Reflections: Initiations by Water

Imagine Fire, Earth, Air and Water existing in a constant dynamic of creation. These elements are the primal forces of creation in us. Each one of these elements is a highly active creative ingredient in our psyche, in our biology, in our emotions and in our minds. Sometimes too much fire or heat/anger/electricity can scorch our earth; that is, burn our physical tissue and over heat our physical organs. Too much heat in our psyche can cause neurological fires, among so many other “electrical” disorders.

The soft and gentle air currents that flow through our mind like whispers of ideas and imaginings can and sometimes do become wind storms of our life, creating havoc within the physical earth that is our body. Fires within us fuel our life energy, stimulate our sexuality and animate our passions that require that element of Air. We must imagine before we act.

And then there is Water – our fourth element. Water, the cooling, soothing, refreshing element that starts to run like wild rapids within our body, for example, when we are too overheated from generating too much Fire. (Note: High blood pressure is one health condition from ‘running rapids to put out a fire’.) Our physical Earth body would turn to cracked, parched, broken ground without our aquatic nature, constantly moisturizing our physical shell. Our Water element can shape itself as dense humidity that clings to our emotions like molasses. Or we can experience the Water element as a light inner mist – we are emotionally weightless having, at least temporarily, evaporated our fears. We long to return to that mist.

Water is Neptune’s element active within us. Within our aquatic nature is hidden our deepest fears and secrets and our ever-continuing undiscovered potential that we are meant to discover day by day. We have yet to know the person we will be a year from now. And between now and that point will be conversations and experiences and challenges and life surprises and who knows what else that will yet again and once more introduce you to some unknown part of you. Like traveling on an enormous ocean of your own emotions, each day you discover something you did not see before. Your aquatic nature is the most mysterious part of you, the most tumultuous as well as the most tranquilizing and poetically beautiful. It’s no wonder that learning about the power of our Water element requires so many macro and micro initiations.

We have what it takes to emotionally nurture people as well as “emotionally drown” them or conversely, deny people emotional (water) support – putting their own life system at risk. Likewise, each of us knows what it is like to recognize we are in a situation in which the “water element is contaminated”, though it is likely that you did not – or do not yet – think in that symbolic way. But once you do shift your thinking to archetypes and the elements of nature and apply that to the context of your life, you can examine the health of everything in your life through an equation of the balance of these four elements of power: Fire, Earth, Air and Water. How fascinating is that?

And Water, just like our emotional nature, is a force in constant motion. There is no such thing as a permanent emotion or water that is still. Our aquatic element, like the elements of Fire, Earth and Air, is never at rest. We are forever creating, combusting, dissolving, renewing, evaporating. We are a composition of all the elements of creation and their inherent nature directs our nature.

Initiation experiences unfold, erupt, appear easily and often within our emotional domain. We are continually discovering the extraordinary power held within our emotions – to the power of love; the power to nurture; the power to destroy; the power to resurrect a thirsty life; the power to commit and follow one’s heart; the power to sense suffering; the power to acknowledge the truth.

Initiation by Water completes our four-part series on the Earth elements. I love teaching this wisdom and I believe that this course can only benefit your life in good and wonderful ways. The classes run weekly from July 19th through August 9th. I hope you will join me for these final four sessions.

Love,

Caroline

P.S. A special Facebook page (Spiritual Direction – Caroline Myss) has been created to help support this growing Reflections online community, and is available to all students taking these classes.