Exploring the Water Element in Winter by David Tircuit
It is common knowledge in acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine that the goal of treatment is to bring the individual into homeostasis with the environment in order to bring on the natural healing capacity and encourage well-being and recovery. A feature of the environment which always in flux has to do with the season. Balancing the individual’s constitution with the current season is pivotal. One philosophical basis of Traditional Chinese Medicine involves what is known as the Wu Xing or Five Phases. Each phase corresponds to an element within nature’s metal, water, wood, fire, and earth. As well, each element corresponds to a season. Metal is autumn, water is winter, wood spring, fire is summer, and earth is Indian summer. Earth element is also connected to the space between the other four seasons during transition.
As we move into the winter season, as well as the water element, it is important to understand some of the key aspects of the phase both in treatment and general lifestyle consideration. When water element is in phase, the lifeforce is tending to move toward the deeper places within the individual’s body/mind complex. Life force moves toward the ancestral hub of the person’s system, much like how a bear hibernates in the winter. This is both to save resources to combat harsher weather and to draw up the deeper ancestral energy to fortify the system.
“When water element is in phase, the lifeforce is tending to move toward the deeper places within the individual’s body/mind complex. ”
The movement of life force is an inward spiral. The color connected with the the water element is black as it is where all the other seasonal colors return to. There is a tendency toward introversion when this element is in phase. The emotion connected with water element is fear, which is also wisdom when the emotion is used to pay closer attention to one’s environmental and energetic state. This tendency toward contraction can easily become stagnation if not balanced with warming aspects. This can include such things as focusing on eating warmer foods in general, drinking mainly warm drinks, and dressing in warm clothes. Even though the water element is characterized as an inward spiral, it is still always in motion. Balancing the introverted tendency of this element can also include participating in some of the holiday functions which characterize this time of year.
And additional alchemical feature of balancing the water element with warm energy includes bringing in some of the energy of its opposite element, fire, or the outward spiral of summer. The common tendency for people is to be overactive in the summer, exhausting life force. An aspect of seasonal alchemy is saving energy in the summer to warm the winter. The method includes the philosophy that within each elemental phase is a bit of its opposite. In fact, the reason the elements are referred to as phases is that all the elements are always present. Each just comes into phase in cycle. While water element is characterized by cold and contraction as energy returns to its source, at its core, within the individual, resides a hidden sun consisting of an ancestral fire which will rise with the fire element in the summer.