During the previous presidential election I was called a snowflake when I wrote disparaging comments about a guy I went to high school with, Ryan Zinke. My first instinct was to take offense but even though I hadn’t seen it yet, the Game Thrones series had started to shift the public debate on what it snowflakes and winter were really all about.
Then while I was teaching my apprentices about the water element in Chinese Medicine, I finally understood the contractive energy of water when it is frozen. And I realized, I wanted to be a snowflake. For a variety of reasons. Like each human, each snowflake is unique, supposedly there are no two snowflakes with the same geometric pattern. I sense this is very true for humans as well.
In Chinese Medicine there are 5 elements but the basis of life is dependent on what is called the Sacred Marriage between Fire and Water. Fire is the ultimate yang energy and Water is the ultimate yin energy. When the two are in sacred balance, Life continues. When the two or out of balance and separate, death occurs.
For years I have been studying the work of Lonny Jarrett, who wrote the book, Nurturing Destiny. He theorizes that each of the elements has virtuous expressions, excess expressions and deficient expressions. And each element has an emotion(s) associated with it that, when in balance, help the element stay in balance. This perspective totally re-framed emotions for me. Somewhere a long the line, I learned and believed that emotions were “bad”. Now because of these theories, I have come to understand that they are a part of our sensory system that helps keep us alive.
According to this theory, fear is an emotion that keeps us alive. When it is in balance, it snakes up our spine and makes the hairs on the back of our neck stand up.( I have also felt the hair on my arms stand up around someone who was potentially dangerous). Fear, when felt is a contractive energy. It pulls our energy into us and heightens our senses so we can respond appropriately to danger. When our system is functioning properly, fear rises when our survival is truly threatened. It is a nervous system response and if we are aware, we contract our energy to we can freeze and not be seen, defend ourselves with the fight energy or flee the situation all together.
Because I am a student of plants and the plant cycle, I use the plant metaphor to help my students understand the elements. After the killing frost of the autumn, the fruit drops to the ground and the seeds are covered by leaves and soil. They are in a state of hibernation, just like the bear. Within each seed, is the blueprint for the tree. In the cold of the winter month, the energy of the seed, and our energy is within. Living where Grizzlies live, I often think that when the nights are long and the days are short, we like the bear should be resting, dreaming and contracting our energy deep within so that when the snow melts we can take the action we need to for the “new growing cycle.”
If we resist this natural cycle of restoration, we deplete our bank account of energy. I don’t know how many times I have heard people this winter tell me they are exhausted and yet they refuse to rest. I am not sure if it is our “Puritan Work Ethic” or the understanding that if they slow down they will have to feel everything they have suppressed over the year(s). Instead, they fill their heads with podcasts, news and binge on netflix.
where I live, it is common to have that outdoor obsession where people are often intent on “conquering” nature through amassing vertical feet in skiing and other winter sports . Ice climbing, cross country and down-hill skiing and hiking are all perfectly fine, but anything done as a resistance to resting or stillness isn’t any better than going to the bars every night or smoking pot so you become “comfortably numb”.
The contractive energy of winter, is a time between time. Except for the evergreen trees, all of the plant life looks dead. I learned to read the pulses and this time of year, my kidney pulses are there, but they are very deep, I would imagine that is what happens to the kidney pulses of a bear. I have given myself permission to go to bed early, to take naps and to witness my own c0mpulsion to fill every moment with activity or thought.
My other observation over the past year has been that I (like a lot of people around me), tend to have an imbalance in my kidney/heart axis. I tend to be super fiery and until recently, I had weak kidney pulses. As I have been working to remedy this I have come to the realization that one of the best things for me is to be able to “contain” my fire and nourish my life force. When my water element is balanced I have access to the Wisdom of my ancestors that is stored in my bones and my blood. I can also expand time so I can contemplate, I have access to cleverness and when I am balanced, I use my personal resources wisely as well as natural resources. I don’t waste energy, nor am I stingy with it. I am able to stay centered and focused and I use the strength of my will, supported by the divine, to be who I have to come to be on the planet at this time.
Once again we are in an election year and once again Zinke is on the ballot. I know now I am a snowflake. I still refuse to vote for Zinke, even though he boasts about being a Navy Seal, and once implied to me that he could take out his opponents. As I told one of my clients, “I have known Zinke too long to ever vote for him.” He was an arrogant prick in high school and he still is an arrogant prick.” I am a snowflake and Winter is here.
Though in other places, end of March/late February often signals that spring is coming. Here in Montana that is often not the case. I still have potentially 2 more months to work strengthen my kidneys and learn more about how I get out of balance, ungrounded, fiery and scattered. My current practice is to watch what triggers imbalance in me. It isn’t always easy to perceive the trigger that causes me to explode in Chaotic Joy. My clues are when I talk fast, talking over people and am less likely to hear what they are saying. I also have a tendency to walk fast and think super fast, often faster than I can talk or type. When I have enough awareness to to witness this, the first thing I do is take a big deep breath. I slow down my movements, my speech and my breath. The quicker I catch it the more clues I get as to what triggered the “chaotic joy”. All of this has led me to understand how easily I get out of balance because of my coping mechanism of extending my awareness outside of myself into other people’s fields in order to “be safe”.
And this takes me back to where we started. The contractive energy of the snowflake doesn’t have to be unaware of the other snowflakes. Instead, the snowflake has contracted its energy because of the cold. As we contract within we are able to contact our vital essence and purpose. We know who we are, we know why we are here, we just focus on our most honest, authentic self, with the understanding that if everyone is snowflake this world will survive and humanity will not once again destroy civilization and the environment.