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When people experience emotions in their flowing states, they’re often astonished that their emotions don’t feel dangerous, time-consuming, or embarrassing. The emotions are so gentle in their flowing states that it’s hard to identify them at first. The emotions have been shoved so far into the shadows that we often aren’t aware of what’s going on inside us. Our natural and innate empathic intelligence is simply not welcomed, exercised, or honored.
But empathy is a normal human skill, and from the animals I’ve known, I’d say it’s a skill in most animals as well. The skill of empathy allows us to read the interior state, the intentions, the emotions, the desires, and the possible actions of other people or animals. If we’re very good at reading emotions, our social intelligence and our emotional intelligence tend to be very high. We get people and animals and their needs in the way some intellectual geniuses get mathematics or physics, or in the way artistic geniuses get colors, shape, and perspective. Empathy is one of the multiple kinds of intelligence we have.
However, most of us grew up in a world where multiple intelligences were not yet understood. It was only in 1983 that Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences became known. Dr. Gardner identified more than just the logical intelligence that most people focused on at the time—the intelligence that allows us to do math and science, identify patterns, and use logic and deductive reasoning. Logical intelligence is the one that can be measured on an IQ test, and for decades, it was the only aptitude that was openly called intelligence.
Dr. Gardner saw intelligence differently, and he put a name to six other forms of intelligence that go along with logical intelligence. Four of these intelligences are linguistic intelligence, which allows us to write, communicate, and learn other languages skillfully; musical intelligence, which allows us to identify tone, pitch, and rhythm and to appreciate, compose, and perform musically; bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, which allows us to utilize our bodies and our musculature with great skill (think of dancers, athletes, and gymnasts); and spatial intelligence, or the ability to recognize patterns in space and to utilize space in novel ways. Architects, builders, people who are good at geometry, and most visual artists are in the spatial intelligence category.
The other two intelligences Dr. Gardner identified are interpersonal intelligence, which allows us to understand the intentions, motivations, and desires of others, and intrapersonal intelligence, which gives us the ability to understand our own motivations, intentions, and desires. These are incredibly important forms of intelligence that help us pilot through the social world.
To be an effective empath, it’s important to focus on these interpersonal and intrapersonal areas of intelligence, though all of our other intelligences are important as well. Right now as you’re reading, you’re using your linguistic intelligence, and in the chapter where we learn our five empathic skills, you’ll use your bodily-kinesthetic and spatial intelligences as well. None of our intelligences exists without the others, so it’s not as if you have to turn any of them off. In fact, you use your logical intelligence all the time, and while your musical intelligence may not seem to be active right now, musical ability is connected to your ability to use and understand language, because language incorporates rhythm, pitch, phrasing, and listening. When you’re reading, you’re also relying upon your interpersonal intelligence to translate the words on the page and decide what I mean, what I intend, and what I want you to understand, and you’re using your intrapersonal intelligence to respond, react, and feel your way through what you’re reading.
With the ground of Dr. Gardner’s work to stand on, we can refer to intelligence as a constellation of abilities, and not simply those skills you use on IQ tests. However, here’s the problem for empaths: when most of us were growing up, the only kind of intelligences that mattered were the logical and spatial forms. Maybe our musical and artistic intelligences were accessed in school, and probably our bodily, sports-focused abilities were, too, but PE and art were probably not an equal focus of our school day. When I went to school, PE and art were not seen as essential to learning, and now, with all the budgetary problems and the testing-focus facing schools, PE and art are even less likely to take up a large part of the school day. Therefore, we don’t tend to access all of our intelligences at school.
It is telling that our interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences are not a part of our formal schooling at all. I think I took a class called Citizenship once, but I can’t really remember it. What I do remember, in school and out of it, is that behavioral and social skills were often taught on the fly. We learned how to act by watching others or by being praised or yelled at, but there wasn’t any actual instruction. We learned to be in relationships and to be siblings or friends through osmosis or by the seat of our pants. We didn’t receive direct instruction about our relationships or our emotions unless we made some huge social mistake, such as openly displaying unwanted emotions like anger, jealousy, or envy in our mood states. We were taught math and logic, we were taught art and music, we were taught PE, and we were taught reading, writing, and languages. But in regard to our emotions, our interpersonal skills, and our intrapersonal skills, we were just supposed to have figured it out somehow.
