The Witch's Book of Self-Care: Magical Ways to Pamper, Soothe, and Care for Your Body and Spirit - Arin Murphy-Hiscock 2018

Elemental Balancing
Household Self-Care

The four classical elements are earth, air, fire, and water. Each has a specific kind of energy to it. Many people often have an affinity for one or more elements and find the associated energy soothing.

Very basically, the elemental energies are:

♦ Earth: stability, firm, grounded, prosperity

♦ Air: light, adaptability, clear thought

♦ Fire: passionate, activity, change

♦ Water: purifying, fluid, transformation, healing

A good exercise is to spend time in a room and open yourself to its energy. How does it feel? Does it tend strongly toward one element?

Working with elemental energy in a home can involve looking to correct an imbalance of energy (controlling the overpresence of an element by introducing other elemental energy) or to encourage the presence of an element in order to enhance the desired feeling in a room. For example, a bedroom should be soothing and calm in order to encourage proper rest. An excess of air or fire energy would not be conducive to that.

If you have an excess of energy related to one element, try to balance it with the energy of another element with more conducive energy to cancel it out. For example, if you have too much air energy in your bedroom, don’t add fire energy; instead, reach for earth energy. You could use water energy as well, but think about the ultimate goal of your room and go with the energy that feels the most appropriate.

How do you go about introducing elemental energy?

♦ Color is an easy way to do it. Think about your emotional response to colors and choose one or two that reinforce the type of energy you are looking for. Another way to choose color is to look at traditional energy associations for colors (red being associated with passion and activity, blue being associated with peace and protection, green being associated with health and abundance, and so forth) and pull in one or two that resonate with the energy you’re looking for. Try the emotional response first, though; your response to color is more valid for your purposes than general lists.

♦ Plants bring earth energy. They also have the added bonus of cleaning the air and providing positive energy in general. Stay on top of caring for them, however; dead plants have the opposite effect.

♦ Crystals and stones carry their own native energy as well as being excellent vehicles for energy you program into them. They are associated with earth energy in general, but each stone has its own energy that you can draw on to help balance the energy of a room. If the room feels less positive or supportive than you wish it to be, try placing rose quartz in it to transform negative energy into positive energy. Use a chunk of amethyst to create a feeling of peace, and so forth.