Soft Wood's Colors of the Wind

Your Emotion of the Year

With your own energy at home in your personal element's house, 2022 was the Year of YOU! It was a year to BE YOU. A year to remember who you are without any distractions. A year to more fully embody who you are without any influences from the other personal elements. A year to show yourself who you are so you can review and reflect and then recommit to who you'd like to be going forward.

2022 was also a Yellow Earth year. Thankfully we're nearing its end. And while it still has the potential to punctuate its final months with a punch to the gut before turning on its heel and leaving in a huff, the new energy coming in may soften its hard hitting blow. Or, at least, lend us its resilience to quickly bounce back. 

The next two years promise to be extremely emotional ones. After back to back mental energy years followed by a year of physical rest, humans will be provoked to emote. Soft Wood next year will be followed by a Hard Wood year in 2024, providing the fuel for the new era of future prosperity to ignite, catch fire and slowly burn for the next 20 years.

The Wood element is highly emotional. As feeling beings, Hard and Soft Wood elements experience it all without favoritism or discrimination. From the highs to the lows and everything in between, all emotions are valid. They're what vibrantly color our experience of the world.

Emotions are unique to humanity. How you experience and express, process and release your emotions will become the next area of life to master. We won't be limited to Soft Wood's contrariness or hysteria, attention seeking drama or suicidal ideation or Hard Wood's anger and bitterness, rage and resentment. We'll feel it all! 

What Wood elements know is: emotions are an essential guidance system to navigating being human. They are energy in motion. Your emotions are always valid. So, don't let anyone invalidate what you are feeling or tell you to suppress your feelings. When you're ready you can choose a better feeling thought and move up the emotional scale to a higher vibe feeling state once you've allowed yourself to feel and express, process and release your emotions. 

Personal Note: My initiation into this intense feeling energy was a trial by fire, that ended a 12-year relationship, over email, since, per request, she was on the do not call or text list. Granted I'm not myself, currently still embodying Mother Earth energy and feeling all the annual energy shifts coming in as well. And the 7 is in the SW (the House of Women) this month, which represents cutting ties with the people in relationships that have expired. You can read the full story on my personal blog, Pearls of Wisdom. Read Judge More, Not Less on Substack.

In addition to your own element's dominant emotions, your emotional state will be influenced by your annual house guest's emotions, both positive and negative. As with every year, it's important to be intentional about your desired feelings and know what you need to do to evoke and feel those emotions. It's also beneficial to know which emotions you'll have the most access to over the coming year so you can actively choose the higher vibe ones. 

Since Soft Wood is represented by the "persistent wind", you could say the variety of emotions we feel during these years are "the colors of the wind". Whether they rip right through you, meander around your shoulders, whip your hair around or swirl in circles at your feet is something you'll get to co-create with this incoming energy. It's a dance you can make up as you go along. 

There are three important things to remember about the dominant emotions of The 8 Elements. The first is that there are light and dark sides to every energy. Secondly, the default settings for The 8 Elements are based on their positive or negative polarity in feng shui. And finally, it's up to you to maintain a state of balance so that you can actively choose the positive setting and higher vibe emotion. 

Since we have a couple of emotional years coming up, I'll use the yin and yang Wood energy as examples. 

Soft Wood is the prospering energy in feng shui. Its default setting is contentment. Its dominant emotion feels like carefree elation. This high spirited element feels the exhilaration of walking on air and flying high on life. When this element doesn't have what it needs or is out of balance, it can feel discontent and depressed. 

Hard Wood is the troublemaking energy in feng shui. Its default setting is ill-tempered, expressed through childish temper tantrums. Its dominant emotion is anger. Depending on the degree, this emotion can vary from frustrated to resentful, exasperated to vexed, enraged to embittered. When this element has what it needs and is in balance, it has a good sense of humor and can be of good cheer.

The 8 Elements

2023 is everyone's Year of Prosperity! With the Soft Wood element in the center of every space, all of the personal feng shui elements will be influenced by this element's default setting of contentment and primary emotional state, carefree elation. It feels like falling in love for the first time, the amorous and flirtatious energy of a new romance. It can also feel like romanticizing and being in love with your own life. Like an angsty adolescent going through puberty, we're going to get moody and feel all the vibes, from the high highs to the low lows. So, get ready for a whirlwind of feelings and a rollercoaster of emotions!

Water

2023 is your Year of Happiness! With the Fire element in the your house, you'll be influenced by this element's default setting of liveliness and lightheartedness and primary emotional states, happiness or apathy. 

Fire is considered a positive energy. It activates and enhances, intensifies and multiplies any energy it's with. So, it's up to YOU to choose which emotions get the spotlight this year. 

