The Five Elements: Understand Yourself and Enhance Your Relationships with the Wisdom of the World's Oldest Personality Type System - Softcover

Dahlin, Dondi

 
9780399176296: The Five Elements: Understand Yourself and Enhance Your Relationships with the Wisdom of the World's Oldest Personality Type System
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0399176292 ISBN 13: 9780399176296
Verlag: TarcherPerigee, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

The Five Elements brings the wisdom of an ancient healing system to modern readers, helping them understand themselves--why they do what they do--better.

Dondi Dahlin shows us that we are all born with individual rhythms that go beyond the influence of our genes and upbringing. The five elements originated in ancient Chinese medicine over 2,000 years ago--when scholars theorized that the universe is composed of five forces: water, wood, fire, earth, and metal. Understanding these elements helps us stay in balance physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. By explaining the efficacy of wood, the depth of water, the joy of fire, the compassion of earth, and the wisdom of metal, this book helps people understand themselves and form lasting connections to others, answering the age-old question of why we do what we do.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dondi Dahlin is an award-winning speaker and teacher, internationally-acclaimed dancer, and member of the Screen Actors Guild. With her mother Donna Eden, she coauthored The Little Book of Energy Medicine. Dahlin teaches the five elements at the OMEGA Institute in New York and at Eden Energy Medicine workshops around the world.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

My Life with the Five Elements

My friend Kelly had been trying to find love on singles’ websites. She told me that there are lots of questions on matchmaking sites about likes, dislikes, desires, and a person’s job and family that don’t really tell you much about the person. For instance, singles’ Web sites certainly don’t tell you how the person behaves under stress. This may be the most important key to a relationship and is probably the biggest reason for breakups and divorce—because people behave differently when under stress, and many times they cannot see eye to eye. Kelly said, “I wish I could just go onto one of these sites, say that I am primarily a Water/Earth type, and have everyone know what that means. Then I would find my soul mate much quicker and we would undoubt­edly stay together for the rest of our lives!” 

Gain Confidence and Clarity with the Help of an Ancient System

The Five Elements have been a part of my daily life since I was a teenager. My mom raised me and my sister to navigate life by understanding how Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, and Metal manifest in the world and in people, and this understanding has truly helped me become who I am today. I have learned how to have patience, understanding, and compassion for people when stress, anger, and frustration could have gotten the best of me. My deep knowledge of this system has strengthened my ability to get along with others instead of letting the nitty-gritty details of life bog me down. It has helped me to negoti­ate tricky situations in work and uncomfortable phases in relationships and to find a deep and lasting confidence in myself.

Growing Up with the Five Elements

My mother, Donna Eden, taught me and my sister the Five Elements when we were young. She said they would never fail us. As a world-renowned healer who can see energies in the body—darkness and light, flowing (wellness) and not flowing (illness)—she knew she what was talking about. My mom has a kind of X-ray vision that allows her to see not just the vibrations and energy of peo­ples’ bodies down to their organs and bones, but also the vibrations and en­ergy of their hearts and souls. She cannot remember when she didn’t see, feel, know, and experience people’s “rhythms” and their primary elements of Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, and Metal. Later, as an adult, she encountered teachers who taught her the formal Five Element system that is described in ancient Chinese medical texts and is fundamental to traditional Chinese med­icine. Only then did she realize what she had always been experiencing. Today, Mom teaches Eden Energy Medicine all over the world, a healing method de­veloped by her based on nine energy systems in the body. The Five Elements is one of those systems.

These days, my sister and I both work closely with our mom as she travels internationally giving workshops to teach and heal people. But when I became a teenager and young woman, I was often perplexed by how different the three of us were from one another. Our mom was born with a double blessing but also a spiritual burden: Not only can she heal people—and feels that she was born to heal people—but she also is an Earth/Fire combination. Strong Earth types are pulled deep from their core to serve people and will give up every­thing to make sure people are happy and that peace resides in their hearts. If Earths are not devoting their time to making people feel good, life just doesn’t feel right. Taking care of themselves always comes second. Like Earths, Fires also love people, and they love feeling joy and pleasure. If they can recruit ev­eryone around them to feel the same joy that they feel, then life is wonderful.

But this pressing need to give, help, and heal has a downside, too. Mom’s urgency to comfort and help people comes from a deeply spiritual place that she has had since she was born, and it cannot just be turned off by logic. Mom would take needy people into our home and give them money, food, and what­ever else they asked for, even if they were total strangers and even though we didn’t have much money to begin with. As a teenager, I started to move strongly into my Wood element, and I found myself angry and frustrated. I was starting to form the strong opinions that typically come with being a Wood. One of those opinions was that people needed to take responsibility for themselves. Plus, in the early eighties we were living on food stamps and government-issue cheese blocks, so how could we take total strangers into our home and give them our precious food?

When I was young, I didn’t understand my mom’s Earth/Fire. As a Wood, my tendency was to think that people who do good should be rewarded and peo­ple who don’t should be punished. As I came to understand the Five Elements better, I realized that it is actually torture for Earths not to help others. They simply cannot bear the pain of seeing someone suffer or struggle. I have seen Earth types (my mom included) wither and weaken if their ability to serve people or animals is curbed or hampered in any way. My mom and the Five Elements taught me that it is not fair to stand in judgment or to see the world in black and white—ever. 

Growing up, I also saw that my friends didn’t have a system like the Five Elements to explain or depersonalize normal but challenging life events. We were all experiencing our parent’s divorces, peer pressure, the confusing surges of hormones, and first romantic relationships. When parents started divorcing—as mine had done—my friends would cry at school. They seemed lost. Divorce is never pain-free, but I seemed to have more space in myself to accept my parents’ divorce because I was familiar with the Five Elements. I understood that my mom’s Earth and my dad’s Wood were at odds (see the Button Pushers, pages 233–35). When my dad was angry or even enraged, I saw that he was a stressed-out Wood/Fire. When my mom was emotional and panicking, I saw that she was a stressed out Earth/Fire. Not only were they from different generations with different values, but their elements were different, and because of this they weren’t able to resonate with each other and be a healthy couple together.

Are You Balanced or Imbalanced?

In this book, we talk about balance and imbalance and what it means to be a balanced Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, or Metal. Simply put, balance is the har­mony of your body and mind. To have balance is to not be saddled with chem­ical, emotional, mental, spiritual, or psychological issues. It is to have wholeness, harmony, and joy in the mind, body, and spirit. Imbalance might be repressed emotions or a physical illness that is limiting the full potential of your personality and your authentic self, to shine.

In each phase of my life, the Five Elements have showed me that other peo­ple’s imbalance has little to do with me. It’s not a comment on my worth or even their feelings for me. I can still care for them and make clearheaded choices. For instance, when a dear friend decided that she would end our friendship because I didn’t have time to do daily meditation with her, I under­stood that it was her Metal out of balance. Metals have a lot of need for rever­ence, and if you don’t share their cherished ideas and standards, on their terms, they can get put off. My busy life simply didn’t allow me to revere her the way she required. Because I am familiar with the Metal element, I didn’t take her decision personally. Similarly, when I once spent time with a friend who scheduled the entire day with bike rides, walks, and...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
TarcherPerigee
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0399176292
ISBN 13 
9780399176296
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchpark GmbH
gpsr@buchpark.de

Krügerweg 1
Trebbin
Brandenburg
14959
Deutschland