(Ep. 6 the FINAL episode in the Soul-Care Series)

The earth element can help us to ground our energy, face our fears as we cultivate courage (which can be supportive when dealing with nightmares as well as difficulties in our waking life). The earth element can also be helpful for bringing energetic resolution to the traumas- both big and small that have taken up residency within our bodies.

In this episode you will:

• Learn how the earth element relates to fear and courage- and how to harness the grounding, balancing powers of the earth in order to face scary things in life
• Learn about the astrological and physiological correlations or the energy triad of earth and how to recognize when this element is in or out of balance in your body
• Experience a poem I wrote on facing fear called "when the hunted becomes the hunter"
• Enjoy a simple but powerful visualization for connecting to the earth
• Learn how to work with nightmares along with my favorite tip for re-entering them safely (which also applies to facing our fears in our waking life as well).

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Go to Elevationhive.com to learn more about our conscious dream circles, and upcoming in-person classes in polarity and craniosacral therapy.

• Check out my art at AmandaLux.com
• Learn more about your chakras and elements with the Soul-Care Workbook:  https://www.amazon.com/Soul-Care-Workbook-Journey-through-Elements-ebook/dp/B08BYWCJFR
• read teh article quoted by Toko-pa Turner here: https://toko-pa.com/2012/10/04/dreamspeak-eating-your-shadow/
• Click here buy me a cup of coffee or show your support for this podcast. So much energy goes into the creation of this free content and I'm a one-woman show over here. I really appreciate your appreciation! 

Thank you for listening, sharing, reviewing and sending me your dreams! 

I love to read them. 

Summary 

Welcome dreamers, seekers, empaths, and healers! My name is Amanda Lux of the Elevation Hive school and community membership for energy medicine and dreamwork. In this podcast, I share teachings, musings, poems, songs, and interviews with other amazing humans who walk the healer's path. 

Songs used in this episode:

Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):

https://uppbeat.io/t/soundroll/slow-mo-dreams

https://uppbeat.io/t/danijel-zambo/traveller

https://uppbeat.io/t/vens-adams/silence

https://uppbeat.io/t/caleb-fincher/something-greater

Light wind: by https://lesfm.net/

Alone/All One theme song written and performed by Amanda Lux

So often our unconscious fears are what fuel our nightmares

hiding under our surfaces.

They're the parts of our psyche or our being that are trying to be revealed.

And when our shadow chases us, if we run from it, we just give it more power.

It just keeps pursuing.

But if we are able to turn and find the resources and the circumstances

and the boundaries to safely face it.

Then we can learn what is underneath the fear.

Welcome to a Lone Traveler's Guide to the Divine.

My name is Amanda Lux and I'm the creator of The Elevation Hive School and Community

for Energy Medicine and Dreamwork.

This is the final episode in the Soul Care series.

Where I've been sharing ways to tend to your body, mind, and soul elementally.

Throughout this series, we've been touching on the positive and negative

pull aspects of each of the five elements, which correlate to the five

main physical chakras in the body.

Beginning with the ether element, we explored the positive and

negative pulls of grief and bliss.

Then we went into the air element, which expresses through envy,

anxiety, and unconditional love.

The fire element expressing through anger, rage, and the ability to

take empowered, embodied action.

And then in the water element, we explored unhealthy attachments, and

the ability to go with the flow so that we can discern healthy boundaries.

Finally, we're here landing in the earth element whose positive

and negative pulls include fear and courage in polarity therapy.

In this episode, I will be exploring this continuum, the energetics of

fear and how we can cultivate more courage to face it, and how to access

more resource and balance through connecting with our earth element.

I am gonna be talking about how this plays out in our dream time through nightmares.

How the earth element often holds the key to releasing either acute or

chronic physical issues, as well as trauma that gets stored in our body.

And I'll be sharing a visualization for tuning into and balancing your

root chakra, the earth element.

But before we dive into all of that, I'm going to open this episode with a

poem that I wrote some years ago called When the Hunted Becomes The Hunter.

Fear is a funny thing.

It is never what It seems to be sneaky and illusory in dreams that

which we fear often pursues us.

And every time we run there is that heavy feeling of no escape.