Happiness is the pleasurable state of being completely satisfied with yourself and proud of the choices you've made in your life. You're feeling truly blessed. The divine spark of Source shines brightly through your eyes. You have a great passion for life! So much so, your lively and animated energy ignites and fuels a radiant inner glow up that emanates through every pore of your being. 

To be happy, do the things that you know make you happy. Do the things that your future self will be happy you did. And do things for other people that you know will them happy. Make a Happy List and or a list of favorites things and create time each day and week to do some of those things.

Having a crushed spirit is the yin side of happiness. Apathy is the yin side of passion. When you are apathetic you lose interest in things that used to bring you happiness. You lose your enthusiasm for living. You lose passion for your own life. You lose your ability to choose to be happy.

To avoid becoming apathetic, be intentional about doing the things that bring a twinkle to your eye, a warm glow in your heart and light a fire in your belly. Include other people in plans you're making because connecting with other souls will help you stay inspired to keep on keeping on. Sometimes shifting the focus to making other people happy and seeing the brightness in their eyes, is all you need to restore your soul, reconnect with your inner light, reignite your passion for life and revive the happiness in your heart. 

Mother Earth

2023 is your Year of Peace. With the Water element in the your house, you'll be influenced by this element's default setting of tranquility and serenity and primary emotional states, peace or fear.

Water is considered a positive energy. It's life enhancing and increases any energy it's with. So, be intentional about what you'd like to enhance and manifest more of. 

Peace is a calm state in which you are free from disturbances in your physical, mental, emotional and energetic space. You're free from emotional upset and mental anguish. You're not at war with yourself. You have inner peace. And you have a quiet, peaceful place to be with your own thoughts and feelings. 

To have more peace in your life, create peaceful places. In its yin state, water dwells in crystal clear lakes, lovingly held by the yin earth’s supportive, comforting embrace. That's what this energy feels like...a warm hug, a cosy union of inner peace and unconditional love. So, clear your energy and the energy in your living and working environments. Make peace with anything in your life that is disturbing. Protect your peace by setting the intention to only engage with people and be in spaces that will contribute to your peace instead of disrupting it.

Fear is the yin side of peace. Fear is a low vibe emotion you feel when you perceive a potential danger or threat. Fear is rational when it triggers an appropriate fight-or-flight response to a legitimately frightening experience. It can help keep you safe from harm when you need to defend yourself or flee. Irrational fears like phobias, paranoia and paralysis are inappropriate responses to “false evidence appearing real”. Instead of causing you to stay and fight or run away, they make you freeze, unable to do either. 

To avoid becoming fearful, look at your fears so you can let them go. The intention is not to become fearless, but to be discerning about what makes you fearful. Clear any stored fear in your body. Work through any fears you have. Take the time to identify things that make you feel fear. Before responding to fear, check in to see if your fears are valid and require action or if they are false and can be released. 

Hard Wood

2023 is your Year of Love. With the Mother Earth element in the your house, you'll be influenced by this element's default setting of separation and division and primary emotional states, love or hate.

Mother Earth is considered a negative energy. It's separates and creates division between people. So, it's up to to YOU to choose the higher vibration of unity and partnership, the sacred union of the divine masculine and divine feminine energies.

Love is an intense feeling of deep affection, strong attraction and emotional attachment. Mother Earth is associated with unconditional love. This is the love a mother has for her children, that can manifest as worry. It's also known as agape, divine or God's love. Ancient Greek philosophers identified five additional types of love. Familia love is the love you have for your family. Eros is the romantic love you feel for a lover. Brotherly love is the platonic love we have for our friends and fellow humans. Guest love is the graciously hospitable feeling we have toward people we are welcoming into our home and hosting. And self-love is the love we have for and show to ourselves. 

To have more love in your life, be loving to yourself and others. Love is an action verb. It's not just a feeling, it's a way of being in the world. It's something you are and it's something you do. To be love, treat others the way you'd like to be treated. Express the love you feel toward others. And act in loving ways. 

Hate is the yin side of love. It's a low vibe emotion you feel when you have an intense dislike or strong aversion to something. It denotes accompanying antagonistic acts and hostile behaviors. 

To avoid becoming hateful, clear any self-loathing. Hating things about ourselves has been normalized. From there it's easy to hate your life and even other people. Once you become a hater of everyone and everything, it's challenging to pull yourself out of that dark hole you've dug that began with your own self-hatred.

Soft Wood

2023 is your Year of Compassion. With the Hard Wood element in the your house, you'll be influenced by this element's default setting of conflict and contention and primary emotional states, compassion or anger.

