The Five Elements are a two thousand year old philosophy that is the basis of Traditional Chinese Medicine. They are an incredible language to help us better grasp how we find balance in our lives, both inside and out. I have observed that the Five Elements gift us a very holistic and poetic language that is effective, simple and universal in helping us to gain insight into how our experience of life, our health and our sense of being is affected by and affects the external world around us. 

 

One of the Five Element’s biggest strengths are in the way they use our natural environment around us to highlight different aspects of our life. The Five Elements are also a wonderful system of the diagnosis of dis-ease in the physical body and can help us get to the root of physical symptoms rather than merely treating them. Five Element Theory (sometimes called Five “Phase” Theory) allows us to understand in a very intuitive way how our physical health is connected to our emotional and spiritual life. 

 

Each element has a group of characteristics to help communicate their nature and how they interact and dance with one another. Each person is said to have a “guardian” element, the element that they are impressed by the most and dance with most intimately in their life. This can be diagnosed a number of ways, from how someone looks, their personality, their smell, the physical symptoms they experience most often etc. Below is a summary of the elements.  

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​