The four elements practice — earth, water, fire, and air — is one of the less commonly taught objects of mindfulness, but for some practitioners it opens something that sitting practice alone doesn’t.
In this talk, Travis Hicks shares why he finds the elements practice particularly valuable, especially when taken outside, and walks through what it actually feels like when it’s working well.
Rather than experiencing the body as a contained self with arms and legs, the practice gradually dissolves that boundary — sensations inside and outside the body begin to feel continuous, and the usual sense of separation from the world softens. Travis draws on two vivid personal examples: walking barefoot through dewy grass in a labyrinth at a Houston retreat center in January, and sitting on a rock in a power line clearing in British Columbia with the wind moving through. Both point to the same thing — that this practice is less about analysis and more about direct, unmediated contact with experience as it actually is.
Welcome back, everyone. So this practice of the 4 elements is one of the objects of mindfulness of the body, and this is a practice that I don’t think is— it’s not often taught. I teach it because I like it a lot. It’s something that I have personally found a lot of benefit out of, and so I give it as an offering and see if other people are interested. But it’s definitely a practice where I think if you didn’t get anything out of it, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Each of these practices— the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, this Four Foundations of Mindfulness— the Buddha presents 37 different objects of meditation. And that’s because there’s a lot of different viewpoints on how meditation works for each of us. We’re all different people. We come from different backgrounds. We have different karmic dilemmas. But for me, the Four Elements practice, as this is a practice of the body and has really been helpful at different times. And again, this is the solidity, the fluidity, the temperature, the movement and vibration. This is how we experience the world. You could think of these in terms of the states of matter of science. There’s solid, there’s liquids, there’s gas, and the temperature that changes in between these things. Whatever way of thinking about it works. And in some ways, this practice is a lot about being in the body.
But also about connecting the body to everything that’s around us, about moving our awareness of the body a little bit outside of just this container of me. That when you can kind of feel yourself breathing and the air, the wind is blowing across you, you can feel the solidity of your foot, but also the squishiness of the earth underneath your feet. You know, there’s the heat that we’re latently generating as well as the heat around us. And this water element that just kind of spontaneously is happening in the flow of the blood and the creation of saliva and sweat.
You see all of these objects come up in some of these other meditative topics where, you know, you go through the parts of the body and you look at sweat, you look at the breath, you look at all these different factors, and this is just a different spin on that. And, you know, I think in many cases we can get, especially in meditation, kind of wrapped up in the head. We can get wrapped up in the head in our modern world, and I personally really take this practice, the Four Elements, when I’m outside. I think being outside with it really opens it up in ways that being inside doesn’t always do. So I think this was a good opportunity because I often mix it with the walking practice when I’m outside, sometimes when I’m on retreat, but also just in daily life if I want to have a walk outside. And so again, we’re feeling the elements directly inside and outside the body.
This is kind of this back and forth between the solid nature of the body, the solid nature of the world, the flowing in the body, the flowing in the world around us. There’s many different ways to think about each of these. There’s no— I mean, you know, if you think it’s earth, it’s earth. You think it’s fire, it’s fire. Let it flow. And, you know, you can notice it when you’re eating. We sit there and we eat. We’re eating this earth. It mixes with the water, the saliva in the mouth, the water in the food. The digestion turns it into heat. There’s heat in the digestive process. And for me, when this— working with this is really flowing, the body becomes this kind of constellation of sensations. And it’s not really the awareness of it as a body with arms and legs and a head and torso and stuff, but there’s There’s just feelings in the feet, feelings on the arms, feelings through the body.
And so it’s this interesting balance between a practice that allows us to really be here with this sensation, but in a way that really looks, you know, kind of turns our awareness of our body to kind of a completely different direction while still maintaining a direct awareness of feelings. That, you know, we’re inseparable from this river of experience. And when you get this river of sensations as you walk, and, you know, sometimes the wind’s blowing, sometimes it’s not, sometimes it’s hot, sometimes it’s not as hot as it is right then. Each of these things comes into our mind a little bit more as we’re moving around. And at times they interrelate. Sometimes there’s a mix of hot air, for example. There’s a mix of cool ground.