We got demerits or gold stars for our behavior, but we didn’t learn how to identify our emotions or work with them skillfully. If we acted out our anger, we’d probably be sent to the principal or the school counselor, or we’d have to go to detention or stay after school. The anger would take us out of the normal school day, out of the classroom, and out of the way. And the other kids would learn, “You don’t do that. You don’t express anger, or you’ll be shamed.” If we acted out our fear or our sadness, we might be seen as weaklings and maybe become targets for the other kids, or we might become the teacher’s pet, which is often the same thing as being a target.
We certainly didn’t learn that anger helps us set effective boundaries, that fear is our intuition, or that sadness helps us relax and let go of things we don’t need anyway. What I also noticed at school, and it may have been different for you, is that acting out our compassion was also frowned upon. For instance, if a child was being isolated and identified as a geek or a target, you took your social survival into your own hands if you tried to befriend him or stick up for him (if you didn’t have status, that is). Sometimes, I saw kids with status—you know, the cool kids, the pack leaders—reach out with compassion and essentially throw a cloak of protection over a social outcast, but it didn’t happen as often as it needed to.
What I saw growing up, and what I still see, is that we’re asked to grow to maturity while keeping two of our most important intelligences under wraps, in the shadows, out of the way, and off the radar. As adults, we tend to need therapists, counselors, and psychiatrists to help us access our emotions and our interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences, even though these intelligences belong to us and are essential to pretty much everything we do. It’s not surprising, then, that we don’t know what emotions are, what they want, or what they do. It’s also not surprising that we’re left to create a ground under the emotions by ourselves. Dr. Gardner’s multiple intelligences give us an excellent foundation, but I also want to add another model, which is the four-element or quaternity model.
In order to create more support for our transition into empathic awareness, I like to present the four-element or quaternity model, where earth is the physical world and your body, air is your mental and intellectual realm, water is your emotional and artistic realm, and fire is your visionary or spiritual realm. This model gives us a way to both deepen and clarify our understanding of concepts. If we can place people or situations into a quaternal model and observe their earthiness, their airy aspects, their watery movements, and their fiery natures, we can understand a little bit more about them.
The four-element theory is not a scientific one. We are not—nothing is—made up of only four elements. This elemental framework is mythological and poetic in origin, and it has been used for centuries and across cultures as a way to gain understanding of the world. As we’re learning now, the fire element, with its dreams and visions that seem to come “out of nowhere,” is turning out to be a function of an exquisitely attuned brain and nervous system. When we speak of the fire element, therefore, it’s important to keep in mind that the entire realm of fire—dreams, spirituality, and vision—is very likely a function of neurological (and not paranormal) processes. However, this doesn’t make our fiery aspects any less fascinating or useful.
In our modern world, we have grown in leaps and bounds toward an intellectual understanding of the universe, the earth, human and animal behavior, and the brain; however, we haven’t grown as strongly in our ability to put our understanding into everyday practice. As we explore this concept of the quaternity, we’re engaging not just our logical abilities, but also our intelligences that understand nuance, mythology, and dreams. In truth, we have to engage the older and more empathic parts of our brains to understand the deep and gorgeous realm of the emotions.
Even though the quaternity model is mythological, understanding our own four elements and their interactions brings unusual stability into our lives. When we can envision the emotions as our internal water element—as the part of us that embodies fluidity and flow—we can bring great clarity to our intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences. With water as our model, we can understand the function of emotions, the properties of emotions, and the position emotions should take in our whole lives.
Water has many distinct properties, and it’s valuable to study them in relation to the emotions. Water is soft and flowing, but it can wear down boulders and mountains. It’s a great conductor of heat and energy, and it can carry things within itself through its ability to support weight and create buoyancy. It moves and flows around anything put in its path, and it usually finds its way to the deepest, most grounded places. Water can even travel upward; it moves constantly. If you put a lot of energy into it, water can change its form; it can shape-shift into vapor or form itself into a solid block of ice. Water moves back and forth between states in a constant flow, just as emotions move (or should move) between their free-flowing and obvious mood states in a constant flow. Water makes plant life possible, it quenches and bathes every living creature, and it regulates the temperature of our entire planet. The unusual properties and qualities of water make life on earth possible.
The unusual properties and qualities of your watery emotions can do the same for your living system—if you will let them. When you understand that water needs to flow, you can begin to behave properly when water rises in your own psyche. If you can simply allow your emotions to flow as water does, and if you can respond to them honorably, you can create balance within yourself. Movement and flow are the central properties of water, and of the emotions themselves. Mythologically and psychologically, water is the unconscious, the great container, the place from which all life and all impulses originate. The word “emotion” even has roots in the water. It comes from the Latin emotus or emovere: to move outward, to flow outward. Allowing your emotions to flow naturally is the foundation of the ability to channel emotions properly and skillfully. If you can simply let your emotions flow—if you can notice them, welcome them, and let them move freely through your life—you will begin to heal. You won’t have to increase your emotional flow with overt expression (that often creates too much flow if your emotions are very fierce); rather, you can consciously welcome each of your emotions.
Here’s an example of welcoming your emotions: Imagine you’ve just been cut off on the freeway. The emotions that arise are usually fear and anger. Fear in its mood state ramps up your instincts and your intuition to let you know you’re endangered, and anger rushes forward to help you rebuild your disrupted boundaries. If you express these emotions, you might scream and swear, gesture rudely, or even chase the offensive driver, none of which would take you out of danger or rebuild your boundaries. If you repress your fear (your instincts) and your anger (your ability to set boundaries) and try to ignore the rudeness and keep driving, you’ll most likely be less aware and less conscious for the next few moments or miles—again, you won’t reduce your danger or rebuild your sense of safety. But if you welcome both emotions and allow them to flow through your system, you can use them to increase your awareness. You could use your fear to sharpen your senses. That’s what properly flowing fear does—it increases your focus and awareness. Your fear could help you ask yourself where your attention was and why you were so startled. Your fear could also help you think about ways to prevent such inattentiveness in the future. You could also use your anger to make the proper corrections and get yourself away from the unsafe driver. Properly honored anger would enable you to quickly and consciously rebuild the “traffic boundaries” around your car; it would protect you from the recklessness of others and help you become a more skillful driver yourself. When you welcome and attend to your fear and anger consciously, neither one will endanger you or the other driver; rather, they’ll simply help you increase your awareness and skill.
When you and your car are out of danger and your emotions have been attended to consciously, both your fear and your anger will then flow and move on—as they should. Neither emotion will need to stay active in its mood state, and you won’t have to obsessively relive the incident or drive unconsciously for the rest of the day, because you’ll have handled the situation, and the emotions, appropriately. If you can honor your emotions and welcome them as the life-giving water element they are, they will behave exactly as water does. They’ll flow and change, shift their states, react and respond appropriately, and create the perfect ecosystem in which you can flourish. Allowing your emotions to flow freely inside your psyche brings life-affirming water and empathic awareness into your life.
Through the model of earth, air, water, and fire, we can see that our emotions are a great and flowing oceanic force, without which we could not live or grow. Yet still we try to live without—or in spite of—our emotions. We struggle to change or delete our emotions. We try to live without water in our souls and then wonder why our lives refuse to work, or why our world is filled with unrelieved emotional pain. If we can place the four-element model before us, we can see that none of the elements (and indeed, none of us) can exist without the watery emotions. We tell ourselves we can go beyond our minds, or transcend our bodies, or ignore our spiritual longings, or transform our emotions. That’s all a load of hooey, but let’s face it: each one of us tries to make that hooey work in one way or another.
