I’ve been surrounded by the Fire element in my Chi Kung practice, feeling the warm heat of Summer on my bare arms, a kind of tiny crackle ready to spark. Fire is our friend, but you have to keep an eye on it, offering both support and restraint — as my teacher Thalbert says: “Balance the system, don’t try to heal it.” Healing ultimately takes care of itself: it’s our attention to balance that creates the opportunity for healing to begin. Often we’re the ones directly in the way of this simple cycle of recovery and growth.
I’ve been working with the 5 Elements for many years now, first in Macrobiotics, then BodyMind Maturation and Elemental Chi Kung, and now in psychedelics. They (the Elements — Earth, Metal, Water, Wood, Fire) have always been speaking to me, offering their wisdom about the truth of life, the pace of health, and the depth of aliveness we are all part of, all of the time.
In my most recent plant medicine ceremony, I stood in front of the fireplace flames and practised a particular Elemental Chi Kung form (“Offer the Candle”) thinking this was what was needed, trying perhaps to recreate the expansion I had been gifted in my last ceremony. But it felt flat, so I closed the movement and sat down, perplexed. Much later into the night, upon returning to sit by the fire, I realised I had been blocking the wisdom of the teacher right in front of me and simply sat there, empty and unsure. And of course, within that surrender, Grandfather Fire spoke through me as clear as day. I laughed and said out loud:
Thank you for the lesson—
to not know,
and to listen.
What a place to come from.
We think we’re losing out when we wait, or say nothing, but we are opening to the vitality and potential of the present moment in a way that short circuits the survival activity of the mind. The vigilance, the fixing, the anticipating, the controlling. It’s all an illusion of protection anyway and it blocks the flow.
This is precisely why I practise Chi Kung. Because I am as human as you are - and I need a way to empty out the noise, and will do for the rest of my life. The human mind is always trying to keep us safe and alive, it’s mechanical, based on the blueprint of the past and multiple moments of threat held in our memory. Perhaps, for me, the deepest survival imprint comes from when I had meningitis aged 4, and left my body to linger somewhere above the ground, far away from everyone I loved so much. Closer to heaven than earth, suspended between worlds.
The second gift of my ceremony last week was the strange recreation of this early experience, or rather the surviving of it, in a very particular way. As these ceremonies close, all participants return from a heightened state of expansive being back into ordinary, everyday life, and the ordinary human body they inhabit. Some might say this is when the real work begins. This transition, on this particular day as the morning light intensified, summoned the exact moment all those years ago when the acute danger of my illness retreated and I came back from the Cosmos. A little child back in her body and alive after almost leaving, surrounded by grown ups, unable to communicate the depth of what she had been through, feeling like a ghost, so small and alone, and without an anchor.
I felt extreme terror moving through me at the shared breakfast table, and had to step away to seek 1:1 support for what seemed to be happening. Through my panic and despair, I slowly came to realise the importance of what I was finally in touch with in the fabric of my BodyMind. I was re-living the confused return to my physical form —and the lack of anchor that has always been hidden beneath the surface of my being. Even though I have talked about having meningitis many times before, Psilocybin gave me access to the actuality of what I lived through so that I could become conscious of it, distinguishing the past in the present, and from that place of awareness begin to make new choices, and take deeper care of the echo of dislocation I will always carry. No wonder I developed extreme separation anxiety over the following years, focused primarily on my mother. I hope that by owning this fragility within me, on a deeply felt level, I can release her from the anxiety I projected onto her, thinking she was the one holding on to me. She wasn’t just holding on to me — I was holding on to her.
And if the path I’m walking speaks to you —
you’re welcome to join me.
My next Elemental Chi Kung class is on Saturday 12th July:
And at the end of the month (28th July 7:30pm) I’ll be holding space for another Dreamweaving session online — a place to enter the field of dreams, universal symbols, and collective reflection. Just 15 spaces available: