Summer is a season of Fire Element. A balanced Fire reads love; authentic expression; creativity; flowing communication – and simply the joy of life.
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) gives us many clues to understand how balanced our Fire element is (outside of professional pulse and tongue reading and a set of physical symptoms forming a Fire imbalance pattern). For example, if Fire energy is unbalanced it can make a person overly shy and disconnected from or overly dependant on and entangled with other people.
If Fire Element is deficient, it can make a person shy; they can just find it hard to extend to other people; hard to go out and communicate; deficient Fire makes it very hard to express ourselves in conversations in an authentic way, to express our thoughts and feelings as they are; to express our vulnerabilities and our joys as they are and so on. When there is too much of a desire to be alone, or hide from other people at the first feelings of a slight discomfort, this can indicate a deficient Fire according to the TCM.
If Fire Element is in excess it can make a person over-sharing and over-expressive; overly emotional to the point of being explosive with their emotions; they can also become overly entangled in all the demands and obligations with other people. If there is too much of a need for a constant company or too much energy tied up in absorbing social media….following other people’s every step, this can indicate an excess Fire according to the TCM.
A lack of or a presence of creativity can also be indicative of Fire Element imbalances as can be inability to love or feel loved even when love is present in our life. But the most ‘felt’, sensed, seen or read in the body language and facial expression could be a presence or absence of Joy.
Sometimes, joy is either our natural state or can often spontaneously arise when we experience something pleasant, cute or otherwise warming our heart. Joy is highly individual in expression: it could be an exuberant laughter or a subtle smile. But we feel it in other people in our interactions, we can tell.
Sometimes, there are situations in our life which deeply affect us but are well outside of our control: life circumstances, other people’s moods and life situations, collective events. Seemingly, there is nothing we can do when affected negatively by these: there seems to be no place for joy at all. And yet, joy as an expression of a healthy Fire element is absolutely needed for our health and wellbeing regardless of external circumstances – and we all have some little things in life which can create favourable conditions for the joy to appear; we can ‘invite’ joy intentionally if we know what feeds our Soul and supports our inner Fire.
How can you invite your joy to appear? Which conditions do you need to create?
- Do you need solitude or you need people?
- Do you need to be outdoors or you need to be indoors?
- Do you need a soft and cosy environment or you need a fun and glamorous environment?
- What do you need, where is your joy hiding?
- How you can invite your joy in?
Some simple Journaling prompts here:
- ‘Which conditions do I need to create for my joy to show up?’ or
- ‘I can invite joy into my life if/when/by…..’ followed by free unrestricted stream of consciousness writing.
- ‘Here is what feeds my Soul….’ followed by a list journalling.
- ‘What’s my happy surroundings, what’s my happy inner state?’ – here you can create a Mind Map.
Or you might want to sit in a comfortable solitude and some meditative state and ask yourself deeper questions according to your preferred practices. Journaling alone may not immediately bring us joy, but intentional reflective journaling always brings clarity.
Any questions – please get in touch using the form below. If you would like to learn and practice various creative and simple journaling techniques for your daily self-care, making sense of your life experience or exploring deeper layers of your inner world, join us for Journaling Challenge ‘Letters to the Soul’ – it will give you a wide variety of tools to journal with ease and joy for years to come.
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