With the help of the four-element model, we can enter the world of each element in a more functional and mature fashion. Consciously placing each of our elements in relation to the whole helps us envision balance and flow in all parts of ourselves. We begin to understand how our lives function, or malfunction, when any element is out of balance in our psyches. We begin to see that balance is necessary if we want to experience our emotions (or any part of our lives) in brilliant ways; we’ve got to have full and conscious access to our airy intellectual intelligences and capacities, our earthy physical perceptions and intelligences, our fiery visionary wisdom, and our watery emotional awareness and intelligences. If we’re truly serious about healing and personal growth, we can’t just pay attention to one or two parts of ourselves. If we want to be strong, aware, and emotionally agile, we’ve got to build a village inside of us and learn to honor our full quaternity of earth, air, water, and fire and all seven of our intelligences.
We need this village inside us when we enter a subject empathically, because we don’t just study it dispassionately; instead, we drop down into the heart of troubling issues and work in the depths. What I have observed is that the emotions identify imbalance and then move from imbalance to understanding to resolution. Often, we try to ignore this emotional process; we try to jump to solutions first, but solutions that have no foundation in the understanding of the issues are not real solutions. They’re just stopgap fixes that don’t carry enough energy with them to do any real good. However, it’s easy to understand why we avoid the emotional movements that drop us into trouble, because we’ve all been socialized to avoid trouble (and most emotions) at any cost. The good news is that if we agree to dive into trouble as our emotions ask us to, and if we allow them to flow naturally, they’ll contribute the energy and intelligence we need to work our way back out of that trouble—quickly, and without any unnecessary drama.
For instance, sadness in its mood state slows us down and makes us stop pretending that everything is all right. If we mistakenly fight the sadness, our lives will soon come to a complete stop anyway. If we can instead move honorably into sadness, we’ll find the rejuvenation and healing that lives at the very heart of sadness. Or consider that anger in its mood state riles us up and makes us stop pretending that we weren’t hurt or offended. If we fight our anger, we’ll miss the boat completely and probably get hurt again because we didn’t speak up. If we can instead move honorably into our anger, we’ll learn to rebuild what has been broken and protect ourselves and others with the fiery strength and certainty anger contains. The only real way out of any imbalance is to go through it consciously. If you can bring all parts of yourself to the imbalance and gain a complete picture of a problem, you can work toward a complete solution.
If you want to be able to rely on your physical skills when emotions arise, you’ve got to know how your emotions and your body interrelate. If you want to be able to think quickly and process your emotions intelligently, you’ve got to understand the ideas you have about your emotions and your intellect. Correspondingly, if you want to have access to visionary or spiritual knowledge about your emotions, you’ve got to know what relationship your fiery spirit has with your watery emotions. It’s important not to move toward the emotions in unbalanced or facile ways, because in order to work with them properly, you need the deep knowledge that only a whole and resourced psyche possesses. The emotions are powerful, and you don’t want to fool around with them; as we all know, they can be dangerous when they move into the raging rapids or when they’re handled carelessly.
As we learn to invite our full village of elements and intelligences into our empathic process, it’s important to stop for a moment and look at the unnecessary struggle that has been manufactured between our airy logical intelligences and our watery emotional intelligences. If we subscribe to the false idea that being emotional is the opposite of being rational, we’ll set up an unfortunate fight inside of ourselves. The truth is that our emotions and our logic work together—or they should—in a healthy psyche.
The airy parts of our intelligence—our logical, spatial, and linguistic intelligences—are beautiful, worthy, and utterly necessary, but they’re just part of the whole village inside us. They cannot be balanced or stable unless they’re intimately and compatibly connected to each of the other intelligences and each of the elements in the quaternity. When we separate our air element from its brothers and sisters—from earth and water and fire—we dishonor it, we disable it, and we expose it to unnecessary danger. The problem absolutely isn’t in the logical air element itself. The problem is in how our extremely unbalanced culture has trained us to treat the air element inside (and outside) of ourselves. We cannot bring our emotions out into the open until we understand how our intellects are both idolized and demonized, in much the same way our emotions are. And we certainly can’t honor and channel our emotions skillfully until we know how to approach our intellect empathically, and how to approach our emotions intelligently. We need to bring our good judgment to the forefront.