Yet so often in dreams, just like in life, our fear is

our own power stalking us.

I have never faced a fear that I regretted turning towards.

Not once have I wished I had cowered instead, because our fears are our

greatest informants, just like our pain, which alerts us to pay attention and tend.

So what if our greatest fear stopped being that our fear would devour us,

and rather than feeding it or letting it feed on us, we fed on our fear instead.

Oh, the power that could come from ceasing to flee from releasing control.

So completely.

When we no longer agree to be the hunted.

We become the hunter of the thing that hunts us.

And by harnessing the courage to dive into the dark waters that threaten, we remember

that they are always our own depths ever revealing the mystery that is us.

The earth element resides in our root chakra at the base of the

perineal floor as the slowest densest frequency of all of our chakras.

It is the place of the unconscious subconscious, our primal

instincts and our gut responses.

Because it takes the longest time for energy to arrive at the

frequency of the earth element.

It often holds the key to our oldest most chronic issues or the things that we came

here with inherited from our ancestry.

And it's often the place where our acute trauma goes either to be processed or to

be stored if we don't have the capacity to discharge the energy of an event.

In the moment so as a body-based energy worker, I've had over 20

years of experience getting to work with different bodies and

different people in this capacity.

So I've noticed a correlation time and again between

trauma and the earth element.

Because energetic residue arises from traumatic events often gets lodged.

Or stored in our root chakra, which may affect our physical body in our

posture, our pain levels, or it could show up as various forms of acute

or chronic dis-ease in the body.

This is usually deeper than our conscious mind can access, so we don't have a way

to process it on the conscious level.

That's why, oftentimes trauma work.

Really needs to address the body.

In the soma, in our nervous system, in our connective tissue,

in our viscera.

It's stored deeply in our bones.

We can't just think our way out of these things.

It hides and lays dormant in our body mind matrix, and then it comes

out in unexpected moments triggered by physical memory or it seeps out

in our dreams causing nightmares.

So how do we address this through the earth element?

I wanna explore that in this episode because there are several ways

to approach this topic of fear.

Trauma is different than fear, but oftentimes it is triggered by fear.

So whether that's fear of something that is actually happening to us or that we are

anticipating could happen to us, starts with fear, and if we have a physical

reaction to that, it could become a trauma response and the earth element.

Is very much in relationship with that fight or flight response, that primal,

instinctive way that we respond to fear.

And that's why I relate it to trauma.

So you could say that most of our disorders or dis-ease comes from

energy that is stuck or blocked or not.

Processing through our system and being integrated in a

healthy way that is life giving.

It starts to drain our vitality if energy gets stuck, slowed

down, along the way and is not.

Able to be processed.

So processing energy is how we restore vitality, unwinding those stuck

places where trauma has been stored on a physical, emotional, energetic

level is how we restore vitality and learning how to cultivate courage is

necessary for that kind of work, and that's the work of the earth element.

The earth element can help us learn about facing our fears by

calling on the resources we need in order to create a safe container

The fire is really what steps in to protect our boundaries, and the water is

really that negotiation of the boundaries.

But the earth is the boundary itself.

It's the holder of the actual boundary.

It's the container.

when we are able to listen to our root chakra and honor what our

needs are for healthy boundaries

Then we can process the energy of our lives more readily.

In polarity therapy, the earth element takes up residents in our body through

our neck, our knees, and our bowels.

Those are the three areas , that the earth element shows up.

In polarity sessions, in our bowels, , our intestines, it has

to do with how we have digested and are in the process of eliminating

those things that we've experienced in life, not just in food, but all of

our experiences have to be , digested,

. Processed and then the residue that is no

So that is in the sign of Virgo and the bowels, and then the sign

of Capricorn is in the knees.

And to me that's a lot about how we pivot in life, so oftentimes when things

show up in that part of the body, I get curious about how is this person able

to walk through their life to meet the obstacles, to change course as needed?

So the earth is very much that place of physical dense energy,

old, longstanding, chronic.

It's the place where we negotiate what we have not yet come to awareness of and what

we are complete with and ready to let go.

It's the place of completion.

