Today, let’s explore how to transmute elemental energy (Air, Water, Fire, Earth) from one form to another…and why you might want to do so.
But first, a story.
Last month, I got a letter from one of my parents. It was fourteen pages long, single spaced, and starting with my birth and steamrolling to the present day, it detailed the many, many reasons why this person thinks I suck.
(There was also a strong throughline of why they’re not responsible for their actions, and instead, all events should be attributed to other people’s failings—often mine, but other family members were awarded supporting roles.)
Midway through the first page, I felt like my body was topped full of kerosene, and someone had tossed a lit match down my throat. Whoosh! 🔥
By page three, I’d opened my email, hands quaking, and began composing, in fits and starts, an angry response. Deleting it. Stabbing out another paragraph. Deleting it again.
On page five, though…something shifted.
I realized there was no conceivable way to reply to this letter.
Or more specifically, there was no conceivable way that I could respond to this letter without saying cruel, damaging things, which I would certainly regret moments after hitting send.
I also realized, to use the language of Internal Family Systems, that I had roughly a dozen inner parts desperately vying for control of the keyboard, and that was no state to be replying to anything in ⛔ much less something as emotionally charged as this letter.
I flicked off my screen and backed away from the desk. I wandered into the living room in a sort of haze. I don’t know how long I sat there, slumped on the couch, trying to steady my breathing and slow my racing thoughts, and then…I reached for my journal.
As words became sentences and sentences became paragraphs, pages overflowing with hurts and fears, humiliation and grief, it struck me that this very same parent had sent me a very similar letter in my 20s.
And there was something so acutely sad about that, about the fact that, two decades later, this is still how they’re choosing to approach things. With vitriol and bridge burning annihilating, with blame-shifting and projection.
I could also see how, if I’m not mindful, I could end up walking that very same path myself.
It’s a path I’ve stumbled onto many times throughout my life, and it seduces with the promise of pseudo-certainty and the protective armor of always being right (in your own mind).
This letter read like a litany of unresolved traumas and misunderstandings and pent-up feelings, and it conjured a memory of when this parent and I were walking through a park.
This was five or six years ago, and I remember asking them what it was like running a business, something they’d done at one point during my childhood. I was curious, as a business owner myself, what this parent had experienced and learned.
Within five minutes of broaching the topic, we were embroiled in a story about an unscrupulous “Mr. X” who owned a similar business, and Mr. X, according to my parent, resorted to all manner of shady tactics to win the “battle” for business supremacy. Judging by the biting tone and scathing insults, this wound, which had occurred almost thirty years ago, hadn’t scabbed over well, much less healed.
I’ll be blunt: This is not how I want to live my life.
I don’t want to be clutching onto all the ways I believe I’ve been wronged.
I don’t want to move through life viewing interactions as battles to be “won.”
And this letter was a perfect opportunity to navigate feeling hurt and angry in a different way.
This brings us to the transmutation of elements, which we’ll approach through the lens of rumination.
One of the life strategies frequently modeled in my family is ruminating oneself into a state of sleepless, constipated, irritable anxiety. It’s a strategy I’m quite familiar with, personally, and I’ll add “breaking out in itchy hives” to the list of party favors. Lots of fun, lemme tell ya.
This letter could easily have been a perfect opportunity for rumination. I mean, I had fourteen pages of content to work with, after all. 😐
But what, really, would this accomplish, aside from not being able to poop or sleep for days?
Elementally, we can think of rumination as Air run amok.
Air is the realm of the mind, so when Air is in balance, it’s extremely handy! It helps us parse our experiences into more manageable bits, and it can help us reassemble those bits into an understanding that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
But when Air becomes trapped, or there’s simply too much of it, perhaps incoming at an unrelenting pace, our mind can feel like our worst enemy.
Working elementally can look like, one, moderating the flow of energy by changing how much is coming or going, or by altering where it’s flowing. And two, we can transmute one element to another, which is what we’ll be focusing on here.
Going back to the possibility of my post-letter ruminations, how might I transmute this trapped Air (looping thoughts, conducting arguments in my head, etc.) into something else?
Well, ruminating is frequently the result of unfelt emotions.
Let me say that again: Ruminating is frequently the result of unfelt emotions.
There are aspects of our human experience that we simply cannot think our way through, no matter how hard we try, but when we allow ourselves to feel what needs to be felt, things shift, often in profound ways.
Let’s pull a few passages from one of my favorite books, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy by Edward Edinger.
🌊 The alchemical stage of solutio corresponds to the element of Water. Edinger writes:
“Another aspect of solutio…[is] its power to answer questions or to provide a solution to problems.” (75)
“The solutio experience ‘solves’ psychological problems by transferring them to the realm of feeling. In other words, it answers ‘unanswerable questions’ by dissolving the libido obstruction of which the question was a symptom.” (76)
(Note that in Jungian terminology, “libido” is not specific to sexual energy; it refers more broadly to what we might call “life force.”)
In the days following the letter, I ran a little experiment:
If I ever found my mind wandering into rumination, I paused to ask, “What am I feeling right now?”
Nine times out of ten, I was feeling very, very sad and/or very, very angry. Interestingly, I found that the anger was often a rather thin veneer over sadness, and once I allowed myself to feel my anger, I then needed to let myself cry.
Now, this might not sound wholly preferable to thinking myself into a constipated state of insomnia, but the detail I’ve left out is that all of these emotional experiences (Water) passed, typically within minutes, leaving behind a sense of being grounded in my body (Earth) and more clear in my mind (Air).
I was often creatively inspired, to boot, which relates to the element of Fire (as does intuition, and I’d frequently have light-bulb insights after connecting to my emotions).
Contrast this to rumination, which often yanked me out of my body, drained my energy and focus, and left me utterly uninspired.
You might wonder, how is rumination different from thinking about a situation?
For me, rumination has a repetitive, go-nowhere feel.
I can ruminate over something for thirty minutes and feel absolutely zero percent better, and it doesn’t lead to insights or a change in behavior. It just makes me feel stuck and often bitter and resentful.
Thinking, on the other hand, leads to new connections and insights, and it inspires action (or intentional inaction, like not replying to my parent’s letter).
This brings us to a second point about rumination…
…and that is, rumination can serve as a substitute for moving toward a solution and taking action.
🚗 Instead of, say, telling a friend that we don’t want to go on a road trip because we’re afraid of hurting their feelings, we build a twenty-point legal case in our minds, detailing why they “shouldn’t” have asked us in the first place, how they “should” know how busy we are, that we don’t like being cooped up in a car, etc.
No amount of ruminating will replace directly communicating what we need and/or how we feel.
(And I speak from copious experience…unfortunately.)
How we move through these elements might differ from person to person or situation to situation, and I have to wonder how much our astrological makeup plays into this.
As someone with a lot of Air in my chart, might that predispose me to rumination? And with Water as my runner-up element, perhaps that’s why I often need to shift from Air to Water, and then the other two elements are more accessible for me.
I don’t know, but it might be fun to explore in your own chart! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If today’s topic was your cup of tea, I also have a Jungian Energy Work mini course where we look at energy flow within the psyche and how we can strengthen our magic by learning to partner with this flow in new ways.
As always, thanks for being a part of my weird, little corner of the internet…and happy Full Moon! 🌝
