Breath is Life
We take breathing for granted. Everyone breathes, right? Well, everyone must at least breathe enough air to not die. Unfortunately, that is about how much air most people breathe—just enough to not die.
Breathing is the single most important factor affecting the quality of your life. And yet, you can live your entire life without giving breathing a second thought unless you get a condition like asthma or you get the wind knocked out of you.
In the Five Elements Theory, which is the essence of acupuncture, your lungs represent your physical body’s will to live, your right to be here. Owning your right to exist is defined as your animal spirit. All animals possess the will to live.
The life force of your animal spirit changes from moment to moment depending upon how much air you breathe (or don’t breathe). The power of your animal spirit is a dynamic, constantly changing reality. You can be as awesome as a grizzly bear or as timid as a mouse. How much air you breathe determines whether you rise to the occasion or shrink from it.
I notice that every time I start walking anywhere—going out to my car, getting out of it, standing in the checkout line—I practice breathing out forcefully from my lower abdomen. Who I am, beyond the stories, comes into sharp relief.
The Element of Wood
Your Splendid Plans and Dreams
The ancients likened the element of wood to a new shoot pushing up through the hard earth. Your splendid goals, dreams, hopes, plans, and ideals are in many ways like new shoots pushing up through the hard earth in the springtime. So full of promise. Such potential. So delicate. So vulnerable. Nurturing a new shoot until it can fend for itself is comparable to nurturing a new dream or goal until it becomes established.
Figuring out what you want is by far the most difficult part of manifesting your desires. Then when you have figured out what you want, you must commit to it. Commitment is like putting your car into gear. Manifesting is easy once you know and commit to what you want.
The instant you commit, anger completely transforms into one of the heartfelt emotions such as certainty in your dream, gratitude, or thankfulness. No trace of anger remains. The clearer and higher you can focus the vibration of your heartfelt emotions, the more powerfully your desires are attracted toward you.
Sometimes it is better to get forgiveness than permission. When you first start to do something, usually you do not know exactly how it will turn out. You want a life of action, not a life of holding back. Give yourself permission to make mistakes—even big ones. Doing one thing really stupidly teaches you more than you can learn doing a thousand things right. Mistakes are your true teachers. Let them guide you to your desires; you do not want to die with your songs still in you.
The driving energies of the wood element are hope, vision, future, vitality, exuberance, birth, growth, activity, and regeneration. These qualities exist outside of us and within us. As above, so below. When your wood element is healthy, you can feel the noisy exuberance of your plans and dreams wanting to bust out from within your being. You have vision.
You have a bold future to manifest into being. You want to shout it out.
Nothing can stop you.
The emotion associated with the element of wood is anger, although many forms of anger are not associated with this element. The anger coming from your wood element needs to burst out. It is vigorous and forceful, a feeling that wants to shout. When you block that kind of energy, you become frustrated, hostile, and resentful. However, indulging your anger by letting yourself stay mad about something is counter-productive. Staying angry harms your liver.
If you indulge your anger by staying angry, or if you suppress this vigorous energy, less honest emotions come forward, such as feeling powerless or galled. When you assume that something outside yourself is blocking your plans or dreams, the blocked energies emerge from you less honestly in the form of stubbornness, depression, or irrational behaviors.
These secondary emotions are how you rationalize giving up your dreams and goals. They can appear to be part of your personality—temporarily, or for your whole life if you actually believe someone or something out there controls your destiny.
You can spend years indulging your anger or rationalizing some combination of these secondary emotions. Indulging anger in no way helps you to get what you want. Anger is your source of power, but only when you learn to direct it.
The type of anger your liver produces gets you out of your rut. It pushes you to assert the action that accomplishes your goals. When you become angry, you need to slowly look around the circle of your life, as if you are doing a slow turn until you spot what is irritating you. When you find it, that is where you need to work.