A lot of our fears that dwell in the earth element in the subconscious are what Carl

Jung would describe of as our shadow.

And Toko Pa Turner, a dream worker, an author writes about something called

Shadow eating, which I absolutely love.

She says, "eating your shadow in dreamwork is the slow practice of

meeting those dark figures within and growing one's, bravery to face them.

Learning to live with our failings, shortcomings, anger and grief.

But shadow eating is also a source of great potency.

As we break from traditional morality, we learn the true value

and meaning things have for us.

And in learning to love the entirety of ourselves, we come into contact with

a far vaster compassion for others."

The shadow is really everything that we have not yet faced within us.

And I love dreams for this because every aspect of the dream

can be interpreted as a version of ourselves, when we take full

responsibility for the ways that we are, every character in our dream.

Both in the waking dream of our lives, as well as when we are

asleep, even in our worst nightmares.

If we can see these nightmarish aspects, these things that we are most afraid of as

aspects of ourselves, then we can begin to meet them, to face them, to become curious

and to create a dialogue with them.

And this needs to be done safely, or it can be counterproductive.

It's important to find the tools that work for you and create the scenarios

that allow you to feel safe enough to face these things so it's not so dangerous.

And this is true for our dream life again, as it is for our waking life,

but we have to, do that work safely.

Sometimes we try to face things in our dream and and they just gobble

us up and we wake up in terror.

Right?

But I think creating a safe space to work, the dream is really essential, and

that's about setting healthy boundaries.

It's about tending the container and the earth is so good at that.

the Earth is the ultimate resource.

If we put seeds in the ground and we water those seeds then we can grow

everything that we need to be nourished.

The Earth provides and.

In return, it just asks for the detritus that we no longer need.

It asks for our shit that we are ready to let go of, and the earth

transmutes that into something that's vital and nourishing.

So that is the, energetic quality of the Earth that we can tap into

as a resource that rich fertile.

Receptive, transmuting, powerful place that holds us, that gives

us foundation to stand on.

And if we can connect with the earth and ground ourselves, . We can

find the resources we need to face.

Anything.

And Earthing can look a lot of different ways.

It can look like creating a symbolic ritual with the Earth where you

are just sitting on the ground or laying on the ground or walking

barefoot in the dirt or the grass.

You can sit beneath a tree and visualize its roots.

You can do something that is kinesthetic with your hands, such

as repotting, a plant, working in a garden, weeding or playing with clay.

Sculpting is also a really, really earthing activity.

You could engage in

digging.

Sometimes.

For me, it's just digging, even if I don't have a, a purpose, if I can dig.

And I get lost in that physical labor and the smell of the earth and the feel of

it, and it moves energy on a fundamental base level, it moves the energy there.

So maybe you need more earth in a yin way.

You need to just lay on the ground.

Maybe you need to lay on your belly and put your nose directly in the

grass or in the soil, and remember your connection on a base level as

a creature, more than a human, as an animal, in a primal way that is not

separate from the earth, but connected

My favorite way to connect with the earth is through visualizing

roots coming out of my feet.

And I invite you, wherever you are in this very moment, to engage your

imagination and visualize this, that your feet don't end at the bottom

of your body, but extend beyond your physical body through the form of roots.

Just like any plant or any tree.

Imagining and visualizing that you have roots that grow out the bottoms

of your feet and into and through the ground wherever you are visualizing that

burrowing action of your roots, diving deep below the soil and the bedrock.

Journeying down through all the layers of water,

through the electrically charged core of the planet to plug in.

Like plugging into an outlet and that there is in the heart of the earth.

An actual outlet you can plug your roots into, and that literally is grounding

connecting with the electromagnetic energy of the earth itself, and allowing

that to ground your energy to help you release then anything you don't need.

Thinking about the eliminative functions of the earth element, and thinking

about what in your life you are ready to let go of, what in your energy is

too dense to really be of service to you anymore is ready to just drop.

Down and out through the bottoms of your feet, through your roots,

and down into the earth to be transmuted, letting it all go.

This does not have to be a long, slow, hypnotic process.

You can do this anytime of day, anywhere you are.

