Читать книгу Healing Your Emotions: Discover your five element type and change your life - Angela Hicks - Страница 60

Sometimes the ability to assert ourselves in the world seems missing. Wood types like this often don’t have a strong notion of what they want.

In these circumstances the missing part is usually supplied from without. The Wood type may find someone to replace their capacity to set boundaries, create structures and define who they are. For example, joining a cult, enlisting in the army or perhaps marrying a dominating person may replace their self-determination. The cult, the army or the other person gives them a purpose, and makes many of their decisions for them. Colin, who we spoke to earlier in the chapter, could understand this:

I find the idea of being in the armed forces appealing and can relate to those who join. It’s the routine and the structure and knowing what’s expected of me. It’s knowing where I am with it.

Simon knows he finds external structure helpful and purposely brings it into his life:

I like structures imposed to some extent because then I have to do things. I know I can make things happen but I don’t do a lot to make them — it’s easier not to. I know I could easily drift and I don’t want to. I choose people who are well-organized to be around me. My last flatmate for example was very strong on boundaries and I value that and appreciate our different qualities.

At the extreme, people without internal structure may not know what they want. In this case they may be so adaptable and take on an outside structure so easily that they either play into the hands of others or cause others to feel frustrated. In the former case, the outsider has found a compliant and useful helper; in the latter, the outsider knows something is not quite right, but doesn’t know what it is. Paul told us:

Whatever happens is OK with me. I don’t need a big career or somewhere I’m going. I am just happy to be. I am not asking for anything.

When the pattern is extreme, a person has no life plan and their ‘Hun’, which we mentioned earlier, is not manifesting in the world. This position sounds attractive and can even masquerade as a form of spirituality — truly just Being with no compulsion to do anything in order to achieve results. It can also result in no work, limited possessions and minimal relationships which is not an easy position to maintain for long.

This ‘not apparently wanting anything’ is an inability to assert ourselves in the world — which is the capacity of the Wood Element.

VIRTUES AND VICES OF A WOOD TYPE

Depending on the health of the Wood type, these ways of coping produce both virtues and vices. Some of the virtues are:

a strong capacity to organize

a commitment to continuous growth

a capacity for determining rightness or correctness and a resolve to see this carried out with justice

a useful warrior mentality

a youthfulness, even in old age, born out of a commitment to continue growing.

Some of the vices are:

over-attention to structuring, detail and rules

over-assertive behaviour which can lead to chronic belligerence

repetitive rebellion which forgets the outcome of growth or development

never admitting to the real goals and ends

passive stuckness which has forgotten the real ends.