Five Element Series Part 6: Fire Element

Fire brings heat to the body, mind, and spirit. The range runs from warmth to desire to rage. In its milder forms it shows up as the warmth and generosity we bring to the people we love. In its stronger forms it's aggression, tension, hostility, lust, the whole scary end of being alive.

Some spiritual teachers have an awkward relationship with this element. Where the teaching aims at transcendence, students get told to overcome passion through suppression rather than transformation. And suppression produces a particular character: the aspirant who is pretending to be blissed out and is, in fact, furious. Ram Dass called the sexual version the horny celibate. The bliss is a performance, and the anger underneath is what the performance costs.

The fear of fire is fair. We've all watched a sentence said in rage end a relationship. People who kill say, I was in a fit of rage, I wasn't in my right mind. Playing with fire takes skill. But if we never learn to use it, we lose a whole side of life: expression, warmth, passion, adventure.

Here is where it gets practical. Anger is the signal that a boundary has been crossed, a boundary marking something we cherish. A value, someone we love, ourselves. Handled with some proficiency, that signal becomes the capacity to say no and mean no. Without it, we say yes and mean no, and then we feel ripped off and used. The no we swallow doesn't disappear. It comes back as resentment, and anger expressed from resentment creates more chaos than the clean no would have.

Repressed fire also finds vices. Coffee, spirits, cocaine, pornography. The addictions give the fire somewhere to go. They just burn us and the people around us without transforming anything.

The yogic tradition takes fire seriously. The fire in the belly, agni, metabolizes food and experience alike. Tapas, the heat of practice, is the capacity to stay with discomfort long enough to see into it. The practice builds that heat deliberately: moving quickly between postures, more sun salutations, a louder exhale, an arc of intensity that peaks and then comes down into ground and clarity. On the other side of expression there's usually both.

When there's too much fire, water balances it. Sadness, longing, the deeper and slower feelings cool the hot ones. So does simple kindness turned inward, the metta phrases: may I be filled with peace, may I be safe and protected.

But the first move is smaller than any of that. Notice where you said yes this week and meant no.

I wrote a book about that. The first chapter is twenty-eight minutes, read in my own voice. Enter your name and email and I'll send it to you.