Just turning on that idea that you can dump and release anything that isn't

serving you or anything that isn't yours, to carry anything that's old and letting

it go with gratitude, honoring that the earth really enjoys that symbiotic

relationship, that it's reciprocal.

And that the earth wants to transmute that.

It needs it to create healthy soil,

to create the fertile environment that holds us.

That carries us through our lives.

That grows us.

So how do we cultivate courage with the help of our earth

element or within our earth?

How do we cultivate courage to face our fears?

And I wanna just speak to this in the metaphor of a nightmare one

of my favorite dreamwork teachers, Robert Moss, says that all nightmares

are just unfinished dreams.

And I really love this saying because what he's inviting is this idea that if

we were to face whatever was scaring us in the dream, We would no longer be afraid

and it would no longer be a nightmare.

It would become just another dream that we were able to learn and grow from.

Whenever I have a nightmare, I get excited.

Usually even if I'm terrified in the moment, I know that there's

potency there for me to gather.

I know that I have the tools and the resources to meet

that scary thing in my dream.

And once I do, I know that I will be empowered because it's happened over

and over and over again in my life.

Sometimes I Don't have the consciousness to meet the scary thing in the dream.

Sometimes I do, but sometimes I don't because it's coming

from an unconscious place.

The fears are.

Not something that I've been able to work through on a conscious level.

That's usually how it works.

So if it's coming up in the dream and I am able to meet it, then I

feel really exuberant about that.

Like, wow, I just met something in the unconscious realm by becoming conscious

and knowing that I could meet it.

But that doesn't always happen.

And so, Oftentimes when we have nightmares, we don't wanna think about

them, talk about them, remember them.

We wanna bury them immediately because they rose up from

a buried place within us.

But if we can remember either within our sleep or when we wake up,

what Carl Young says about making the darkness conscious within

us is how we become enlightened.

That is the way to learn and grow within ourselves is by meeting those

things that are in the darkness.

So often our unconscious fears are what fuel our nightmares

hiding under our surfaces.

They're the parts of our psyche or our being that are trying to be revealed.

And when our shadow chases us, if we run from it, we just give it more power.

It just keeps pursuing.

But if we are able to turn and find the resources and the circumstances

and the boundaries to safely face it.

Then we can learn what is underneath the fear.

What is it we need to embrace or let go of or transmute?

These are places in ourselves that we have often rejected or turned away from.

Not wanted to relate to or been too afraid to relate to.

And if we turn away enough, we will forget that those are parts of us

at all, and we will see them as so other and so alien that we will feel

victimized by them and we can create patterns in our waking life like this.

But we can face those.

Issues in our lives by creating safe space.

So I'm gonna share how I would do this in a dream.

One of my favorite tools for working with nightmares is to go back into the

dream from a conscious state, which is called dream reentry, and I don't just

waltz back into the terrifying dream.

I will first ground myself.

I will feel my root chakra.

I will ground into the earth and then I will call on my guides and allies.

I will call on my helpful ancestors to support me, whomever in the

spirit realm or the above and beyond.

Your awareness is working on your behalf.

Call them, ask for support.

And to me, this is the equivalent in waking life of asking a friend to help you

face the scary thing, or seeking mediation or calling up a counselor or finding some

resource, some ally that can support you.

So it's an intelligent thing, right?

To not just go waltzing in alone we want to create safe space.

Consciously ask for support.

I will do this process when I want to reenter a scary dream or work with a

scary dream in any way, whether that's through art or through journaling,

or through conscious dream reentry.

As I will ground, I will ask for support.

And then I will have a dialogue and I will create whatever boundaries,

whatever conditions I need for that dialogue to feel safe.

And that means that I might not talk directly to the

scary, bad guy in the dream.

I might actually put them on a movie screen.

I can view the dream as though it is on a movie screen.

And I have the remote in my hand and I can hit pause or rewind

or fast forward anytime I want.

So that's one way that I use to reenter a terrifying nightmare

and you want to create a safe scenario where your guides can support you, where

you have whatever kind of distance and boundaries work well for you to feel

confident that you have some control.

And from here, you just need to really be curious and be willing to listen.

Be willing to watch.

