It’s All Born from Wuji: The Secret Language of the Elements
At the heart of Daoism is a simple and potentially radical idea: we do not know.
Radical, especially when you compare it to how Western thinking trains us to find answers, to explain, to intellectualise, to make meaning out of everything.
Early Daoist thinkers didn’t try to fill the gaps. They said plainly: we do not know.
Observing Nature, Discovering Ourselves
Instead, they watched. They gave attention. They studied nature — seasons, weather, growth and decay, the cycles of light and dark, and they studied themselves — breath, sensation, emotion, awareness, and the subtle movements of energy in the body. Over time, they realised these weren’t separate studies. The same patterns that govern rivers, forests and stars also govern human life.
From this came the Dao.
Not a belief system. Not a deity. But a way of pointing to the underlying order through which life unfolds, an order you can feel, live and move with, but never fully name. And while Daoist thinkers were comfortable sitting with not-knowing, they also saw something essential: all movement, all phenomena, arises from an underlying fabric — a field of stillness, a no-thing-ness.
Many traditions describe this in their own way. In Hermetic and Vedic traditions, it’s called Akasha— the subtle, all-pervading field from which form emerges. In Daoism it’s Wuji — the undifferentiated state before Yin and Yang. In other contemplative traditions it’s simply the Void — not emptiness, but fertile potential. Aether, as it’s called in physics, points to this same idea: the silent condition that makes sensation, movement and change possible.
Aether is not something you feel in the usual sense. It is so still, so silent, that language fails to describe it. It is the field in which everything arises — before sensation, before movement, before thought.
Wuji and the Field From Which All Arises
When we connect more deeply to this stillness, our Yuan Shen, our Original Spirit, naturally comes into clarity. This is the part of us that is always aligned with the underlying flow of life. It perceives, orchestrates and guides movement without effort, allowing transformation to unfold both inside and outside ourselves. In this way, stillness doesn’t just quiet the mind — it awakens the intelligence within that knows how to move, when to release and how to align with life itself.
It is from this fabric of Wuji — or Aether — that the Four Elements first appear as experience, and from there the Five Elements reveal themselves as cycles of transformation.
When I teach Qigong, especially the Five Elements, students often ask why Air isn’t included. The answer is simple: different system. The Four Elements — Earth, Air, Water, Fire — describe experience. The Five Elements — Earth, Metal, Water, Wood, Fire — are not things, they are patterns of behaviour. Both are useful. It just depends on what you’re exploring.
Understanding the Four and Five Elements
The Four Elements:
Earth: solidity, structure, stability, weight
Water: fluidity, adaptability, emotion, flow
Air: movement, breath, expansion, communication
Fire: heat, intensity, metabolism, activation
You feel them in the body: density or lightness, tension or ease, warmth or coolness, movement or stillness.
The Five Elements:
Wood: emergence, growth, direction, upward and outward movement
Fire: expression, heat, peak, illumination
Earth: integration, nourishment, centring, transition
Metal: contraction, refinement, boundary, letting go
Water: storage, depth, stillness, potential
These are not static things. They are movements — patterns that describe how Qi flows across time, seasons, and life. Energy rises and falls. Growth peaks and declines. Heat condenses into cold. Expansion always returns inward.
The Five Element cycles show us that imbalance isn’t a flaw — it’s a disruption in movement. Healing isn’t about fixing a frozen problem; it’s about letting natural flow resume. When Wood can’t rise, Fire can’t express. When Fire burns too long, Earth depletes. When Metal refuses to let go, Water never replenishes. Seen this way, personal growth, emotional processing, physical health and spiritual development all follow the same rhythm. Change isn’t random. It has its own pulse.
Attuning to Life: Qi, the Elements, and Inner-Outer Alignment
Qigong, Daoist cultivation and life-nurturing practices all point toward the same thing: learning to move in ways that restore feeling, to feel deeply in ways that reveal what needs to shift and to arrive at stillness that appears naturally from both — not forced, but allowed; movement becomes the doorway to stillness, and stillness informs the clarity and wisdom of all action.
Ih Qigong, form is never just physical. As your internal movements shift, your choices shift. Choices shift, relationships shift. Relationships shift, work, health and the impact you have in the world shift with them.
This is how Qigong and Yang Sheng Fa guide transformation — both inside and outside. The Four Elements help you notice what’s happening. The Five Elements help you see what needs to move. Stillness — the field of Wuji, Aether, or the Void — allows that movement to happen naturally and harmoniously.
It’s alignment, and it’s through alignment that real transformation is inevitable.
The opportunity to attune to the Elements is all around us, every day. By noticing the changing landscape on your daily walk, by growing your own food, by watching the sunrise and sunset, by feeling the mother waters of the ocean, we can see and feel the cycles of Qi and transformation in motion. Nature offers a constant mirror, showing us the rhythm and intelligence of life — if we choose to watch and notice.
All of this — stillness, movement, the Elements, and Yuan Shen — is not just theory. It is something you can feel, explore and embody. Feeling and knowing the frequencies of the Elements is often easier when they’re transmitted by a teacher who is actively on the path of cultivation. A skilled guide can help you attune to the subtleties in the spectrum of frequency, the movements and expression of Qi, and the cycles of transformation in a way that working alone cannot.
If you’re curious to experience the Five Elements in a guided, practical way, to feel how energy moves in your body and life, there are two ways to explore: in my in-person Five Element workshop series, or through the Five Element Small Group Mentorship. Both offer a space to cultivate awareness, restore natural flow and connect with the rhythms of the world - through your own experience.
