In Paul Francis’s published books, earth is groundingGrounding. Returning fully into the body and physical reality; the bedrock of safe practice, and how every journey ends. More about this and belonging; fire is personal power, vitality and drive; air, through the sky burial, is linked with impermanence and non-attachment; and water is emotion, flow and letting go. Each has its own transformation practice: burial, burning, sky burial and dissolving. Ether, the fifth element, and the fuller teaching on all five are taught on the courses.
What is earth? #
Grounding, belonging and connection to Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this. Burials, the earth transformation, help “with grounding, and with deeply connecting to the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer and to the earth. As such, they are profoundly useful if you struggle with being ungrounded in any way.”1 They help people who feel they do not really belong or have a place on the earth, who “have never fully ‘arrived’ here”, or who “tend to live in your head instead”. And “even if you are not someone who struggles to stay grounded, burials can help strengthen and deepen your connection to Mother Earth, something that in this culture nearly all of us need to do.”
What is fire? #
Personal power and vitality. “The fire element in us is our personal power. It is the source of our authority and integrity. It is our ability to hold our healthy boundaries, to assert ourselves when needed, to speak the truth as we see it. It is our vitality, our ‘energy’, our motivation, passion and drive.”2 It is also “our courage and confidence, our optimism and happiness.”
When fire is lacking, we feel it. “In ‘depression’, it is the fire element that is being depressed, literally held down or even lacking altogether. If we lack fire, then we feel low.” Burnings, the fire transformation, “can teach us to embrace the fire element and not be afraid of it.”3
What is air? #
The element of the sky burial. In this transformation the body is given to the birds, and it is “a profound meditation on impermanence, non-attachment and of the cycle of life.”4 In most cultures birds are seen as messengers of the gods. The books say less about air than about the other three elements, and the fuller teaching on it is given on the courses.
What is water? #
Emotion, flow and letting go. Water dismembermentsDismemberment. A transformation practice in which the Power Animal takes you apart (classically: eats, digests and regurgitates you), reformed and healed. A practice of trust, cleansing and death-and-rebirth. More about this help with “fear of actual physical water”, and also with “a fear of being ‘out of your depth’, or of ‘letting go and going with the flow’, a fear of being ‘swept away’ by emotions”.5 Water issues “can also include things like wallowing in the past and not letting things go, holding on to things, unfinished and unresolved grief, and so on”. In a dissolving, a person lets themselves merge with a lake, the sea or a waterfall until there is nothing left of them but awareness.
Why is ether different from the other elements? #
Because its teaching belongs to the courses. The published books name earth, fire, air and water and their practices, but not ether, and Rewilding Yourself promises that the elements, “what they are and how to work with them”, will be covered “in great detail in later volumes in this series.”6 Students learn about ether, and about how all five work together, on Exploring the Lower-World and the Wheel of Life course. See What is the Wheel of Life?