In your imagination, be willing to paint or draw what actually is coming through

you without judgment and to explore then what is the meaning of this dream?

Of this nightmare?

What is the message?

And I always want to assume that there is something here that I don't know yet.

And so I get really curious.

And the more you practice this with your dreams, the more empowered you

feel and the more likely you are to remember within the dream that you

have this power to actually turn and face the scary thing in the dream.

And that's really exciting when that happens.

And what's really cool is the more you can practice this in your dream

world, the more you can do this in your waking life and vice versa.

Learn how to create the boundaries, find the support you need to create enough room

and safety for curiosity and non-judgment.

To learn how to see the other as an aspect of yourself to learn how to then integrate

that information to assimilate and process what this experience is here to teach you

and to let go of and eliminate whatever remains that is no longer of service.

To your growth and healing and to your evolutionary process.

There's this idea that the earth element or our root chakra is really

that place of foundation of the unconscious, that it's the place of

our shadow where our fears reside.

Sometimes our traumas can hide, and if we can cultivate the courage to face

these fears, then really we can find that that leads us to a deeper knowing

of ourselves, a deeper understanding and level of compassion that we

can take out into the world when we regularly exercise the muscle of

facing our fears in a safe and healthy way, , that we become fundamentally

stronger and less individualistic in the sense that we can really know.

The interconnection of all things.

We can see ourselves mirrored back in everyone around us.

We can take full responsibility for the scary dreams and the scary life

circumstances that we participate in creating so that we can learn and grow.

And the more that we practice overcoming those fears the more

empowered we feel in our lives, the more strong we are in our root chakra.

This morning in my yoga practice, I was practicing an Ashtanga move where

you are basically in a squat and your knees go up on your elbows and you

jump back into a Chaturanga or a pushup like position, and I was struggling a

little bit in the moment with getting my knees up on my elbows and my legs.

My feet were a little too wide, but I didn't know that because I felt

safer with a wider squat stance.

I was afraid of falling on my face.

But what my teacher said, and this struck me in the moment, my teacher said that

I needed to bring my feet in a little bit, make them narrower, and I needed

to lean my face forward, even though that seemed totally counterintuitive,

like I was just gonna fall on my nose.

But I did what she said, and suddenly this nearly impossible move became easy.

It was almost easy.

It took strength, but it wasn't nearly as impossible feeling.

And she said to me, oftentimes, we instinctively create a wider

stance or we don't lean into the move because it's scary to do that.

But if we can remember that, that that's not necessarily

ergonomically correct, right?

That.

Physiologically speaking, it's better to narrow the feed and lean into that thing.

Then we, we have more access to our core and to our power.

We have more leverage to leap into action.

And this felt like the perfect metaphor to me for the earth element

because sometimes we think that taking a wider stance will help.

Or keeping a distance from the thing that's scaring us will help.

Sometimes we think that, but what that does is it disempowers us, actually.

And so sometimes we have to , lean into the thing that's scary.

We have to take that leap of faith, and that really is that place of courage.

They say that courage isn't the absence of fear, right?

It's just facing the fear anyway.

And so I wanted to end with this idea that when we can lean in a little

bit and, be willing sometimes to fall on our face a little bit, to

find that edge, that's the practice.

And I think this is how ultimately we become courageous is just through trial

and error, falling on our ass a little bit, falling on our face sometimes.

But learning how to take healthy risks.

And that doesn't always look like what you think it'll look like.

And so that's good to know.

If we can figure out how to do this in our bodies , in our dreams, and in our lives.

Then

we can truly stand in our own power

rooted and strong.

We can allow the energy that's moving through our lives to find resolution

and to find completion, and that is really what the earth is all about.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of a Lone Traveler's

Guide to the Divine, please check out the show notes for links to my

book, the Soul Care Work Workbook,

you can learn more about me and my classes and resources and

polarity therapy@elevationhive.com.

And if this episode was helpful for you and you happen to have a friend

that you think might resonate with, I would invite you to share it.

And also, if you would like to leave a review on Apple Podcasts

or anywhere you're listening, that would mean so much to me.

I appreciate you listening.

I appreciate your energy.

It is such an honor to be in sacred community with you.