5 Elemental Needs for Natural Vitality
All your tangible and intangible needs can be summarized within the five elements of life.
Energize Your Systems and Habits for Natural Vitality
What’s holding you back from having a high level of health and wellbeing?
The answer is probably a combination of things, many of which are taken for granted, such as breathing. All your needs can be summarized with the five elements as follows:
Air - Breathe and Sleep
Water - Hydration - internal and external
Earth - Nutrition and Nature
Fire - Sun, Exercise and Metabolism
Aether - Intangible Needs - Safety, Belonging, Esteem, Actualization
Examining your needs more closely, you can choose to make subtle or larger changes in your life, one step at a time, to take care of all your needs for more natural vitality.
Air
Although you do not see air, it is tangible. You feel it filling your lungs with every breath. You feel it in the wind caressing your skin or blowing through your hair. Breathing and sleeping are both vital to life and need air to fulfill their process.
Breathe
Your breath is your #1 need. Without it, you would die in minutes. So let’s start with your breathing cycle. It’s just as important to consider what you’re breathing, such as avoiding breathing in smoke or toxic fumes. Breathing fresh air in nature is best, providing that the air quality index is good.
Another consideration is your pace of breathing. Breathing deeply and holding your breath is the opposite extreme of hyperventilating with quick, shallow breaths. Neither extreme is natural, yet both can be used to stimulate certain responses within your body.
Quick short breaths can be used to stimulate toxin removal and increase energy. Long deep breaths can calm the body’s nervous system, except when it is being impacted significantly by other factors such as caffeine and/or nicotine consumption. Consciously using your breath can help you to reset your stress response.
Observing your breath is also a great way to meditate and can be very powerful. I was feeling uncomfortable during a dental procedure and felt myself tensing my muscles, which just aggravated the problem. I remembered that Deepak Chopra said the breath made the sounds So Hum and suggested using that as a mantra. So I tried it. Focusing on the So Hum mantra, I slowed my pulse and breath and relaxed my muscles. I concentrated so well that I was able to block out the procedure and focus solely on my breath. It was powerful. I invite you to try it.
Sleep
Sleep is another of your needs that is necessary for basic survival. Although it may not be quite as high on the list as air, water and food needs, your sleep patterns have a significant impact on your survival and quality of life.
Air is vital to our restorative sleep process, bringing the vital elements needed to repair your body, and releasing toxins through your breath and perspiration. Your brain waves during sleep are at the prime condition for restoration and repair.
Water
Water is necessary to every single cell of our body. Dehydration can quickly and seriously impair your health. Hydration can quickly repair your health.
Internal Hydration
Our body consists mostly of water. Getting enough water is important, but getting too much too quickly can also affect some vital organs. So check the current guidelines to find your optimal consumption based on your age and weight. Insufficient fluids can create mental, emotional and physical problems.
Water reacts to emotions as famously observed by Dr. Masura Emoto. Therefore, most of our body reacts to emotions. Consider your self-talk and how you respond to others, and remember that negative thoughts and emotions can harm you physically, too.
External Hydration
Bathing is mentally, emotionally and physically cleansing, healing, detoxifying and loving for yourself. Adding epsom salts to a soaking bath can help you detoxify more quickly.
Listening to ocean waves, waterfalls and steady rain can also be relaxing, soothing and healing.
Earth
The earth naturally supplies all our nutritional needs and our vital connection with plants, animals, geological sites and bodies of water.
Nutrition
Eat as close to nature as possible; think hunter/gatherer. No specific diet is correct for everyone. Observe how your body reacts to various foods and make your decisions based on how you can best achieve and maintain optimal health.
Another significant factor is how your beliefs about food affect your body’s reaction. The clean plate rule emphasizes the fear of lack of food, so you overeat and store fat for the lean times, which in modern society does not often reach us.
I often share about a time when I was hungry after Sunday Service and the only hospitality available was cookies. If I told my body that the cookie was “bad” for me and ate it anyway, my body would have gotten the message “poison” and gone into fight or flight against the cookie. But I chose instead to be grateful for the cookie and to trust my body to accept any nourishment from it and release the rest. That does not mean you can eat lots of cookies, because you truly don’t believe that would be good for you. Instead make the best choice for you each moment. Listen to your body’s needs.
Nature
Plants and animals are part of LIFE and so are humans. Separating from nature has harmful effects on humans. Spending time in nature improves your health. If you can’t spend a lot of time in nature, bring nature to you with indoor plants, pets, and even paintings of nature.
Celebrate nature with seasonal rituals. Our ancestors created many rituals to celebrate each season, such as harvest festivals. Most December holidays were based on the celebration of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, to express gratitude that the days would again be getting longer. They celebrated the rains and new birth in the spring. Spring holidays often include eggs and chicks. Celebrate the seasons of the year in your own way. Choose to follow your ancestors traditions that resonate with you or create your own.
