Do you remember what it feels like the first time you hear a robin’s song heralding a newborn spring? Or when the first blades of green grass start erupting from the newly thawed ground after a long and cold winter? Maybe you feel it as a rising sense of expansion in your chest, or deep breaths just coming a little easier. Maybe it’s a lightening of your step or of your spirit. However your experience may be, this is a beautiful moment to participate in, and represents the rising of the Wood Movement (often mistranslated as wood “element”) that occurs in Spring.
Lessons of the Forest
We so often think of wood in terms of our wooden desk, bookshelves or walking stick. The hard and dense material that we use in construction—this is dead wood. To capture the traditional view of the Wood Movement, we have to engage with living wood; with the metaphor of growing and thriving plant life. This movement roots itself in earth and is powerfully grounding (yin aspect). This movement also grows naturally and powerfully up towards the light and expansion (yang aspect), and it does these two things in equal and balanced measure.
The upward growth is an experience of movement towards the heavens that can only occur in a consistent and sustained way, through howling winds and driving storms because its strong rooting keeps it connected to the nourishment and stability of earth. It is the suppleness and flexibility of bamboo swaying in the wind, as well as the strength of weeds pushing through cracks in the concrete blocks of a sidewalk. It is the power and strength of dynamically responsive growth out into the world.
Lessons of the Body
The wood element in the human being is strongly associated with smooth movement, expansion and grounding on multiple levels. At the level of our biology, this includes progression of the monthly menstrual cycle and the daily sleep/wake cycle. The movement of our digestive tract and circulation, as well as the transition between tension and relaxation in our muscles are all linked with Wood. If the Wood Movement is inflexible, we can get neck and shoulder tension from tight muscles, or painful cramps and constipation in our digestive tract. If it is not rooted well enough and is ungrounded, there can be headaches or dizziness, and eventually high blood pressure.
Lessons of the Spirit
At our intellectual and emotional levels of being, the Wood Movement embodies the qualities of flexibility, responsiveness, grounding, and growth. It is perfectly natural to feel anger or frustration if someone has just cut you off in traffic. Moving from one emotion to another in response to what is happening in our lives is normal and healthy. Still feeling angry 20 minutes later when the situation is long past is when problems can arise. If we lose the freedom to move and progress from one emotion to another in timing with our life, we lose our ability to perceive and live freely in the present moment because we are too preoccupied with those patterns of thought or emotion that have become stuck. This is wood in its stagnant state.
Consider a vine that meets an obstacle on its path. Is it likely that the vine’s primary meditation is on the obstacle, focusing or obsessing over it? The vine simply grows around the obstacle so that it can continue to reach towards the sun. The primary meditation of the vine focuses on the light rather than the obstacle, and this is one lesson that can be taken from the Wood Movement. Shifting our own wood movement may begin with a simple, but often difficult, shift in the content of our focus.
Once mastered inwardly, the Wood Movement can manifest itself externally with the powerful support, strength and capability we can share with others as a result of, and a part of, our own growth and expansion. A concept similar to our ideas of the power embodied in true kindness and compassion, leadership, social work and charity—movements toward the light.
Lessons of the Ages
The Wood Movement is the last of the Five Movements in this series of articles on the Wu Xing, or “Five Elements/Movements” of traditional Chinese thought. They are often misunderstood, since many translations from Chinese to English are hindered either by the language barrier or depth of comprehension. We are called to translate these insights into those forms of thought that are immediately and presently relevant and true to our own lives here, today. These articles are my own little manifestation of moving forward and up into the light and out into the world of Upstate New York culture and thinking, while still being grounded in the deeper truths of the Chinese tradition and its frame of reference. I hope that they can facilitate freedom and growth for you who have read them.