5 Elemental Needs for Optimal Natural Health
All your tangible and intangible needs can be summarized within the five elements of life.
Optimal Natural Health
In my blog 3 Keys to Optimal Natural Health, I explained that you need to energize your mind, heart and body to achieve your optimal natural health. In this blog, we’re going to focus on the third key - your body - express your elemental needs for physical energy. Although these are physical connections, they impact all areas of your life, so we’ll take a deeper look into this connection and its impact in each area.
Body - Elemental Needs
Are you currently at your optimal level of health? If not, 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 tangible and intangible needs can be summarized with the five elements as follows:
Air - Breath and Sleep
Water - Drinking and Cleansing/Detoxifying
Earth - Nutrition and Nature
Fire - Sun, Movement and Metabolizing
Aether - intangible Needs - Safety, Belonging, Esteem, Actualization
Unfulfilled needs can cause more than physical problems. Many mental and emotional problems occur as a result of neglecting your physical needs. Let’s take a closer look at how your elemental needs impact your mind, heart and body.
Express Your Needs
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 and to support your mind, heart and body. Express your needs. Listen to yourself and honor your needs. Expect others to respect your needs as well. Establish boundaries to protect your needs.
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.
Stress can cause you to breathe shallowly, even to the point of hyperventilation. It can also deprive you of sufficient deep sleep. This insufficient flow of air can cause fatigue and brain fog. The fatigue can manifest mentally, emotionally and physically. Brain fog obviously affects your mental clarity, but can ripple out to mood swings as well. Even when you aren’t yet at the level of burnout, when you push yourself to continue working after exhaustion, you overstress your mind, heart and body. If you’re pushing yourself mentally, taking a quick break for a physical activity can be all you need to rejuvenate and be more productive than just pushing through.
Water
Water is necessary to every single cell of your body. Dehydration can quickly and seriously impair your health. Hydration can quickly repair your health. Bathing is mentally, emotionally and physically cleansing, healing, detoxifying and loving for yourself. Even the sound of ocean waves, waterfalls and steady rain can be relaxing, soothing and healing to your mind, heart and body.
Water reacts to emotions as famously observed by Dr. Masura Emoto, using frozen water crystals to show the effects of words on them. Therefore, since most of your body is water, it reacts to words and emotions in the same way. Consider your self-talk and how you respond to others, and remember that negative thoughts and emotions can harm you mentally, emotionally and physically.
Earth
The earth naturally supplies all your nutritional needs and your vital connection with plants, animals, geological sites and bodies of water. Lack of exposure to nature can cause mental, emotional and physical harm. Even having paintings of nature is better than nothing for your psychological health.
Most people are also impacted by the amount of processing of food and chemical additives, many of which cause direct reactions, others indirect. So the best source of nutrition is closest to its natural form and without added sugars and chemicals.
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 your muscles, or metabolized from the nutrition you consume.
When energy is heated, it moves faster. So when you find yourself in a slump mentally, emotionally or physically, try catching some rays of sunshine, moving your muscles or consuming some healthy and easily digested food to heat up your energy.
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.
Belonging (Water)
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. Human beings are interdependent, and frequent interaction is important.
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. Just by being alive you are worthy and deserving of having all your needs met.
Your self esteem naturally affects your mental beliefs and emotional feelings about yourself, but it also affects your physical health by influencing your level of self-care. Love yourself enough to care for all your needs.
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. Explore what your purpose is and create your vision of having actualized it, then take one step at a time to achieve it.
You might think that self actualization is only about yourself, yet being interdependent means that your purpose must benefit others and at least some other people’s purposes must benefit you. So what role do you want to play in this lifetime as your contribution to all LIFE?
Conclusion
Take some time to reflect on your needs and how you are currently caring for them. Notice where some unfulfilled needs have impacted all three areas - mind, heart and body - and not just the obvious area. Intuit what shifts you could easily make to enhance your mental, emotional and physical health. Notice, too, in what ways you take great care of yourself. Give yourself a gold star or some other reward and continue those practices.
For more specific ideas on how to care for all your needs, see my blog 5 Elemental Needs for Natural Vitality.