The 4 Directions & Moving Meditation 🧭🌎🔥🌊🌬️

An ESSENTIAL Indigenous Wisdom framework & a little audio gift for you

Hello my friends! Special treat for you today. I’m sharing with you a framework that while very simple, has completely changed the way I orient to myself, my wellbeing, and how I see the world. To help you connect with the framework, I’m sharing a ~30 minute guided moving meditation.

What is a moving meditation? Often guided meditations prompt you to find a straight-postured seat or lying down. I personally like to meditate while moving my body - whether I’m walking, stretching, dancing, or practicing yoga. Mind and body are not separate, they are connected! So moving meditations can be doubly effective in helping you cultivate feelings of groundedness, stillness, clarity, ease, noursihment, restoration, vitality.

While this is a bit longer of a recording to help your body and subconscious to reach a deeply relaxed state of mind, once you’ve learned the ritual, you can make it your own and complete the body scan within minutes at any time of day for grounding.

This meditation blends indigenous wisdom with somatic healing and yoga as a way to find relief, ease, and even magic in the body ✨

If you practice it, let me know how it went for you!¹

Continue reading to learn more about this timeless ancient framework and how to work with it in your daily life.

What is the Medicine Wheel or Four Directions?

The Four Directions is a framework, a ritualistic tool, a practical and symbolic guide to orient us to the world around us.

Every culture and tradition has different orientations and associations (ex. I’ve seen this taught where different directions are associated with different elements, or different parts of the mind-body system).

The medicine wheel is specifically found in Native American and Mesoamerican traditions, but there are many cultural and spiritual traditions that relate to the four directions. In Ayurveda, Curanderismo, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and other healing wisdom systems, the elements are a major part of observing, diagnosing, and treating dysfunction and disease in the body. These healing traditions understand that the bodies are mini-earths, where we hold all of the elements (fire, air, earth, water, space). So we work with the elements to find balance, healing, and holistic wellbeing.

I encourage you to look into your ancestral traditions to see how they your people related to the four directions, the elements, seasons and what animals, colors, symbols, stories etc. they associated with them.

The Four Directions as Ritual

I learned the Four Directions as Ritual from my herbalism teacher, Lidia Ruelo-Salazar. This is both a personal practice for Lidia and the way she begins any ritual or ceremony. She lights copal and hands drums and maracas to those gathered. In the brief (~5 minutes) ritual, we begin facing one direction where we say out loud our greetings and gratitude for the elemental and spiritual associations with the direction. We then take a rotation and face another direction until we’ve completed all four.

tierrarituals

A post shared by @tierrarituals

Lidia is hosting this hands-on medicine making experience beginning later this summer. Highly recommend if you’re in the Bay Area.

You too can complete this ritual for grounding, centering, and feeling connected to the big beautiful natural world that surrounds you. It is a great way to begin meditation sessions or a way to orient when you wake up in the morning. When I’m walking, I’ll greet the different elements in nature. Really any time of the day you can turn to this framework to feel connected by the elements and spirits of the four directions.

Why are the Four Directions relevant today?

We’ve explored here the archetypal journey of the rise of Patriarchy and Colonialism, and how it eclipsed humanity’s eternal relationship with Mother Earth.

[0.2] In the Beginning, God was a Woman 🌎

[0.3] Solar Eclipse & the Descent of the Divine Masculine 🌞

Under Patriarchy and Colonialism, we’ve been conditioned to value certain elements and ways of being over others.

Colonization works through our collective disembodiment, separation from our bodies and each other, moving from collectivism and connectedness to individualism. When I think about the current state of the world, I feel this over-reliance on the masculine elements - climate change, burnout, progress is more, sense of urgency, are all ways that fire seems to be in excess. Mind over matter, intellectualism, worship of the written word are ways in which we’ve turned to the air element in excess.²

In this framework, Air and Fire are more Yang-like elements. Water and Earth are more Yin-like elements. Ayurveda includes Space or Ether, which maybe we associate with neither, nothingness, or universal. In our world, there is no question that we are significantly over-indexed on the Air and Fire elements. Connecting to Water and Earth, our Hearts and Bodies, will help bring balance to the world.

Still not sure what I’m talking about? Watch the Avatar the Last Airbender Intro for an apt allegory for the times we’re living in.

The Four Directions for Holistic Health

The ancient healing traditions teach us what happens and what we should do when we are out of balance in the elements. The Indigenous Healing Traditions all see the body as one system - physical symptoms, emotional symptoms, and energetic symptoms are all connected to each other. In Ayurveda, a core part of the system is understanding the elements in the body, and how they are in or out of balance.

Let’s take a look at an example that some of you might relate to.

In Ayurveda, Pitta is the fire element in our body. 🔥 When Pitta is overactive, you’ll experience physical and emotional symptoms.

To be clear, you can have an underactive Pitta or you might be in excess of the other elements (Vata - Air, Kapha - Earth/Water), in which case some of the Pitta-aggravating activities like eating spicy foods or going to a sauna might be actually exactly what you need.

The point is - when you have too much of one element in the body, you are to balance it with the elements with opposite properties.

Notice that to balance Pitta, you are to try grounding (earth), cooling (earth + water), fresh (earth+water) practices. This includes the foods you eat, what you drink, what you’re putting on your skin, and the physical activity you’re doing. It can even include the colors you wear (blue, grey, green) to bring your temperature down.³

The Four Directions can also be understood in the context of trauma and our body’s trauma responses. Trauma responses as neurobiologically wired ways our bodies respond to danger. This can be another way we assess which of the elements may out of balance in our bodies.

The four trauma responses are Fight, Flight, Fawn, and Freeze. And wouldn’t you know, each maps to one of the elements being overactive, out of balance, too much.

Does this not blow your mind?!

Finding Balance ☯️

What do we do when we feel ourselves out of balance? Maybe we’ve spent a long time disconnected from our bodies and we can’t remember the last time we had real, rejuvenating rest. Maybe we haven’t connected with our heart in sometime in fear of facing overwhelming emotions.

For each element or part of our system, there are a number of activities we can do to connect to, restore, and balance the energy.

Restoring & Balancing the Elements:

🌎 Earth: feet in earth, go touch some grass, hug and meditate with trees, gardening, talk to elders, storytelling, cooking

🌊 Water: be in water! ritual cleanse (limpias), everything showers, swimming, crying, journalling

💨 Air: breathwork, creativity (visioning), visualization, meditation, play

🔥 Fire: generate heat and sweat! connecting with our passions, dance, sauna/steam room, creativity (taking action), sexuality

There are also super-practices that help us connect to each of the elements. For example, when I practice yoga or dance or journal, I can find alignment across these elements. I’m able to move emotions, clear my mind, reconnect to my body, tend to my inner fire. What are some of your favorite practices or methods to work with the elements? Drop them in the comments below.

1. I would looveee to record more guided moving meditaitons, as I wish there were better ones out there! If you complete the meditation, I’d love to hear your feedback. And if you’d like more opportunities to practice yoga and dreamy meditations with me, I’ll be sharing exciting news very soon ✨ Stay tuned!

2. Learn more about the Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture to understand how Patriarchy, Colonialism, and Systemic Racism show up within our culture.

3. People really want to dismiss these practices as pseudoscientific and woo-woo, and don’t realize that modern science emerged from these ancient sciences. Quantum physics is just now coming to the conclusion of the energetic nature of reality that alllll of these wisdom traditions have been saying from the beginning. All the pragmatists want to laugh at the idea that colors might have an impact on our mood and health, and yet psychology is now coming to this conclusion.