Water Element Practice:
Learning to Be Comfortable In the Midst of Movement & Change
Welcome!
Water is the nature of a healthy mind: always moving, never fixed. Healthy water is moving water. Good, clean water is critical for life. Water without movement is turbid, smelly and stale. Water must move and change to stay healthy. So it is with us. Spending time in your nest with Water Element Practice is developing your awareness of your changing body & mind, the flow of your thoughts as well as the changing circumstances around you.
How can you be vital, healthy, engaged and joyful in the midst of change?
With practice you can learn to discern - with kindness, courage and toleration - how to be present with change in ways that are useful and supportive.
Spending time in your nest with Water Element Practice gives you an opportunity to get to know the nature of change, what change feels like from the inside, and what you can do for yourself in relation to change to make the flow both enjoyable and supportive.
To practice being with change and how your feelings, sensations, narratives (those tapes in your head) - no matter how pleasant or how unpleasant - is fundamental to vitality and resilience.
Dragons Work
Water Element
For now - so long as you are in this body – this is how you encounter world. You feel and you engage with others through the medium of your body. There is no other way.
Old modalities of thinking/feeling/being have been telling us to overcome our bodies and to use our bodies in ways that reify ourselves - as if our bodies are machines, tools to be used - by others. By ourselves.
Yet our bodies are living beings. Our bodies live us. And more importantly - our bodies, however provisionally, are the medium through which we encounter change within ourselves and change in the world around us.
If you are concerned for the planet - your home - start with your body. If you are concerned for your family - start with your body. If you are concerned for your community - start wth your body.
For the purposes of realization, your body is constituted by the same forces that constitute the cosmos; Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Space, and Consciousness.
Here at Dragons Nest Academy we practice being whole and being vital through the Six Element Family - the natural forces that animate all of existence - yours included.
We may have been told that others know better what to do with our bodies (and our earth) than we do. Yet we can - and must - know this for ourselves.
The great lie is over.
If we treat our own bodies (as well as the bodies of others) with ignorance, disrespect, anger, suspicion, alienation and hatred – if we are locked into a war with our bodies (overeating, overwork, fear, denial, anxiety, chemicals, additives, pollution, plastics, misplaced expectations) we are also locked into a war with our planet (agri-business, plundering resources, climate change, denial, deforestation, water supply, plastics, pollution).
Our bodies are constituted primarily by water. The flow of water is our body, and our body is always in flux. Realizing this flux (on the inside) is how we enter flux (on the outside) with ease and grace.
As my body/home changes: our body/planet changes.
As we go - so it goes - the state of the planet, the state of our bodies. Our flow is one and the same
How can we take care of our body/home/our body planet? The question is extraordinarily complex yet stunningly simple.
The answer begins and ends with awareness. In order to act is ways that benefit ourselves and the planet we must practice being aware; aware of what is happening inside of us (my body/my flux), as well as what is happening outside of us (our bodies/our community/our planet) with grace, compassion, kindness, vitality and joy.
Start where you are. Start here. Start now.
With the water element you are working with managing and directing flows of energy that move around, above, below and through you (60).
As human beings we occupy a unique position in that we can actually think about flow - consider it, direct it, manage and move flow consciously and in directions that affect not only ourselves but also our loved ones, and worlds entirely beyond our own purview (56).
Articulations of kindness keep flow in motion (58).
Six Element Practice
Is not my idea!
Six Element Practice was born through the work of Kôbô Daishi - a brilliant scholar, statesman, artist and monk who lived in the ninth century in Japan.
Also known as Kûkai, he has been referred to by scholars as the Leonardo DeVinci of Japan.
It was during my practice at Yôchi-in Temple on Mt. Kôya from 2016 - 2018 that I underwent a series of experiences that taught me the value of evidence-based spirituality.
Our realized connection with the universe and with the unseen forces that constitute the cosmos is real and available to each and everyone of us at each and every moment.
My teachers at Yôchi-in enabled me to practice while I maintained my position as a university professor. Because of their graciousness I have been blessed with the ability to bring my profound revelations off Mt. Kôya and into the world at large.
As a species, we are currently experiencing profound changes in our relationship to nature and to ourselves. Six Element Practice is but one of the great wisdom traditions that calls on us to evolve - and to involve - our consciousness in living happier, more balanced and integrated lives in synergetic relation with the being of this planet.