Fire
Fire transforms fuel into energy. The more energy you burn, the more you feel alive. Fire can be absorbed as warmth from the sun, created by the expansion and contraction of muscles, or by burning the nutrition we consume.
Sun
Sunshine energizes us. No wonder a lack of vitamin D makes you tired and sluggish. Walking in sunshine is one of the best things you can do for your mental, emotional and physical health.
Exercise
Instead of calling it exercise, Dr. Christiane Northrup talks about moving through gravity. She distinguishes between chronological age and biological age, sharing a story about Astronaut and Senator John Glenn when he joined the space shuttle Discovery mission at age 77. The person in charge was reluctant to let Glenn join the mission because of his age, but finally relented. She was therefore alarmed when Discovery returned and she heard that one of the crew was very sick. She assumed it was Glenn, but instead it was a young astronaut. Age isn’t as important as moving through gravity consistently.
Cardio, strength, flexibility, lymphatic system, endurance, agility - there are many types of and needs for exercise, it’s important to move all your body. Choose a variety of fun activities to cover all your bases - dancing, swimming, playing with others, an energy routine. Use a gym for its equipment and its supportive people if that resonates with you.
Metabolism
Your body’s metabolism is responsible for burning food, drink and your fat stores for energy. You have high or low metabolism based on your ability to convert and use energy at rest. To boost a sluggish metabolism: consume protein at every meal, exercise, sleep, and use spices. Green tea, oolong and coffee also boost metabolism, but caffeine causes a lot of other issues, especially when consumed in large quantities. Your metabolism is impacted by all the elemental needs, but is grouped under fire because of its job.
Aether
Aether encompasses all of your Intangible Needs. Using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, safety and belonging go beyond the physical needs of food, shelter and human touch. The intangible aspects of those needs include the mental and emotional considerations, which have a direct impact on your ability to meet your physical needs. Each of these intangible needs is directly related to one of the physical needs described above.
Safety (Earth)
Safety goes beyond your actual physical needs for survival to the intangible level of mental and emotional safety. You can be physically safe and secure and yet not feel safe or believe you are safe. Your mental and emotional state can have a profound impact on your physical results. It is important to consider why you feel fear and determine what can be done in response to fear, but not to let fear consume or control you. Excessive fear keeps the body at a high level of stress and therefore in a state of fight, flight or freeze. You must release the fear to allow your body to relax back into a state of rest and digest. Explore ways to deny fear any power over you, such as through mindset shifts or meditation. Seek professional help when necessary.
Belonging (Water)
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs includes all the tangible and intangible needs, yet his hierarchy has some inaccuracies. While the logic of his hierarchy is correct, basic survival is dependent on our physical safety, in actuality physical needs alone cannot sustain life. Infants do not survive without connection with another human being. Belonging is just as important to the infant’s survival as safety is. When people lose loved ones, many die of a broken heart. The importance of human interdependence is significant. Hugging a loved one or a pet feels great.
Esteem (Air)
Self esteem is based on your sense of worthiness or deserving. If you don’t feel worthy and deserving of respect, love and abundance, then you’ll never allow yourself to receive them. You can actually train people to treat you disrespectfully and to deny sharing their abundance with you. You won’t even accept compliments, because you don’t feel that you deserve them. This lack of self esteem is usually rooted in childhood beliefs instilled by your family of origin or authority figures in school and church or even in peer group hierarchies.
To improve your level of self esteem, challenge those limiting beliefs as they arise and replace them with affirmations of the truth that you are worthy of love and respect and deserving of having all your physical and emotional needs met, just by being alive you are worthy and deserving. Start with the relationship with yourself and eliminate negative self-talk. Replace it with positive self-talk and treat yourself like your own best friend.
Once you’ve improved your self esteem, you can begin to expect more esteem from others, because you’ll demand it for your new best friend.
Actualization (Fire)
Self actualization is the realization of achieving your full potential in life. What is your passion that burns brightly? Even if all of your other needs are met, you won’t care about any of it, if you don’t have a reason for living. What is your life purpose? Your purpose is what moves you forward during the hard times.
Each person’s purpose is unique and impacts every other person you come in contact with and also impacts your environment. There are many types of purposes including parenting, teaching, business, politics, spirituality or religion, and activism. Most people discover their calling by the significant events in their life that awaken their awareness to a problem that they have a strong desire to solve. Explore what your purpose is and create your vision of having actualized it, then take one step at a time to achieve it.
You’ll find that self actualization eventually expands to community actualization with you doing your part, and finally expanding to world actualization with everyone doing their part.
Conclusion
Assess how well you are currently fulfilling your needs. Which needs would you like to spend more of your time and resources caring for and fulfilling? Pick one area and make one small change. Celebrate when it feels complete. Then pick another one. Taking one small step at a time and celebrating your wins will quickly find you caring for all your elemental needs.
Want to dive deeper? Join me in a free Energize Your LIFE Vision workshop!