By introducing the word judgment, I’m opening a big can of worms, because the ideas we have about judgment are just as befuddled as the ideas we have about emotions, if that is possible. When I refer to judgment, I refer to your capacity to react as an individual and use your discerning intelligence freely. If you have good judgment, you can disagree with others, go off on your own mental tangent, and strike out on your own path of discovery. This is an important set of skills; however, this solid, adult capacity to judge has gotten very bad press in the last few decades.
The theory is that judgment stops you from experiencing life completely, because you’re too busy categorizing and thinking about things to be fully present in each unfolding moment. This no-judgment rule has had some positive effects, but it has also created a great deal of turmoil. This call for nonjudgmentalism comes from nearly every spiritual teacher we could name (including Jesus, Buddha, and Lao-tzu), but its application in the everyday world is exceedingly confused. This confusion isn’t an unusual occurrence (think of the trouble humans have in deciphering any sacred text or injunction), but when people forbid themselves the faculty of judgment, they take the airy part of their wholeness and throw it out the window.
We need to rescue our much-wronged ability to judge from its forced exile and bring it back to a place of honor at the very center of our lives, because we need to be able to rely on our airy intelligences if we want to be wholly intelligent and intelligently empathic. We can ask ourselves: “Why do we forget that the word ‘judgment’ is a synonym for ‘intelligence?’” When we say someone has poor judgment, that’s not a compliment!
I understand, of course, that by referring incorrectly to judgmentalism, spiritual teachers intend to denigrate name-calling and the tendency to place people or experiences into simplistic “right” or “wrong” categories. I agree that name-calling is usually a bad thing, but because the idea of judgment has been so distorted, many people have become bewildered. They believe that all facets of real, adult judgment are forbidden to them, and unfortunately, this makes working with their emotions nearly impossible. Instead of moving gracefully away from the simplistic right/wrong thinking that can hinder their awakening, many people stop using all of their judgment, when in reality, only a partial suspension of certain aspects of judgment is ever necessary.
Judgment, in its truest sense, simply tells you what a thing is and whether it works for you or not. Healthy judgment is a combination of your airy intellect and your watery emotions coming together to form a considered opinion. Healthy, mature judgment isn’t bad-tempered name-calling or simpleminded categorization of the world. It’s just an internal decision-making process about what a thing is and whether it suits you or not. If you try to emote without thinking—without judging—you’ll fly off the handle. But if you try to judge without feeling your way through your decision, you won’t ever be able to decide. Thoughts and emotions are partners. They’re not enemies.
Healthy judgment helps us define ourselves in the world, and it helps us separate the wheat from the chaff. This process of definition keeps us focused and centered. Healthy judgment helps us decide between this idea and that, between this option and that. Healthy judgment does not need to trash the path not chosen; it just needs to be free to make decisions and engage with its environment. Trying to squelch judgment is futile, because we’re active, reactive, and responsive beings. We’ll always have our own thoughts and feelings about events, and we’ll always judge and process our environments independently—no matter how many rules we ingest or how authoritarian our teachers are. Healthy judgment is a natural process of making intelligent and competent decisions with our hearts and minds acting together, and with our logical intelligences and our intrapersonal intelligences respectfully communicating with each other. This is very different from bad-tempered name-calling or labeling.
Let’s look at the difference between judging and name-calling by focusing on something simple. Let’s imagine a rug that doesn’t work in the room we’re in. We can judge the rug and see that its pile is too high for the traffic it gets or that its color is so light that its shows more wear and dirt than it should. Let’s agree that the rug isn’t ideal for the room. Perhaps we feel sad that so much money was wasted, perhaps we think about putting runners over the traffic areas, but we freely process information about the rug and add that information to our skill set. That’s judgment. It’s not name-calling; it’s a considered, decisive process. We have a problem with the rug, we have feelings about it, and we’re definitely judging it, but we’re not doing damage to our minds, our emotions, or our psyches. Therefore, we move forward with more knowledge about rugs and rug care and about purchases in general.