Hard Wood is considered a negative energy. It's the troublemaking and challenging energy that can cause disharmony and dysfunction, disputes and drama. So, it's up to you to choose to show yourself and others compassion.

Compassion is an expression of kindness and tender loving care. The Hard Wood element is empathetic, thoughtful and genuinely caring. They have the ability to understand and feel what someone else is feeling and truly care about their emotional needs and wellbeing. 

To have more compassion, become more emotionally intelligent. Feel your feelings. Experience your emotional states. Become self-aware of the emotions being evoked within you. And empathize with others who are emoting or expressing their feelings. Seek to understand your own feelings. And genuinely care about your own and others' emotional wellbeing.

Anger is the dominant emotion for the Hard Wood element. Anger is a low vibe emotion that can get stored in your liver and can hurt the overall health of your body. It can also serve the highest and greatest good and wellbeing of people when it activates the courage and determination required to defend yourself or protect others from harm, abuse or trauma.

To avoid becoming angry, process your emotions in healthy ways. Feel and express your emotions. Let them move through you. Don't suppress or store them. Don't let anger accumulate and turn into frustration, resentment, rage or bitterness. Ask for what you need instead of complaining about what you don't have. And practice forgiveness.

Hard Metal

2023 is your Year of Rest. With the Yellow Earth element in the your house, you'll be influenced by this element's default setting of roadblocks and detours and primary emotional states, resistance or rest.

Yellow Earth is considered a negative energy. It creates obstacles and delays. The best way to work with this energy is to surrender to it. Don't try to push against the barriers, hit walls, rush over stumbling blocks, hurdle obstructions in your path or force things to happen. Instead, embrace the need for rest, don't take any unnecessary risks and intentionally move at a slower pace.

Rest is an essential part of life. To rest is to be inactive, to cease working or moving in order to relax your mind, restore your energy, recover your health or regain your strength. The Yellow Earth element asks us to slow down, to be still and honor our need for rest. When we don't choose to rest, it will create an obstacle or delay to force us to rest.

To honor your need for rest, actively find ways to take it easy and put your mind at ease. Reduce your expectations and don't try to accomplish a lot of huge goals. Create time to take breaks and allow for rest periods in your schedule. Take evenings and weekends off from work. Make sure to get enough restorative sleep. Allow for more time than you think you need to complete tasks. And have some back up plans when things don't work out.

Resistance is what gets in the way of our ability to rest. Resistance is the refusal to accept something and surrender to it. It's our attempt to prevent something from happening by impeding, stopping or opposing it. But what we know is: what we resist persists. 

To avoid resisting, surrender. Choose the path of least resistance. Know that the obstacle is the way. And rest.

Soft Metal

2023 is your Year of Hope. With the Hard Metal element in the your house, you'll be influenced by this element's default setting of rank and status advancement and primary emotional states, hope or grief.

Hard Metal is considered a positive energy. It's the heavenly blessings from noblemen, benefactors and wise advisors. It's up to you to ask for help and expand your capacity to receive their gifts, resources and wisdom.

Hope is trust that a better future for the world and its inhabitants is ours. It’s the positive thinking that’s inspired by the threat of a crisis and required to shift the probability factor in our favor. It’s optimism in action. It’s the little engine that could, chugging up the steep mountain tracks repeating the mantra, “I think I can. I think I can”. It's an anchor that keeps us safely tethered in the storm. The silver lining in the clouds. The confidence that after the rain, the sun will shine again. The knowing that what we don’t yet see, will suddenly appear..like a rainbow in the still misty skies.

To have hope, steer clear of false hope, hopelessness and the addiction to hopium. Instead, choose an optimistic state of mind, combining the power of positive thinking with a positive belief system. Have the expectation of positive outcomes while in active pursuit of a better future. And have the self-confidence required to fulfill dreams and accomplish desires.

Grief is the dominant emotion for the Hard Metal element. Grief is a low vibe emotion you feel in response to a loss of some kind. Besides being emotionally painful, grief also has physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, cultural, spiritual and philosophical dimensions. Physically, grief can feel like getting shot in the heart. Or, drowning in an ocean of sorrow and not being able to come up for air. Throbbing heartache. Excruciating heartbreak. Or, like there is an elephant sitting on your chest so that your breathing is labored. You just can’t get a breath because you feel suffocated by the weight of your grief.  

Grief is a natural part of life. It's important to grieve your regrets, losses and the death of your dreams. Move through the 6 stages of grief. Don't skip one or get stuck on one for too long. Keep moving through them, processing your thoughts and releasing your feelings as they come up. Then, restore your hope in a better future by remembering that, as Rumi says, “Anything you lose comes 'round in another form”.

