Chinese Medicine Guide to Grief

​Grief and the Five Elements

We’ve all individually and as a society, had more loss than we deserved the past several years. In the past several years I’ve worked with many patients struggling with loss. The way Chinese Medicine thinks about emotion can serve as a useful lens to reframe our perspective and experience of loss. If you are suffering from the pain of a recent (or not so recent) loss. I encourage you to read along. See if this perspective guides you to a place where you can transition into a healthy relationship with your grief. 

There are some conceptual pieces that, when patients grasp them at a deep level, make this transition easier. A brief description of emotions from a Chinese Medicine perspective is necessary in order to give you the foundational understanding necessary to be able to apply this process in your own life. Each of these emotional transitions have associated acupuncture points, organ systems, therapeutic processes, and mental exercises that can be used to encourage the resolution of obstacles. However, just gaining awareness of the road map can immensely help in your transition.

​The Five Element System

In Chinese Medicine and, before that, the philosophies of Chinese culture, there was an effort to view all phenomenon as a progression through different phases. The popular symbol Yin/Yang is an example of this in which all processes and phenomena are divided into either yin (cool, stagnant, calm, solid) or yang (energetic, active, hot, moving). Taking this basic delineation further, a more nuanced division breaks all phenomena into 5 phases. Those are Metal, Water, Wood, Fire, and Earth. These operate as a set of elements encouraging the growth of the next (as water to wood) or keeping each other in check (such as water controlling fire, or metal cutting wood). 

Take a moment to study the image below. 

You can see how the Elements are organized in a circle so that each supports the generation of the one after. Water supports the growth of Wood, which provides the fuel for Fire, which burns down to become Earth, which is where we mine Metal, where condensed Water accumulates and so on. This simple framework is the roadmap by which all cycles of growth and transformation ultimately follow. The arch of a life’s story, the growth and fulfillment of a project, the stages of a relationship and the four seasons follow this process. 


Water represents winter, at the bottom, dormant, calm and settled. Next an upward and outward movement is symbolized by the Wood element, and representative of the spring season. The Fire element represents the intensity and climax of summer. As the energy peaks and begins to descend, the late summer energy is manifested in the Earth element. This is akin to that moment of calm and relaxed savoring when fruits are ripe, work is done and temperatures are comfortable for relaxing, the slowly radiating heat of embers smoldering after a passionate blaze. This energy can also be captured in that feeling you get after the accomplishment of a difficult or strenuous task. It’s a calm savoring that is all the more enjoyable because of the intensity of the period that just ended. Next we move into Fall, the Metal element. As the energy starts to move downward and inwards, the excitement of the summer fades further. The passion and exuberance of the preceding active phases calms and recedes. By fall the seeds have been released and have fallen down to incorporate into the soil. The Water element follows and corresponds to the cold, still winter. Those seeds cast in fall lie dormant through winter, awaiting their perfect opportunity for spring. Finally, rebirth, in the explosive growth of spring with the opening of those seeds as Spring renews with a return to the wood element. 


The Seasons of Love


Now, looking at a relationship through this same lens we learn about how grief becomes a natural stage in this (and indeed in all phenomena):


In the process of our interaction with another human, a person we love, we also go through these phases. We carry in us the dormant phase (our water element) the seeds and distillations from previous cycles and experiences, our loves, battles, wounds and so on. Informed by these seeds we recognize in another person what we love and we are drawn to. These come from a deep place, the resonance of all the previous seeds planted from our previous experiences. It’s deep and subconscious and powerful. As we interact with them the energy rises suddenly and we move and grow in our relationship with them. This is of course, the spring phase, the Wood element. There is growth and interest and looking into the future, envisioning a future with them. (That aspect of vision is crucial and is a key factor of the wood element. As fresh sprouts reach to find sun and spread vines and canopy, so too our growing love sees a future and plans and moves towards it like a fresh tender shoot breaking through the pavement.)


Next the energy moves into the Fire element. In the Fire Element we reach a climax of love, passion and attachment. This is the honeymoon phase, passionate, characterized by excitement and activity. The heat and high energy of this phase provides the needed momentum to grow and expand our connection with this other person. The Fire element associates with light and heat, love and seeing and being seen by another person exposing one another with the light of the fire growing between us. It’s a time in which two people are exploring one another and lighting and warming each other deeply to see their depths of character and form a powerful connection. 


The next phase is the Earth phase. It has moved from the passionate high energy honeymoon period into a period of relative calm and content relaxation. There’s mutual love and the passionate intensity of early love has burned into the long enduring coals of adoration. This is where mature and healthy relationships reach and stay as long as things don’t change.


