Dear Friends,
Over the past days, we have explored the water element as flow, connection, and responsiveness. Today’s reflection invites us to look more closely at how water can help loosen the sense of ownership we often bring to experience.
In reflecting on the elements, the teachings sometimes point to a simple reorientation: recognizing that what we experience is not something we own or control, but something we participate in. With the water element, this can be especially tangible. Water moves through the body and the world continuously – borrowed for a time, shared, and always changing.
As a way of opening this reflection, you might sit with these words from Bruce Lee:
Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless – like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bruce_Lee
Rather than taking this as instruction, let it serve as a pointer toward how experience takes shape in response to conditions.
You might reflect on one or two of these questions, letting them land lightly:
- Where do you notice experience taking shape in response to conditions?
- What aspects of experience seem to arise and pass without being directed by you?
- How does it feel to notice sensations, thoughts, or emotions as shaping themselves, rather than belonging to you?
- What shifts when experience is understood as participating in conditions, rather than being “mine”?
This reflection is not about denying experience or pushing anything away. It is simply an invitation to notice how much of life unfolds without requiring ownership or control.
You can also explore this reflection in everyday moments:
- Watching water take the shape of a container
- Noticing how mood changes with circumstances
- Feeling the body adapt as you move through the day
There is no conclusion to reach today. Reflection here is about becoming more familiar with participation rather than possession, with responsiveness rather than fixed identity.
You are invited to let us know what you discover. You can reply to the email or post a comment.
With good wishes,
Andrea
This wisdom of flowing with water is the most beauty filled and delightful dance…..may I listen to the music, trust the lead and enjoy the dance.
Even if it is the anger dance, or the fear dance, or possibly the headache dance……I hope you dance.
Hi Shamarika, I love your image of the dance, even with the anger or headache steps. It is a gift to trust the flow and stay curious with whatever arises. May you keep listening to the music and dancing through it all.
Thank you, Andrea.
Here is an exploration by Maria Popova on Bruce Lee’s approach to life — “be like water”.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/05/29/like-water-bruce-lee-artist-of-life/
And an addendum by Bob Marley:
“Some people feel the rain, others just get wet.”
Thanks Rod, Maria Popova’s take on Bruce Lee’s “be like water” adds a broader dimension to the snippet I shared, and Bob Marley’s words bring a beautiful reminder to truly feel life, not just pass through it. I appreciate you deepening this reflection.
I bike out and rest near the water, watch it reflect the wide sky, flash brief footprints of racing winds. It’s always moving, in lines, waves, unseen currents, across time. Changing phases again and again, over time. How many kinds of bodies have felt it, shaped it, across time?
Do I drink the same water my ancestors drank? (Do I drink my ancestors??)
Beautifully expressed and thought- and feeling-provoking comments, Barb–thank you for posting! –Susan
Thanks Barb, I appreciate the way you bring in the timelessness of water, its movement through bodies and across generations. I love your question, “Do I drink my ancestors?” It captures so deeply how connected we are through this ever-changing flow. Thank you for sharing this rich image and invitation to feel our place within the currents of time.
Being beside, on, or in water in natural surroundings is a healing experience for me. Have taken my grief to the waters many times. because of the flow of water (and often wind) there that seems to wash (and blow) away perceived fixities, rigidities, and hard containers. Your teaching for today, Andrea, made me think that the sense of intersubjectivities that for me melts the fixed and bordered sense of self could well be extended to intersub-objectivities if that term be understood as the way human experience is shaped by the material as well as the social and more-than-human world.
Thanks, Susan, for sharing how water has been a healing presence for you, carrying away rigidity and opening space for flow. I really appreciate your reflection on extending intersubjectivity to include “intersub-objectivity” – a beautiful way to honor how our experience is shaped not only by social connections but by the material and more-than-human world around us. It deepens the invitation to see ourselves as participants in a wider web of life.
A practical physical scientist (i.e a plumber) once exclaimed “Don’t you know that you can’t compress liquid?” Well true enough-it has never been much of a consideration. And this property of water keeps popping into thoughts as we gather more and more reflections to ponder on the water element. Maybe that’s why tensing, pushing, and efforting toward a perceived end(even well intentioned) is so difficult, painful, and fruitless??? A ha moment here❣️
The more investigation, the more amorous the view of the power of this element: its a medium that dissolves, precipitates, dives, dances, flies in the clouds, and when it freezes becomes hard as a rock-with the strength to burst a metal pipe.
Lisa
Hi Lisa, I love your “a ha moment” – that tension and effort go against water’s nature of flow and adaptability. Your vivid description of water’s many forms and powers captures its complexity and vitality. It reminds us how even something so soft can hold incredible strength, inviting us to embody both ease and resilience. Thank you for this rich reflection!