Now let’s get into name-calling about the same rug: “Why would anyone buy this rug? What kind of moron puts a pale, fluffy rug in a public area? Look at the way those colors clash; it looks like someone ate a box of crayons and then threw up on the floor! How can anyone think that this wretched excuse for a carpet...” With name-calling, we get personally affronted and belligerent, which means it’s not about the rug any longer; it’s about the chip on our shoulder, our childhood issues, or our unlived emotions. With name-calling, we throw blame all over the place, and we don’t internalize any useful information about the rug. In both of these examples, we don’t like the rug. But with name-calling, we fly off the handle and make wild assumptions and accusations.
These sorts of attacks damage us. They damage our emotions by lobbing them all over the room; they damage our intellects when we use them against others; and they damage us as individuals because our behavior is embarrassing to us and everyone around us. This name-calling doesn’t make us smarter, stronger, or more aware—it just pits us in futile opposition to a floor covering. When we judge appropriately, we restrict ourselves to the decisions we can make with the information we have, and we process our emotions coherently. Healthy judgment helps us choose what works in our lives. It helps us carefully evaluate situations and people with our minds and our emotions, and it helps us connect to our honest reactions and opinions. Healthy judgment helps us become more intelligent, and it helps us identify and articulate each of our emotions in its free-flowing state, in its mood state, and in its raging rapids state (if it has one).
The intellect is exceedingly important and useful, but it was never meant to perform the Herculean tasks we’ve forced upon it in our airy, logical-intelligence-only society. Conversely, it was also never meant to be thrown out with the trash. The logical intellect has very specific functions and very specific properties, but most of us try to bend and mangle the poor intellect into something it’s not and can never be. If we want to be intelligent about the intellect, we need to understand the interplay between the intellect and the other three elements in the quaternity.
Let me give you some examples of how a functional quaternity operates: Our emotions convey messages between our unconscious and conscious minds, and they give us the skills and abilities we need to deal with each situation we encounter. We might have a gnawing, wordless sense of something that keeps us from finishing a project, a strange something that holds us back. If we can drop into our emotions, perhaps we can catch a fleeting glimpse of a large well of some emotional state—but that’s all. If we don’t have a functioning quaternity, we might give up on the emotion because we can’t understand it immediately. However, when we’re functional, we can invite our intellect into the situation and ask for its help. We can make equal room for the emotion and our thoughts about the emotion. We can trust our emotions and our minds to work together as we alternate between feeling the emotion and naming it in a back-and-forth rhythm, bringing our logical and linguistic intelligences to the task: “Is it fear?” No. “Is it anxiety?” That’s closer. “Is it worry?” Yes. “What about...?”
When our logical intelligences and our emotional intelligences can work together, we become able to feel and think about things consciously. When our emotional state is named and understood intellectually, we can work with it properly. This is how a balanced psyche behaves. In an unbalanced psyche, the intellect might take over and squash or devalue the unnamed emotion, but in a whole psyche, the intellect will act as an interpreter and contribute its skills toward greater emotional understanding.
In this next example, the emotions and the intellect support another element within the whole self. Many of us have had a vision of a different kind of life, of an opportunity off in the distance. This is an example of our fiery vision soaring beyond the present and into an alternate future. If we don’t know how to rely on the village of elements and intelligences inside us, that vision might never come to fruition; it might be relegated to the scrap heap of fantasies. However, if we allow our full selves to work freely, we can move decisively toward that vision and make it real. Our emotions can translate the vision into urges and feelings that can move themselves into the sphere of the body in the form of dreams and desires. If we honor our dreams and desires, rather than squelching them because we’re afraid or because they seem illogical, we can make day-to-day movements toward that vision. Our logical intelligences can help us gather data and plot a logical course for the journey. Our emotions can contribute the skills and impetus we need to stay on course. Our bodies can help us walk toward the vision and make it real in our everyday world. Our visionary spirits can remind us, when we get tired or confused, about the excitement just ahead of us.
