Solutions for Earth-Gone-Wrong
In my recent post Personality Flaws of the Four Elements I described ways the 4 Elements can go wrong, each according to its own nature.
How To Know If Earth Is Grounding You
When your life is carefully measured from achievement to achievement (or failure), it’s easy to forget how to have fun. Earth is the poster child for “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Your Earth has gone wrong when:
- You’re such a critical perfectionist that your partner calls you a nag.
- You’re a cynic, only interested in the bottom line and closed to any ideas that don’t have already proven value.
- You’ve been called “cold” or “calculating.”
- You’re prone to overindulging in physical pleasures to compensate for how hard you work or how boring your job is.
- You’ve learned to defer gratification in favor of long-term goals—learned it so well that you can’t let yourself off the hook during a vacation and you despair of enjoying retirement.
Solution One: Balance Earth With The Other 3 Elements
If your Earth is distorted, the other elements can help restore balance. When your routines and systems are so effective that even you are bored, it’s time to break up the Earth with a little Fire. Be spontaneous, take risks, look dopey. Fling yourself into something, instead of calculating all its details first.
Earth gets dull and blockish without the lightness of Air. Air encourages brainstorming sessions and crazy ideas—some may sound just like empty theories, but others will, with the time and testing Earth provides, prove useful in the end. But you have to open your ears and listen first.
Water fertilizes Earth in a wonderful way, bringing warmth, emotion, compassion and sensitivity Earth does not naturally possess. Too many late nights at the office? Balance them with cozy family time. Gotten too controlled or controlling? Nothing like a nice emotional outburst to break down the walls. Oh, and don’t forget to be vulnerable.
Solution Two: Emphasize Healthy Earth
Healthy Earth practices can eliminate the need for compensatory, negative Earth behaviors. Here are some examples of “Earth-Fu:”
- Pay close attention to your bodily needs and engage in rigorous physical self-care.
- Feed yourself delicious, homemade, organic, healthy food on a regular basis. It tastes best when you cooked it yourself.
- Organize your home, your office and your projects in ways that allow you to streamline, be effective and stop worrying. Work smarter, not harder.
- Fall in love with this physical world: get out in nature more, breathe clean air and surround yourself with trees.
Set achievable goals and be consistent about rewarding yourself (even if it’s just a mental pat on the back) when you succeed. When you become preoccupied with your failures, wrench your attention away from them and instead put it on what you’ve done right.
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Coming up next: Does Air Have You Lost In A Cloud?
