We Are the Elements

As I began this practice, I imagined asking the elements for permission to speak on their behalf. What would they wish to communicate through me? What would they want people to understand?

And I hear them say: We are you. We live in every cell, in every breath, in the flow of your life. We shape your body and the world around you in every moment. We care for your wellbeing, and if you truly paid attention, you would care for ours—for we are one.

Asking permission and engaging in dialogue with nonhuman beings is a relatively new practice for me, yet when I do it, I find it enlivening, clarifying, and humbling. My human-centered worldview softens, and for a while, I experience the world as more loving, more alive.

I first learned about the four elements meditation in Mark Coleman’s Awake in the Wild Nature Meditation Teacher Training. My take on this practice is also informed by the Gaia Meditation by John Seed and Joanna Macy. At first, it felt abstract—just an intellectual exercise in imagining my body as a combination of elements. But as I spent more time outdoors, practicing and teaching this meditation, it became deeply embodied and real.

This practice is both simple and profound. We don’t need to look beyond our body to touch the whole world. Through awareness of our body, we connect with everything. As I sense the elements flowing through me and the natural world, the illusion of separation falls away.

The elements are archetypal forces shaping our lives and our planet. Across all cultures, people have honored the elements, relating to them through their own indigenous traditions to make sense of the world they inhabit. In modern times, as we grow increasingly estranged from the natural world, we forget our intimate dependence on these forces, yet still, a deep part of us remembers. Perhaps that is why many of us instinctively check the weather each morning—some ancient part of us still knows our survival and well-being depend on the elements.

The practice of four elements meditation dates back to the Buddha’s time. In the Satipatthana Sutta (c. 20 BCE), the Buddha described meditation on the elements as part of cultivating mindfulness:

“Within this body of mine there are the earth element, the water element, the fire element, the wind element, the space element, and the consciousness element.”

While space and consciousness are two elements considered in more advanced practice, the practice of meditating on earth, water, fire, and air is more common. Through this practice, several insights can arise.

We realize our body is made of the elements, which can be understood as four ways we sense the physical world—through texture, liquidity, temperature, and movement. They are also the four forces that sustain our body:

Earth—our bones, muscles, tissues—nourished by food grown from the earth.

Water—our fluids, blood, and tears—sustained through water and nourishment.

Fire—our warmth and metabolism—regulated by sunlight, food, and shelter.

Air (Wind)—our breath—vital to oxygenate and animate the body.

Through this reflection, we begin to sense how deeply we are interconnected with the natural world. The elements can teach us the truth of impermanence. The elements are constantly changing in the natural world, as they are within us. Our body is in a continuous process of transformation: When we eat food, drink water, or breathe air from different places, when we choose to sit in the sun or shade, our body changes—and we feel different. As the four elements get refreshed in our body, we are refreshed and renewed.

The elements can teach us the truth of impermanence. The elements are constantly changing in the natural world, as they are within us.

This realization also helps us understand the concept of nonself at an intuitive, embodied level and loosens our sense of a fixed, separate self. What we call “me” or “my body” is not solid but fluid and ever-changing—constantly dissolving and reforming. As the Buddha said, “Nothing is to be clung to as me or mine.” This understanding leads to openness and loosening, rather than grasping the sense of self too tightly. At death, our body’s elements dissolve and transmute. We are returned to the earth and the great cycle of life.

This practice also reveals our profound interconnection with the natural world. There is no real boundary between the elements within us and those around us. Our body and the elements from the land are inseparable.

Our body is 70 percent water, so when we drink from the Catskill Mountains, we are the Catskill Mountains. When we breathe in the air of New York City, we are New York City.

We are not separate from nature—we are nature. So when we protect our water sources, keep our soil healthy, plant trees, and take care of our ecosystems, we are taking care of our body, our being. And we are a small part of this larger world.

In addition, within each element contains the others. A piece of wood, for instance, contains not just earth but also water, fire, and air—each playing a part in its creation. Likewise, our bones may seem solid (earth), yet they hold warmth (fire), moisture (water), and subtle movement (air).

Through this meditation, we move from the densest element, the earth, to the lightest, air, and we expand our awareness from our body to the wider world and to deep time.

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You can begin with a posture of sitting, lying down, or standing, whichever one that brings you a sense of both alertness and relaxation. Feel parts of your body that are touching the ground, the support from the earth, and know that this support is always here for you, whether you notice it or not.

