Living in alignment with the five elements of traditional Chinese medicine (Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water) may foster a return to health or elevate your vitality even if you're already quite healthy. Five element lifestyle tenets and choices can be excellent tools for modulating unhealthy responses to stress, the causes of many chronic illnesses and premature aging.
“Thus Knowing How is the maintenance of life.
Do not fail to observe the Four Seasons
And to adapt to heat and cold,
To Harmonize elation and anger
And to be calm in activity as in rest…
In this way having deflected the perverse energies
There will be long life and everlasting vision.”
Five element living helps one to recover from illness and become resilient in adaptation. Adaptation is the ability to adjust to changing circumstances and challenges of life without suffering the consequences.
Symptoms of illness and unhealthy behaviors are always signs of an imbalance in one of the five elements. They prevent the body, mind and spirit from adapting and “knowing how.”
Allopathic medicine focuses on the disease, not the person who has emotions and propensities that often actually encourage the sickness.
True healing is not just the relief of symptoms. It is about regaining the energetic balance of that element.
Events in early life can alter one’s underlying constitutional energy thereby leading to disease vulnerability. Healthy aging depends on understanding our constitutional pattern.
In order to stay healthy in the face of life’s challenges, we must embrace conscious living by learning to adapt, but how do we adapt?
Traditional Chinese medicine tells us we are born with five Virtues inherent in each of the five elements. As we transform the Virtues, we transform stress-inducing events into opportunities for growth. We become more consciously aware of ourselves and our environment.
The five Virtues of the five elements and their corresponding organ systems are:
compassion/liver/Wood/Spring
order/heart/Fire/Summer
trust/spleen/Earth/between-seasons
integrity/lungs/Metal/Fall
wisdom/kidneys/Water/Winter
When we accumulate toxic emotional energy from the traumas and hurts we experience in life without clearing and integrating them with understanding and gratitude for what they have taught us, this obstructs not only the positive support the five Virtues give us but it also impedes the health of the corresponding organ systems.
Carrying undealt with toxic emotion prevents our ability to adapt–physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. It impedes the natural flow of life force energy (chi) in the body. This can cause disease or exacerbate conditions that already exist.
Premature aging and many chronic illnesses like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, depression, and autoimmune disorders are the result of a failure to adapt. This failure leads to elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol. It causes changes in the midbrain—where emotions and hormonal secretions interface.
PHYTO5 has pioneered both technology and products that energetically work to assist us by bringing to balance an imbalance of emotion and physical health caused by everyday stressors. PHYTO5’s modern light therapy device, the Chromapuncteur, and the Biostimulator which also uses light to work on points and meridians, both aim to balance vital energy.
Additionally but just as importantly, PHYTO5’s quantum energetic skincare products incorporated into a daily skincare regimen also vigorously work to balance vital energy responsible for radiant health and vitality. The Beauty of Emotions proprietary treatment unique to PHYTO5 which utilizes quantum energetic skincare from our five element lines (Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water) squarely addresses the matter of negative emotions as a barrier to wellness and of positive emotions as a booster of Wei Chi so vital to human wellness.
Ancient Chinese Taoist physicians came to realize that the path to immortality depended on two things:
maintaining physical vitality
focusing on the life of the spirit
The Neijing Suwen mentioned above, the world’s first truly holistic healthcare text and system, meticulously describes how to adapt and thrive by “knowing how.” The Taoist physicians who recorded their observations in the Neijing Suwen learned they could enhance longevity through internal transformation, meditation, breathing, exercise and diet.
What is probably their greatest insight is that self-knowledge, a positive attitude and spiritual practice—the embodiment of conscious living—do more to ward off sickness and disease, paving the way for a long and healthy life, than any other practice or belief.
In 400 BCE, the mythical Yellow Emporer of the Neijing Suwen asked his most trusted health advisor, Chi P’o, how to achieve a long and healthy life. Chi P’o simply answers:
“Observe your environment, don’t get chilled or hot, balance the emotions, remain calm, and know yourself.”
The text known as the Ling Shu (meaning Spiritual Axis) and part of the Neijing Suwen, helps describe the mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of Chinese medicine. The following quote from Chapter 8 perhaps says it all when it comes to how to live well and long.
“The patient is the product and author of life’s standards and of the control of the breaths and the meridians. The stability and firmness of life’s lines, the permanent rooting in the spirits, are nothing more than a perpetual changing—a permanent process of adaptation.”
We are each responsible for our lives. We are our life’s author. And they are the lifestyle choices we make moment to moment that support us to adapt to life’s challenges and create a consciously lived life not just health but vitality.
The loss of control over the breaths or meridians equates to the loss of control of the stress hormone cortisol, and to the loss of control of our physiology and homeostasis.
If we do not or cannot take care of ourselves we lose the ability to adapt and then we lose our rooting in the properties stored in each of the five elements (the Neijing Suwen calls them “spirits”) that provide us the power to adapt.
As an example and to achieve a better understanding of one of the five elements, Metal, we invite you to read our blog, “The Metal Type Personality According to Chinese Medicine.”
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Endnotes:
Moss, Charles A. Power of the Five Elements: The Chinese Medicine Path to Healthy Aging and Stress Resistance. North Atlantic Books, 2010.
Larre, Claude, and Elisabeth Rochat de la Vallée. Rooted in Spirit: The Heart of Chinese Medicine. Station Hill Press, 1995.