by Jean Haner
Love
What is sometimes addressed in the Fire field is how safe your heart feels to accept and to express love. This doesn’t encompass only romantic love but also includes how you are in any friendship or relationship with another. Do you feel safe to allow someone fully into your heart? And are you able to show your own love for them in a healthy and positive way?
You may carry a belief that you have to lose weight or somehow make yourself better before someone can find you lovable. Or you may carry painful memories from past relationships that keep you locked into fear of rejection or of experiencing similar heartbreak again. If someone betrayed you in the past, you may struggle with being able to trust ever again.
Any obstacles to your own love for yourself can be mirrored in your blocks to loving others as well. Just as you may be too hard on yourself, you could also get stuck in judging people, rejecting them before they reject you, or being too rigid in what you require of a person before you can show them love.
This part of the clearing addresses any places in your energy that create obstacles to love. As the clearing happens, these areas may relax and release, opening new ways for you to experience love in your life. Sometimes when clearing this field for someone, you may even feel a stretching sensation in your own chest, as if your heart is expanding and opening more and more. This can be a reflection of what’s happening for your friend’s heart as you clear them, but it can also be a sign that your own heart is expanding its range. Clearing this field also broadens the ability of your heart to open to any heart you encounter and still feel safe.
Chinese medicine teaches that a healthy heart naturally protects itself; it can open or close as needed. Your heart is said to have a “Guardian of the Gate,” whose job is to be discerning about who you let in, the pace at which they may enter, and just how far they’re allowed to proceed. If the Guardian’s doing their job, then you’ll have a psychic sense about another person, intuitively knowing how quickly or slowly to develop the relationship and how much to trust them with your heart.
If your longing for love is an overriding force in your life, it can weaken the Guardian’s discernment, and then the gate will swing open too easily. That’s when you might get involved with someone who isn’t worthy of your trust and so have your heart broken. If you’ve been hurt in the past, that can cause the Guardian to slam the gate shut and lock it tight to not let anyone in again.
It may not all happen in a single clearing, but it may be that after only a few clearings the Guardian regains their healthy discernment, and your heart feels able to be vulnerable, yet still safe, while experiencing love more fully than ever before.
Joy
This energy field is associated with the heart in other ways as well. In Chinese medicine, the emotion that relates to the heart is actually not love—it’s joy. When the Fire field is clear, your heart is lit up with the joy of just being alive and the thrill of involving yourself fully in everything you do with passion and exuberance. You walk down the street beaming, feeling at one with each person who passes by.
You experience life this way when you’re a small child, but soon your light may begin to dim due to painful experiences that make you feel unloved. At the same time, you’re surrounded by adults whose light has already gone out, so you have few models for keeping the joy alive! So many people show a “lack of Fire”: no light in their eyes, no radiance in their faces, no joy in their hearts. If you look through a series of your childhood photos, you may see your bright spirit in each for the first several years of your life, and then suddenly the rest of the photos in the second part of your childhood show that the light, your inherent joy, has dimmed or even disappeared.
But then again, things could also go to the opposite extreme. Instead of experiencing a lack of joy, that natural sense of excitement can amplify until it transforms into anxiety or erratic emotions. Healthy joy carries a sense of calm warmth; it’s not out-of-control excitement. In Chinese medicine, your heart is said to go out during the day to exchange sparks of joy with other hearts. At night, it’s meant to come home to your body and settle, calming itself into a state of peace so you can get a restful sleep. If the energy here is out of balance, you might experience insomnia at night. Or it might be that during the day you struggle with anxiety or feelings of emotional instability. If things get extremely out of balance in this field, the result can even be hysterical behavior, panic attacks, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Clearing in this field can restore peace to your heart and help you reclaim your joyful spirit so you’re then able to discover and manifest your true passion in life.
Healing the Heart
We all experience some degree of heartbreak or even betrayal in life, and we do our best to recover and heal. But when your heart has been hurt, this can subtly influence your thoughts, feelings, and choices for years to come. It can make you reticent and afraid of being vulnerable again, or you may have difficulty allowing true intimacy. You may protect yourself by holding on to weight, keeping relationships superficial, or looking for an excuse to leave if you sense even the possibility of being hurt again.
You may not even recognize how your heart is still looking at the world through that filter of old pain or fear, and thus not see all the ways it’s limiting you in life. In a clearing, you may feel a tightness at first as you tune in to how the person’s heart feels, and then you may get a beautiful sense of gradual blossoming as their heart starts the journey back to wholeness.
There are other ways your heart can be in need of healing. In Chinese medicine, the heart provides a kind of psychic ability, an expansive consciousness that makes you aware of how others are thinking and feeling. It’s with your heart that you sense when your friend is thinking of you or that your child needs you. It can be fun when, for example, you know who’s just texted you before you even look at your phone! But there can be a downside to this ability as well.