For me, I was walking barefoot out there and the grass was a little wet. I wasn’t expecting that, but there was a little wetness in the feeling of the grass. As the foot moved through it and stepped. So one of the ways that this works into the insight practice for me most especially is there is impermanence in the changing awareness of sensations arising and falling, of this element being predominant, then this element being predominant in our field of awareness. But at the same time, there— it gets back to that feeling again of reconnecting our body with the world around it.
This body is made of the same elements as everything else around us is, and it starts to break down some of this I, me, and my making. It starts to kind of integrate this being with everything else around it in a different way. It makes us feel a little more part of the world instead of separate from it. And Yeah, it just— there’s some little chips at the ego, some little chips at this sense of what’s in control, of what’s permanent, what’s me. And again, in insight, you know, we’re seeing things as they are. That’s the goal. Any anchor of practice is a different lens through which we see reality as it is. We see the impermanence. We’re able to see the unsatisfactoriness. We may have wished it was a little cooler than it was. We may wish for this, you know, less fire element, please, a little more water element, maybe a lot more wind element would be nice. Maybe the wind element could shift that cloud a little bit, and there’d be a little less fire. You know, you can sense some of the way we wish things were. Instead of the sensations that are present. And, you know, all of these can be pleasant and unpleasant, and we’re aware of those things. And so again, if an anchor allows you to see that in a clear way, then it’s very effective.
And For me, there’s a couple times I’ve used this really effectively that have really stuck in my memory. One of the times was on retreat at the Villa de Mattel, which is a retreat center here in Houston, and they have a labyrinth like the one that’s on the other side of that building here at the church, but their labyrinth, unlike many that I’ve been to, has grass as the walking paths, and so you can follow the path of the labyrinth all the way in and all the way out very slowly through the grass. And during one of the walking periods of this retreat, I went out there, took off my shoes and socks, and was able to just walk through the dewy wet grass for one of these walking periods. And it was a nice bright sunny day, but it was a little cool because I want to say it was in January. For one of our January retreats. And so there was this amazing mix of sensations as I did this walking practice where the feet on the ground are very cold, the grass is dewy, you can feel the sponginess of the earth, you can feel the feeling of the grass. Again, it’s January, so, you know, it’s Texas, so it’s not that cold, but Again, bare feet, wet dewy grass, the feet are a little cold. However, the upper part of my body is quite warm because it’s a nice sunny day. There’s the breeze of wind blowing across. There’s some sweat. There’s the dew of the grass, the saliva in the mouth. And so it really created again this rich constellation of sensations and the ability to just slowly move through the labyrinth and then slowly move out of the labyrinth and really get to move across that constellation of feeling for a prolonged period of time. It’s an interesting aspect for me of working with the elements where the mind moves around between sensations, between earth and water and air and fire and back and forth and back and forth. But at the same time, there’s a lot of stillness that can come from that, of really feeling like the body is actually connecting to things around it. And allowing, and allowing the body to be like it is.
The other time that really comes to mind for me using this practice, I was on retreat at the monastery up in British Columbia, Birken, and they had this— the monastery’s near these giant telephone lot, like giant telephone easement. That runs out through the backwoods of British Columbia. And so you could follow this little trail, and then it opens up onto this huge power line easement. You could walk up to the top, you know, there’s some elevation there. You get up to the top of this hill, and you can really— in the easement as it moves up, and you can really see out there. There’s a big rock sitting up there, and it was just, again, a nice moment to sit up on this rock. You can really feel the sun, and the wind was just ripping through that easement because everything else is pretty high tree cover. And, you know, you’re breathing, but then like the world, it’s just like breathing on you in this intense way. And the feeling of being there in a relaxed, still posture in nature, feeling the heat, feeling the wind, and allowing those sensations to just be the points of awareness that are mindfulness is resting on. It was a strong, strong experience.
So I appreciate your kind attention and both trying on the practice, engaging in some walking, listening to me discuss mindfulness of the elements. We have some time to break up into small groups of maybe 3 or 4 people. If you’re able to do that for our friends on Zoom, I would appreciate that, Jared. Thank you. And just discuss, did you enjoy walking first? Some people have walked a lot, some people have not walked that much. And what was this practice of the elements like? Did you try it on? Did you not? What’d you think of it? Um, and then we’ll come back into the circle as a full, and there’ll be some time for questions and discussion. Together as well. Thank you.