The next phase is the Metal phase and this is where, from the broader perspective of the relationship as a whole, we move to when we lose someone we love, whether this is a separation or from the death of a loved one. Metal is manifest in nature by the energy of the fall season, things calm, the morning air gets crisp, the colors seems colder, sharper and metallic. There’s a feeling in the fall that makes us go silent. It’s like the energy of walking into a church or a sacred place. There’s a solemn sort of still quality about Fall. Contemplation becomes a natural state. This all happens because the energy of fall, of the Metal element, drives the energy back in and down. Year after year, season after season for as long as life has been on Earth this process has occurred. Gather during the warm months, store during the cold months. Experience life during the summer and think about it during the winter. That’s the rhythm, how it’s always been. Every year we go in two circles, one exterior in the world, and one interior in ourselves. We trace one large figure eight, interacting with the exterior and then retracing those steps but on the inside: in our minds, hearts, families and our inner worlds. Metal is that transition from external to internal. In nature that internal gathering process concentrates into a seed. Fruits (and people) when forming their seed make adjustments based on the environment. We call this epigenetics in people. The seed represents a perfect response to the environment, designed to be an improved version of the parent, given the external world the parent has experienced. That seed falls and lays dormant through the winter to erupt with growth in the next spring (or a future spring when the time is ripe). 


Savoring our Memories


When the grieving process meets the metal element, similarly, we are to think back (painfully at times) to our memories, favorite moments, fights, the quirks of their personalities, the great lucky moments we had, the interesting turns of events, our favorite things about them. We are revisiting them, over and over. It’s not usually something we do intentionally, and it’s something a lot of people try not to do, understandably. But we do it because it is the process of healing. We return to certain memories more than others. Some fall away while others become central to our remembering because we come to recognize that they are somehow emblematic of who they were, of our experience of them. Those memories that are so frequent in our remembrance  that we replay so many times distill down into our understanding of the essence of our time together. They will in turn become the seeds that ultimately find rest in the Water element, the winter phase of our minds and hearts. 


That process moves our grief to the next stage, to where our memories of them can give rise to new growth and a new perspective on the world. The seeds that were gained through the difficult and painful process of revisiting the memories you shared with them finally can manifest the world in a new way. Because you did the work of sorting through your memories with them, you’ve allowed those seeds to find purchase and grow into new perspectives, wisdom, and depth of experience in your world. The grief doesn’t go away, but it can transform. You can see them in people around you, or more accurately, you see beauty in the world that you didn’t notice before, newly informed by a richer perspective allowing you to see with wiser eyes. You see opportunities to send your energy into something because you see them in it, and therefore see the value in it. When you are going about your day and you stop to appreciate something, a beautiful sight or a moment with a person because it resonates with something in you, that’s them. It’s not an exaggeration to say the world itself has been reshaped to honor their memory. 


There are a few key places in this progression where your intentional guidance is helpful. Ruminating on the past is a process that we get from our capacity within the Earth element. It is the same energy that gives us the ability to carefully turn over an issue and think of it from all sides or for that matter, to break down a swallowed bite and extract the nutrition from it. In the case of our memories however, the rumination can become pathogenic when it becomes never-ending and habitual. In a healthy state we contemplate and then decide on a conclusion. In the example of the seasons this rumination is like the ripening of fruits or the savoring of late summer. It happens to move into the production of the healthy seeds that move the whole process forward. In the case of our rumination about our lost loved one, the same process should be happening. I find that switching the language to “savoring” rather than rumination helps. In savoring, we’re enjoying something specifically because we are aware that it is finite. The memories are the same. Our memories of them will slowly fade. This is devastating to many people, but hopefully you can find some relief in the knowledge that as you are forgetting aspects your approaching a more complete knowing. Of course we won’t forget them, but the details will fade, the specifics will become fuzzy, and accepting that is important. The understanding that this is a process with an eventual end in sight recasts the experience into a journey with an end and a rebirth of them. That acceptance of this as a process in turn makes the next step easier. You’re allowing them to complete their mission in this world by being truly incorporated into it. 

Release is a Gift We Give to those We’ve Lost

The other moment where you can put intention into making this a useful process is the energy move from that earth phase of savoring into the metal phase of release. We need to allow those memories to consolidate and transition to their next phase. It is in that letting go of those memories that we are able to distill our shared experiences with them down to those seeds of truth, those kernels of personality that define how this person lived in relation to their world. The seeds need to be resown out into the world to find new root and a new life for them as our grieving process passes through its winter and finds rebirth in our interaction with the world that is still here. The splash that person made in life sent out ripples. When you allow those seeds to form the ripples can bounce off the far shore and spread again across the water. 

I hope for your peace, happiness and growth in all the losses you’ve had in your life.
In Health,
​Kieran Jones