In this example, our intuitive spirit sees and holds a vision, our emotions move the vision into our bodies, our bodies sense the vision and walk toward it, and our logical intelligence makes plans so that the vision can become a reality. In an unbalanced psyche, our logical intelligence might overthink and eventually crush our vision (it might squelch an idea it didn’t initiate), or our dishonored emotions might overreact and scare us away from the vision. But in a whole psyche, our logic will fully support our fiery visions with its ability to translate, plot, and plan.
Each situation we encounter activates different strengths, but the function of each part of us is always the same. Our emotions move energy, abilities, and information from one place to another by reacting and feeling their way through life. Our minds translate, categorize, and store the content of any material presented to them. Our bodies feel and process any material viscerally; they bring it down to earth. Our visionary spirits supply the overview, the big picture of the whole situation in relation to all other situations. In a properly moderated psyche, our four elements and our seven intelligences are like dancers in an intricately choreographed ballet; each moves and performs in its own rhythm and in its own way. In a poorly moderated psyche or system (which is unfortunately the norm in our culture), the elements and intelligences don’t dance; they smack into and trip over one another in confusion and gracelessness.
Most of us have poorly moderated psyches. This is nothing to be ashamed of; it’s just how things are. It’s how we’ve been trained and raised, and it’s how we train and raise one another. We can learn to bring democracy to our inner lives (and we’ll focus on that in the very next chapter), but we can only achieve true balance when we can understand the serious imbalance we’ve endured.
Most of us have been taught to value only our clearly “intellectual” intelligences and we’ve learned to sequester our four elements, and by that I mean our spiritual or visionary lives are very separate from our day-to-day lives, while our intellectual lives are separate from our emotional lives. We’ve all been trained to squelch our emotions and overemphasize our intellects. We don’t seem to know how to feel deeply and think brilliantly at the same time, and we’re nearly incapable of connecting our emotional flow to our intellectual processes. Most of us also maintain a separation between the spirit and the body because it’s all we know how to do. We don’t know how to incorporate meditation, daydreaming, or contemplation into the everyday world of driving, working, and paying the rent. In our imbalance, the realms of earth and fire can seem utterly disconnected from one another.
Whether our personal split lives in the territory of body and spirit or in the territory of mind and emotion, we all experience a split in some part of our souls. It’s a fact of modern life. You see and feel this sort of split in an either/or personality. Either he can live in this world of money and competition, or he can go to a retreat and live like a Franciscan monk, but he can’t do both, because his body and spirit don’t communicate. Either she can study every available bit of information and be absolutely certain, or she can turn away from all thought and feel her way through every situation, but she can’t possibly use her intellect and emotions together.
When we’re split apart, there’s no flowing movement between our body and spirit (or between our thoughts and emotions), and there’s no understanding of the importance of each of our intelligences; instead, there’s a wild pendulum-swing between seemingly opposite poles. Every element and intelligence is alternately glorified and then ignored. The body isn’t allowed to walk the truth of the other elements, the spirit isn’t allowed to bring its visions to each part of the psyche, the mind isn’t allowed to translate for the other struggling elements, and the emotions aren’t allowed to convey energy and information between the warring factions. The outcome of an imbalance like this, in a culture that relies almost exclusively on intellect, is that the sadly isolated mind has no choice but to escalate its skittery, airy process.
When the body and spirit are at odds, and the portaging abilities of the emotions are ignored by both, the intellect will often go into high gear. It has to, because there is a strangulation of every other element and a desperate lack of flow in the psyche. When stagnation is present, the logical, spatial, and linguistic intelligences nearly always step forward—not because they’re better, or smarter, or quicker than any of our other aspects, but simply because they’re the only intelligences that get much exercise or notice in our schooling and our culture.
When there is no communication between the elements, and the intellect is forced to take a forward position in our psyches, we’ll think too much, often to the point of tormenting ourselves with all our misused and overburdened mental energy. Nothing will be accomplished, because our bodies won’t be allowed to bring our thoughts into the world in visceral ways. Nothing will become clear, because our emotions won’t be allowed to make decisions, feel the consequences of our thoughts, or bring emotive information to our intellects. No true brilliance will ensue, either, because our visionary spirits won’t be allowed to help our minds observe the larger picture of where things come from and where they’ll eventually go.
