body feels resolute and static, I think of my house, because that’s my absolute safe space. Of course, then, earth is also an element of safety. My house is, nota bene, made of earth: what are bricks and stones if not earth? My body can feel like earth when a loved one needs my support or when I have a hard day of work ahead.

The negative side of that is that too much stability leads to rigidity. Boundaries are made of stone and don’t have the flexibility of water. What can be a calming stability can also be unbearable tension that solidifies my body, encloses it in a firm husk of earth. When there’s fire beneath that husk, it can produce a horrifying, claustrophobic experience.

Fire

Fire is – obviously – the hottest element. It’s dynamic, it’s volatile. When I think about fire, I think about raw power and destruction. For me, fire is anger, it’s hard to tolerate and sit still with. On the other hand, that destruction leaves space for something new, so there’s potential for creativity in it as well. Think about the zest with which generations alter the world, always passionately thinking that those before them were all wrong. There’s no creativity and progress without destruction because you have to destroy the old to make way for the new. I know next to nothing about alchemy, but as I’m writing this, that word comes to my mind: when high temperatures melt sand, for example, you get glass. When glass is still hot, in the right hands, it can become a work of art. Fire is dangerous but creative.

Sexual desire is fire, but so is intense anxiety sometimes.

Even though fire is hard to contain in the body, it is a testament to the power you possess, power that needs to be channeled properly, but power that isn’t in any way bad. What is good or bad is how we use it.

Water

Water is the most flexible element. It can be hot or cold, depending on its environment, it can stand still or run down the mountain generating power and causing destruction. When it interacts with air, it can make waves that you can surf on and have the time of your life, but at the same time, it can sink ships. Water is the element of ultimate adaptability; it takes the shape of whatever you put it into. Unlike earth and fire, water can evaporate, dissolve in air when it becomes too hot, and then resume its shape when circumstances allow for it.

I don’t work on Fridays, and when I wake up and meditate, I can allow my body to feel like water. It can fill up my armchair as I read in it or merge with the ocean, if weather permits.

Water is inert power – and precisely because it’s inert power, it’s easy to underestimate. Don’t make that mistake and remember there’s no life without water, it’s vital! Precisely because water is inert, even its slightest movement can be an indication of impending change, it reacts to what’s imperceptible. Think about a flat surface. You pour some water on it and water doesn’t stand still but keeps moving. Even though your eyes can’t see it, you know that the surface is tilted. When I “translate” this to my body, I think of it as a source of information that my intellect isn’t able to catch just yet. One might call that kind of nonverbal knowledge intuition.

Air

Like water, air has no shape. But air has clarity that water doesn’t have. Even when it’s still, water always distorts the light, whereas light has clarity. Another difference is that water has weight while air has none. The heaviness of water can be rather beneficial as that is how my body feels sometimes when it’s really relaxed.

The fact that air doesn’t have any weight, it means that it never stays on the bottom, it always rises. While there may be some situations where this is desirable (such as when you need to see the bigger picture, the view from above), floating in air means not being grounded. And if my body as earth makes me feel safe, then too much air can be a sign of anxiety, or even fear! If you’ve ever seen a horror movie, then you know what cold air coming from the basement or leaves rustling in a dark forest usually mean.

Just like all the other elements, air is a double-edged blade. Its clarity can make you safe, but when you start floating, you may begin to panic!

What is the purpose of meditating on the elements?

The purpose of this type of meditation is to help you really sink into your body, to understand its different states and to slowly create a language, a set of metaphors to name what’s going on in your body. You can more easily learn about your needs. You may find yourself agitated meditating on air, but that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you, it could be your body telling you it needs more earth – more groundedness.  

At the same time, these different qualities you meditate on will spark memories and feelings and each of these will give you an opportunity to learn even more, not just about your body and your needs, but about how your mind works and what past experiences bare special relevance for who you are today. You might be surprised by what comes up!

What is NOT the purpose of meditating on the elements?

Whenever I teach this type of meditation, there’s always the danger of people understanding this as an invitation to do some sort of metaphysical even occult work. As you can hopefully see from my description of elements, I think about them in terms of what they mean to me, not what a dead Greek philosopher or a Renaissance occultist or a Tibetan monk may have thought about them. This is because I am not interested in any kind of ultimate truth about elements or anyone else’s philosophy but my own. I am using these to study my own psyche and my own body, so I have to rely on what’s meaningful to me. This is why I cautioned you in the beginning: if my descriptions don’t resonate with you, change them. Think about what qualities you associate with air and then as you meditate, you will see how that relates to your body, what happens when you fill your body with whatever qualities you associate with water, etc.

Having said that, if you do subscribe to a particular philosophy, religion or a spiritual system and these elements are in any way meaningful from the point of view of that system, by all means use it. Whenever possible, I emphasize how fruitful it is to mix spirituality with meditation. I only teach meditation, the technical stuff and the psychological stuff, so people automatically assume that I am not open to the more esoteric or religious points of view. This couldn’t be further from the truth. I firmly believe that your religion can boost your meditation practice and meditation practice can make you more spiritual. The reason why I don’t teach that is because my meditation students belong to all sorts of religions and have all kinds of beliefs and I want to make space for everyone.

How to use this type of meditation?

In my own meditation practice, I use this as a labeling system. When I’m having a hard time describing what’s happening in my body, I will try to label it as one of the elements. When there is too much going on and I’m trying to be mindful of my whole body at once, I will break it down based on what element is dominant in what part of my body.

But that’s probably not the best way to start with this work, because it does take time to understand how these metaphors relate to your bodies. It’s best to start with one element per day and then after two weeks, go back to standard body scans and use elements as a labeling technique.

Play around, explore – and good luck!