Healing with Form, Energy, and Light: The Five Elements in Tibetan Shamanism, Tantra, and Dzogchen
by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Mark Dahlby
"When deprived of one of the elements, we yearn for it. In a desert, we are joyful when encountering water. After being at sea for a long time, we want to kiss the earth when we land. When cold, we run toward fire. The five raw elements affect us profoundly on a deep and instinctive level, but we usually get lost in the surface of these experiences...."
"One traditional formulation describes the flesh as earth; the blood and other bodily fluids as water; the electrical and chemical energies and metabolic heat as fire; the breath, oxygen, and other gases as air; and the space the body occupies and the spaces in the body, as well as the consciousness, as the space element. Each of these five could be further analyzed in terms of the elements: in the flesh alone can be found solidity (earth), cohesion (water), temperature (fire), motility (air), and awareness (space)."