If your Fire energy is out of balance, your psychic boundaries can become weakened. In other words, you become a kind of psychic sponge. You may be bombarded by the thoughts and feelings of the people around you, and this can put you in a state of emotional overwhelm where you feel too easily upset or scattered without knowing why. In this case, healing the heart means creating healthier psychic boundaries; you can still be open, but without taking on feelings that aren’t even yours!
Lastly, your heart is considered to be the shock absorber for your experiences in the world. It’s what helps you deal with daily upsets as well as more traumatic events. Your heart also transmutes this same kind of stress in all the frenzy of modern life. The noise, the crowds, and especially all the ways your attention is constantly on all your devices can affect your Fire energy. Being on your computer, tablet, or phone all day, and possibly even sleeping with your phone nearby all night, exposes you to constant stimulation that your heart energy has to contend with. Clearing this field can bring a growing ability to cope, as well as more discernment about your exposure to this kind of stress.
Clearing the Fire Field
Again, briefly hold the pendulum over your palm, just to check to make sure you’re still in balance. If so, then you can proceed to see if there’s anything that can be released here.
Ask your pendulum if there’s anything to clear in the Fire field. If you get a “yes,” then proceed. If you get a “no,” just skip this field and move on to the fifth.
Fifth Field: Earth
(Safety, Support, Relationships)
The next stage of the clearing is for the Earth Element. As with each field, there are many different types of energy that can be released or rebalanced here. But there are certain issues that can consistently come up to be cleared with each of the Elements, and the following are some that are often addressed in the Earth field.
Safety
Clearing in this field can revolve around how rooted and safe you feel, how at home you are in your own life. In order to really believe you’re
safe, you need to have a sense of solid ground beneath your feet.
One way this is achieved is when you’re in a place of satisfaction and contentment in your career. But if your career no longer seems like a fit, then you may lack that grounded feeling. Either you stay in the job and risk the repercussions of continued unhappiness, or you have to gamble on a new career and risk shaking the entire foundation of your life and your financial stability.
You’ll also have a general sense of safety if you like where you live and have friends and family who accept you for who you are. However, if you’re not satisfied with where you’re living, then your energy won’t feel settled, and you’ll always want to pull up your roots and move. If there aren’t enough people in your life who let you be you, then there’s also no feeling of refuge, of belonging and acceptance. You need a sense of safety in every aspect of your life, but at any one time, there are likely areas where you don’t quite feel it.
Sometimes imbalances in this field can be traced back to childhood, especially if there was little sense of safety at home. Emotionally volatile family members can leave your system still unsettled in adult life. In Chinese medicine, this field is also associated with the theme of “Mother,” and in many ways, your mother is the one who’s meant to provide you with a feeling of being protected and secure. But if you experienced a lack of nurturing from her, whether due to her emotional problems or circumstances beyond her control, that can also contribute to a deficit in feeling safe. For instance, if your mother had to work two jobs, she may not have been able to be there for you despite her best efforts. Any number of individual experiences could have caused you to feel unsafe when you were a child, and each of them contributes to this being a lifelong issue.
You might see a lack of feeling safe as the root cause of someone’s struggle with their weight, or forming part of the reason why they accumulate clutter in their home. However, it may be a more subtle influence in the background, something that blocks their ability to put their thoughts into action or form lasting bonds. Clearing in this field often opens new ways for you to feel truly at home in the world and satisfied with your life.
Support
The need for support goes hand in hand with the need for a sense of safety, of course. The dictionary definition of “support” describes it as something that holds up, serves as a foundation. It withstands without giving way, with patience and tolerance. It is about sustaining a person, the mind, spirits, courage, etc., during trial or affliction.
Do you have enough true-blue people in your life who uphold you, sustain you, and believe in you? Who will always be there, no matter what, like the ground beneath your feet? If not, there can be a variety of ways that this imbalance shows up in your life.
A lack of support can equate to lack of resources and a corresponding difficulty fulfilling your dreams. You may find yourself living in a place where there aren’t enough like-minded souls, or you may be caught in a career or family situation where you feel the people around you are unsupportive. You may keep trying to get your ideas off the ground but can never quite make the launch.
Another imbalance in this pattern can be your own lack of receptivity. If you’re unable to take in nourishing support, you may exhaust yourself trying to do everything all by yourself. If you’re unable to make use of the resources available to you, it’ll be hard to bring your dreams to fruition.
Difficulty receiving is something that many people struggle with, and the issue may date to childhood when their mother wasn’t able to be the nurturing presence they needed. This may not have been their mother’s fault. For instance, if she had to spread her attention around a large family, or if she had to work while raising her children on her own, she wouldn’t have had much left to give.
Whether there were circumstances out of your mother’s control or her temperament wasn’t a nurturing one, the end result can ripple into your adult life as a weakness in receptivity. If you weren’t well nurtured in childhood, that means you didn’t have much experience receiving. You didn’t learn how, and so your receptivity muscles didn’t get fully developed. Once you understand the source of the issue, you can become more able to recognize how and when it affects your experience in adult life.