Mountain Earth

2023 is your Year of Joy! With the Soft Metal element in the your house, you'll be influenced by this element's default setting of competition and primary emotional states, joy or guilt and shame.

Soft Metal is considered a negative energy. It's the cutting energy that hurts with words and the competing energy that is focused on winning the argument, prize or reward. So, it's up to you to tell the truth, but in a kind way. Be impeccable with your word, intentional about what you are saying and conscientious about how you are saying it.

Joy is dominant emotion for the Soft Metal element. Joy is a high vibe emotion of great pleasure or inner happiness. It’s evoked by a feeling of personal satisfaction, accomplishment, achievement, success, unexpected good fortune or a positive outcome. And it’s triggered by smiles and laughter, whimsy and rewards. Joy makes you jump up and down like a child. 

To have more joy, seek out the little joys in life. Savor every moment. Purposefully create joy in your life. Plan favorite things days. Perform random acts of kindness that bring joy to someone else and leave you feeling joyful.  

Guilt and shame are the default emotions for the Soft Metal element. Just as comparison is the thief of joy, so too do guilt and shame steal your ability to be joyful. Guilt is a low vibe feeling you have when you realize or have the awareness that you’ve let yourself or others down. You’ve compromised your own standards of excellence, failed to honor you own values or violated your own moral code of conduct. It’s the feeling you have when you’ve fallen short of meeting your own or other’s expectation of correct or socially acceptable behavior. It’s an emotional state of being conscious that you’ve done something wrong or failed to do something right.

While guilt is feeling bad about something you’ve done, shame is feeling bad about yourself as a person. It can be an excruciatingly painful and unpleasant feeling that results from the self-evaluation of negative behaviors and personality traits or character flaws. Shame can lead to self-contempt and a loss of morale and dignity. It moves the feeling of unworthiness associated with guilt down to a feeling of utter worthlessness.

Guilt vibrates at 30 and shame even lower at 20. To avoid falling into these lowest vibration of emotions, pay attention to when you feel guilt and what you feel guilty about. Determine for yourself if the guilty feelings are warranted or if they’re a pattern you’ve created to keep you from moving up the emotional scale through courage and up to joy. 

Then, address any shame that you might feel, past or present. Determine where you are using shame to keep you in a pattern of self-sabotage. Honor yourself by making choices that serve your highest good and greatest wellbeing. Choose better feeling thoughts that will help you move up the emotional scale from shameful to joyful.

Fire

2023 is your Year of Ecstasy! With the Mountain Earth element in the your house, you'll be influenced by this element's default setting of abundance and balance and primary emotional states, ecstasy or agony.

Mountain Earth is considered a positive energy. The most auspicious energy in feng shui, it represents an abundance of good things, not just money and wealth. So, say "yes" to the good news, great opportunities and generous offers mounting up at your front door.

Ecstasy is intense pleasure. This orgasmic euphoria is often experienced during the climax of the sex act. Emotionally, it’s a feeling of rapturous bliss. Physically, it feels like being on top of the world. Energetically, it can feel like having an out of body experience. Spiritually, it feels like a mystical experience of self-transcendence. 

Find ways to experience more ecstasy without resorting to substances or abusing drugs. Instead, get high on the cocktail of hormones that get released when you are physically or sexually active. That place between the seventh heaven and cloud nine is your happy place. So, take up residence there or at least, visit often.

The default emotion for the Mountain Earth element is greed. Greed is a low vibe emotion you feel in response to a desperate need to have more. It’s an intense desire to have more than enough. Greed is an all-consuming and selfish desire for material wealth. It’s a powerful craving for more with elements of self-entitlement and hoarding. You could even say it's the love of money that’s the proverbial root of all evil. This is especially true when the greediness involves taking and withholding from others. 

To avoid feeling greedy, know that there is enough, more than enough for you and for everyone. So, choose to see the abundance instead of the scarcity in the world. Act on that knowing by giving instead of taking and wisely saving instead of hoarding. And have clarity about what you really need to be happy so you can give yourself the gift of contentment and stop trying to do it all to have it all!

For every high vibe emotion there is its shadow, its opposite or low vibe emotion. It's up to you to choose the higher vibrational feelings instead of succumbing to your annual house guest's lower vibe dominant emotion. Even if you find yourself moving back and forth between the two, at least you're learning how to adjust your sails and navigate with the change in the winds. 

There are a variety of things you can do to vibe with your emotion of the year. The most important thing is to make sure you're honoring your needs and engaging in your personal element's Life Center, so you are in a state of balance and have the most personal wellbeing. Make your annual emotion one of your words for the year. Buy something you'll use or see everyday with your emotion printed on it. A coffee or tea cup that says Happiness or Love, Peace or Joy is a great way to start and end your day.

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