Imagine that the early environment you grew up in – your parental family, home, immediate surroundings – had an inbuilt warmth, love and passion or caring and enthusiasm – meter like a temperature reading or blood pressure reading…. What would it be?
What’s your factory settings on Fire Element? What did you change these into or how did you maintain them?
From this we will look at what our current total joy/happiness readings are – if there were joy or happiness measuring devices – how we processed our early experiences and with what we have created ourselves.
Here are some journaling prompts related to TCM Fire element, the very factory setting, your Fire element reading. Please read the questions first and feel what resonates most and then use stream of consciousness writing to start with to explore this further.
- Did you grow up in a warm family?
- Or was it cold?
- Hot and cold??
- Warmhearted?
- Coldhearted?
- Open-hearted?
- Close-hearted?
- Hard-hearted?
- Soft-hearted?
- Maybe even somewhat broken-hearted?
- If so, was your early family actively focusing on repairing damages, resolving conflicts or were there a culture of silencing problems or sharp corners and avoiding and taboo topics or difficult conversations? What was a general attitude of your family towards conflict resolution?
- Was your family generally happy and optimistic?
- Did you have family meals and holidays together or it was more individual-centric or even somewhat disjointed?
- Did your parents created and kept family photo albums? If they did, where are they now?
- Have you been in an active contact with your parental family members when you grew up? (later we can create a time line based on that)
Now let’s focus on hot and cold:
- If hot and cold, was it predictable or random?
- If predictable, what this love-care-passion-warmth reading would depend on? When would it go up and when would it go down?
- What was you reaction to or participation in this fluctuations? If this is too sensitive, please skip this part. If you are ready for some deeper dive, carry on.
- Be honest with yourself on participation in these hot and cold fluctuations: were you a victim of your family situation or you yourself created some of the problems – maybe as unconscious, a hidden way to express your needs (it’s a hard one; we will come back to it in a minute).
Exploring further the ‘hot and cold’ you can use Mind Map Journalling placing each word as a centre of the map and creating further branches with the details.
If you felt like a victim:
- were you a real victim: somebody had an addiction problem for example or maybe an undiagnosed mental health or personality disorder and randomly or predictably demonstrated fluctuating, destructive or insensitive behaviour?
- or were you a victim in your own, childhood perception: you suffered from maybe unrecognised, unconscious internal upheavals or physical health problems or social connection problems and engaged in some challenging behaviour and your family was reacting to you and this created some of the cold-hot fluctuations).
Example: in some families parents’s reaction to a ‘bad’ behaviour would be not a friendly talk, expressing each others views openly and a final aim at a conflict resolution – but punishment or withdrawal of affection as a punishment and you as a little child or a moody teenager were supposed to figure what the stone faces of your parents meant and what you did wrong?
Please avoid any drama or automatic judgements here, go for a detached and compassionate observation – as if you were watching a movie about somebody else.
If you do you remember yourself creating problems:
- were you a deliberate and determined attention seeker or a rule breaker?
- if so, what did you need?
- what did you crave?
- what consciously or unconsciously you were trying to achieve? Love? Care? Belonging? Validation? Development of your interests?
- Did you actually achieve some of these by your challenging behaviour?
Spend some time mentally sending some unconditional love and affection towards yourself as a child, no matter the behaviour or conflicts or any situations. Breathe into all the resources you have now which you didn’t as a child and extend this wisdom back into your childhood.
And now, how is this default Fire model settings translate into your current family model – whatever unit you have created, whether this is you and your pet or you and your plant or you have a big family where several generations come together regularly for a meal if you all live close or a Zoom call if you live away?
- How do you current warmth and love readings fare?
Please do some journaling with any journaling tools you know and use – after all these questions must have stirred up some memories, thoughts and associations. If your childhood was less-than-wonderful try to avoid slipping into the drama but look objectively on your answers. It’s important to feel all your feelings and look at yourself and your answers with some detachment. These are the facts; these are the feelings – and every day we can make a new choice on how to integrate them.
I hope the Joy of the Fire Element will turn up for your invitations and wishing you a happy summer, happy nourishing your Fire element!
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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