No matter the cause or consequence of an issue with support, clearing in this field can transform your ability to take in nourishment. It could be in the literal sense, and your relationship with food could be revolutionized. You may also begin to notice people showing up for you in ways they hadn’t before, offering to help or making connections for you. You may suddenly realize that you’ve lost your hesitation about asking for support, and you’re now just naturally reaching out to others without feeling shy about it. And you may also start tending to your dreams more successfully, regaining the ability to be the gardener of your own soul.
Relationships
Relationships are such a vital part of life, whether they’re romantic or with family and friends. They’re your external source of safety and support; they allow you the opportunity to give and receive. They feed your spirit. When this field is in balance, you’re able to form healthy bonds and maintain lifelong friendships. You feel genuinely cared for and fulfilled by your own sincere care for the people in your life. You have a sense of being protected without feeling smothered, of being embraced without being held back.
When there are stresses in relationships, whether current or lingering from the past, they can come up to be cleared in this field. Clearing can also bring new balance to how you manage your relationships. For example, you may struggle with boundaries with others and feel guilty about tending to your own needs. You may overgive, let people take advantage of you, or have trouble saying “no.” You may spend too much of your energy worrying about others, and so tire yourself out simply because you’re always flooding your thoughts out in their direction. This can cause you to lose your own strong center and affect how well you can fulfill your purpose in the world.
On the other hand, instead of being overly connected to people, you might feel isolated and lonely without enough of a sense of connection to community, to people who are or feel like family to you. Trudging through life alone, carrying the weight of having to do everything on your own, can be wearying for your body and your soul. You might feel this way even if you’re married or have lots of friends and family in your life. As with everything, it’s not so much what is happening to you as it is how you feel about it, what your personal experience of it is.
As I said earlier, Chinese medicine defines Earth energy as having to do with the theme of “Mother,” so issues with your relationship with your mother can also come up for clearing in this field. (The theme of “Father” is connected to Metal energy, the sixth field.) It’s your mother who first teaches you the language of relationships, of how to give and receive in healthy ways. If there were difficult experiences with her in your early life, they can reverberate through your adult relationships. And if there is still discomfort in your current relationship with your mother, or stress held in your system about her even though she’s no longer alive, clearing the Earth field can address this.
Clearing the Earth Field
Check your pendulum over your palm to make sure you’re not switched, and then take your palm away and silently ask if there is anything to clear in the Earth field. If you get a “yes,” then clear.
As always, pay attention to your feelings or anything that comes to mind; don’t assume it has nothing to do with what you’re clearing. You may discover while discussing the session with your friend that it did have to do with them in some way.
Of course, if you get a “no,” there’s nothing to clear here, so just skip this field and move on to the sixth.
Sixth Field: Metal
(Life Purpose, Authenticity, Recovering from Loss)
The last field is the Metal Element. The following are some common themes in what may come up for clearing in the Metal field.
Life Purpose
/> Each of us has a soul’s contract, a calling we’re striving to answer throughout our life journey. Your purpose can include your career, but it’s also about more than what you do for a living. For some people, their job is only meant to supply the financial means to allow them to devote themselves to their calling outside of “work” hours.
We’re often unaware that what’s on our plate at any current moment is exactly what we need to be working on in order to achieve our purpose. Instead, we just want to eradicate our current problems, thinking they’re what are blocking us from what’s really important. Instead, we need to recognize that our so-called problems are actually the stepping-stones that are showing the way and helping us evolve so we can fulfill our true calling.
What often comes up to be released in this field are any issues that are preventing you from moving toward your life purpose. Blocks in your external world, such as another person’s judgment or beliefs about you, could fall away as a result of the clearing, and then you suddenly get a promotion or job offer. Or in an online search, you might serendipitously stumble across an upcoming workshop that’s the exact next step for your own personal evolution.
Clearing this field also addresses internal obstacles to fulfilling your purpose, and one frequent struggle is with that critical inner voice. Patterns of perfectionism or self-criticism can run in the back of your mind like a subliminal radio station constantly broadcasting the message You’re not good enough. Until you can transform issues of self-worth, you won’t be able to reach the very necessary place of genuine pride in who you are becoming. This is not egotistical pride but rather the sense of personal power we all need to claim as we reach each new level of evolution in our lives.
In Chinese medicine, this field also has to do with the theme of “Father,” and one aspect of this pattern can relate to your childhood experience of him. Issues from your past relationship with your father may release when this field is cleared, but it can be about even more than that. Your father is the one who’s meant to transmit to you a sense of personal power and authority in your life. If he was distant or absent or if he withheld praise, then in your adult life that ancient yearning to make your father proud of you will show up as issues with your own self-worth, a lack of feeling complete within yourself. That can directly affect how well you progress into your life purpose. So clearing this field affects far more than healing childhood issues with your father.