The Fire Element: Becoming Summer and Nourishing Heart Energy

A 5 week depth series

Tuesdays- July 4, 11, 18, 25, August 1

9:30-11:30 am MT

$250

 5 slots available at a 25% Equity/Justice sliding scale discount. Contact Sarah for details.

This series is a dive into the Heart- a practice and journey of healing, awakening and nourishing the courage, love and bounty of our Hearts . Summer is a phase of blossoming and bringing nature’s full blush of color and ripeness to bear, and stepping into the destinies we are meant for.  We will explore through archetypal qigong, primal and fluid movement, community sharing and witness, writing and gesture. It is in this somatic medicine that we have a chance to truly awaken and heal, cell by cell. As much as our thoughts make our body, our body also makes our thoughts. We will tend to this wholeness. 

In the Northern Hemisphere we are moving from Spring into Summer, which are 2 entirely distinct seasons of energy and expression. In Chinese Medicine, this time is is understood as a transition from the Wood Element to the Fire Element- from the tremble of fresh green sprouts, from birth and new beginnings to a phase of full blossoming, shining, fruition, courage, connection and celebration- Fire is not a phase of beginning and growth, it is a phase of the zenith of energy.

When the Heart becomes scared, exhausted, protected or without connection, tenderness and love for too long, we lose our faith in life, and the courage to give love and receive love. We lack the courage to meet the moment with resilience and integrity. We forget the power of the warm sun at the center of our chests.

If we skip this phase in our lives, if we never come to shine, to joy, to celebration and blossoming, then the experience of letting go and turning inward that comes in the Autumnal phase is filled with a bereft kind of sadness as there is nothing true to relinquish…we have not fully expressed the zenith of our heart’s capacity, and therefore, the decline of energy comes too soon and falsely.

To understand, embody, return to and express the wisdom of natural cycles is a radical act of wildness and coherence, which is to say a radical act of resistance to the systems and spells that seek to reduce our humanity, our power, our healthful rhythms, and our rightful relationship to each other and our living Earth.

Join Sarah during each elemental and seasonal transition for nourishing teachings, restorative physical practices, community convergence and invitations of communion and witness with the natural world. We suffer because we have refused and misunderstood the natural cycles of our internal and external lives. When we do, we lose energy, skip ahead, get stuck, resist, deny, bypass, overstay, leave too early, and orphan ourselves at critical moments of transformation, maturation and initiation.

Through Chinese 5-Element teachings, archetypal qigong practices and primal movement we engage a medicinal exploration of the health of your relationship to cycles, rhythms and the biointelligence of life itself, which is always seeking coherence and balance, even through what appears to be dis-ease, chaos and crisis.

Our transitions between the seasons of the year, and therefore between all natural cycles, are nature-supported and profoundly potent thresholds, carrying wise and potent maps, medicine and mirrors for our human lives, inner and outer.

Summer is Nature’s call toward fullness, ripeness, the risk of the heart, desire, longing, celebration, and a follow-through to fruition. This is a call from our cosmological wisdom toward an apex of a cycle. Fire energy graces us with loving generosity, blossoming, expressiveness, aliveness, compassion, shining, spirit and joy…after the essential phase of newness, birth, innocence, vision, and hope of Spring and the Wood Element. In Chinese Medicine, the organs of Heart and Small Intestine, as well as Pericardium and Triple Burner carry the expression of the Fire Element.

When we move from a Wood phase to a Fire phase, this same energy is rising in us, as we too are nature. This passage occurs in line with the seasons, as well as any time we move from a phase of new life and beginning again, to the full expression and generosity of our hearts, desires and spirits.. What is this transition like for you? Where and how do you resist it, get stuck or feel lost about how to make this journey?

If our Fire Element is weak , we can stop short of our desires, shy away from healthy risks, feel a lack of courage, a lack of compassion, “fire”, generosity and love, an inability to express one’s destiny. If our Fire element is overactive, we can be impulsive, ungrounded, erratic, prone to burn out and “flying away” or “too close to the sun”, over-expressed to the point of exhaustion, thus exhausting and depleting ourselves in a multitude of ways.

How is your heart? What is the health of your Fire Element? This series will nourish, support and replenish your Heart and Fire Element.

Please note that the July 1 “Heart of Summer Collaboration with Liz Koch” is a not included in this series and must be signed up for separately. Click image below for that offering.