The psyche doesn’t function properly when the intellect is in charge; instead, it spins and whirls into endless planning, scheming, “what-if-ing,” and obsessing. This is the way most of us experience the intellect, but this is not a true or whole experience. An out-of-balance intellect does behave badly—it does create many problems—but it has no other options. You see, our airy, logical intelligences can’t balance our system all by themselves. They can’t do the job of our other elements or our other intelligences; they can only escalate their own process, which unbalances our system even further.
Here’s an example: Imagine trying to make a decision between two jobs, one in your area offering less money and one in a faraway town offering more. If you use only your mind in making the decision, you’ll center your attention on travel and finances—on whether moving or staying put would make more sense. Your decision will be very logical. But what if the move would eat up the extra money in the second job, bringing both to equal footing financially? If there were no advantage to either one, you might find yourself in an indecisive muddle. You’d go back and forth in your mind, from one job to the other. Which is better? Which should you choose? If your airy intellect was the only element working freely in your psyche, you might careen back and forth between the two jobs and choose one over the other without any real certainty. But even after you made the decision, you’d probably continue to second- and third-guess yourself, because logic alone has no power or grounded direction.
However, if you honored the entire village inside you, you would have more options. If you couldn’t make a distinction between two equally logical choices, your emotional intelligences could provide their feeling sense of the emotive difference between the two jobs. How would staying put feel? How would moving on feel? What duties and responsibilities would come with each job, and how would you feel about them and about the people you’d have to work with? If you could get a feeling for each job, you’d have a clearer sense of which one made more sense for you. Your emotions could help you feel the difference between the two jobs and the two towns, and this would help your body feel the visceral differences in each of your choices—perhaps one is in a wetter climate or nearer to mountains. You could get a physical sense for staying put or moving on, because your bodily-kinesthetic intelligence would bring visceral energy and information into the situation. If you would allow your body and your emotions into the decisive process, your mind could calm down and take its proper position in your psyche. It could even relax enough to allow a visionary perspective to emerge. When your mind was grounded and centered properly, you’d have the peace and quiet you needed to ask yourself where your life is going in the grand scheme of things and if either job would help you get there. When you can rely on all parts of yourself, your judgment will not be merely intellectual; it will be emotively grounded, life-affirming, visionary, and wholly intelligent.
However, if you rely too heavily on your logical intellect, you won’t be able to make clear or whole judgments because your intellect can only work with the flat facts of the material presented to it. It can’t dive down into the feelings and nuances under the facts—not without your watery emotions it can’t. It also can’t soar above all the facts without your fiery vision, and it can’t make the facts useful and tangible without the help of your earthy body. When your logical intellect is isolated from the whole of your quaternity, it is less intelligent, less functional, and less wise. An intellect working alone will always have poor judgment, because it won’t have access to the whole picture. What your airy intellect can do all alone is think incessantly, create fantasies and battle plans, revisit issues hundreds of times, and torment your body and your spirit, not to mention itself. However, when you can give it its rightful place in your balanced village of elements and intelligences, your intellect becomes brilliant.
When you can surround your emotions with a village of skills and abilities, your logical intelligences and your emotional intelligences will be able to work together. When you can allow your emotions to flow, you’ll free your beleaguered intellect from the impossible task of ruling your entire life without support. Then your intellect will be as free as the air itself, able to translate information masterfully because it won’t be expected to actually ferry information from one place to another. Transporting information, skills, and energy—that’s the emotions’ job. The logical intellect has its own job; it translates, organizes, stores, and retrieves information. When the two can work together in your balanced psyche, you’ll become intelligent in deep and meaningful ways.
Many of us have fallen into the trap of thinking that spirit and science, or logic and emotion, or physical life and spiritual life, are at odds with one another, but this is preposterous. None of our intelligences are at odds with one another, and none of the four elements are at odds with each other in the natural world. They’re only at odds in lopsided and confused human psyches. Mysteries and beauties abound in all parts of us, and true genius dances in the places where those parts intertwine.