EARTH

As you feel your body settle into a sense of groundedness, slowly shift the focus of your meditative awareness to the element of earth. Feel the earth element in the heavy and dense parts of your body—your bones, teeth, joints, spine. Feel the weight of your muscles— arms, legs, shoulders—feel the heaviness and solidity of the earth element.

The earth element in you is part of every living thing, from the soil that supports trees in parks and forests, to vegetables grown in farms, to rocks and dirt that make up riverbeds and mountain ranges.

The earth beneath us gives us minerals and grows the food we eat, becomes our muscles and tissues, replacing every cell in our body every seven years. We are made from earth, and will go back to earth.

See if you can sense that we are not just on the earth but a part of the earth that walks, moves, breathes.

And sense the earth element that is in us was also in the ginkgo trees in the Jurassic age, and in the ginkgo trees today.

WATER

After a few minutes contemplating the earth, slowly shift your focus to the element of water. Notice the water elements in your body—fluids, saliva, sweat, tears.

Sense the fluids inside of you cleansing, moisturizing, regulating—in this moment and in every moment.

Notice how this element helps with your digestion, from the saliva in your mouth that helps you swallow the earth element, to the gurgling of juices in your belly, to the urine that rids you of your body’s waste. This process transforms the earth element to the fire element, giving your body energy and warmth.

Softly flex your fingers and wrists, toes and ankles, taking time to feel the fluid that lubricates your joints and makes that movement possible. Sense the moisture in your eyes and on your lips, the damp sweat on your skin. Imagine trying to blink your eyes when they are dry and without the water element.

Explore the notion that the water you drink is the same ingredient that resides within every cell of your body. You are part of a vast hydrological cycle—water enters your body, rinses it clean, and exits your body to rejoin the flow through seas and mountains and sky.

When you drink water from a local source, perhaps a stream or a river from a mountain nearby, know that they are connected to other larger water systems in neighboring regions, to the oceans around the world.

The water within has been through endless cycles, has passed through people living centuries ago, has nourished all the oysters and marine life in New York Harbor, the whales and seals of the Atlantic Ocean, the beavers in the Hudson River.

It has lain in deep alpine lakes, been frozen Himalayan peaks, nourished salmon in Alaska, fed trees in the Amazon rainforests.

FIRE

As your awareness of your flowing, fluid nature deepens, slowly turn your attention to the fire element. Feel the presence or the absence of sun on your skin in your environment. Realize how sensitive you are to the sun, because you are a warm-blooded animal. Let the animal part of you relish the sun’s warmth.

Sense how the sun’s energy is sustaining your very life, providing the warmth deep in your belly. Notice that we hold the element of fire for only a short while, and we need to regenerate fire constantly through exposure to warmth or via energy from food.

Notice how the presence or absence of the sun may affect your mood, your energy.

Feel the sun’s energy giving warmth to the air, and life to the plants, the earth element. When we burn wood, we are releasing the sun’s energy, giving us warmth at night.

Contemplate the sun. It provides life-giving warmth universally: We share this energy with all warm-blooded creatures, with reptiles who use the sun to warm themselves in the middle of the day, with plant life everywhere.

We offer thanks to the sun, for it nurtures our Mother Earth since the beginning, and that this fire element has sustained countless life throughout the ages.

AIR

And it slowly moves our attention to the last element, air.

Notice each inhale and exhale, and then reflect on this mysterious quality of air—invisible, yet it is with you everywhere. With each inhale, sense how the oxygen you breathe has been exhaled by plant life around you, perhaps trees on the streets, in city parks, nearby forests, algae deep in the ocean.

With each exhale, sense how the carbon dioxide you breathe out is absorbed by the plant life around you.

Feel how the air inside you is the same as the air surrounding you. Think about how each breath connects you with the living, breathing world. Through breathing, we are always participating in the cycle of mutual support, of reciprocity, in an intricate web of life, without our even noticing it.

Sense the air that you breathe is shared with every bird flying in the sky, every deer walking in the woods, and every person throughout all of time, including future generations.

Now we contemplate all four elements together, how they support one another, balance one another, both within our body and in the natural world. We offer thanks to them, for sustaining us and the world around us.

May the four elements bring you blessings, and courage, and strength to care for the elements and all beings. May we learn from the elements. May the elements be well and thriving.

May our lives and practices be adequate expressions of the blessings we have received. May the merits of this practice together benefit all living beings, humans and nonhumans, present and future, everywhere, without exception.