All said and done, you and I and every other creature that walks this planet is nothing but a unique combination of the same four primary elements. Earth, fire, air and water. Our bodies are a mix of earth and water, our breath is air, and the heat generated by our body and its processes is part of our fire legacy. Everything we do is a function of the wisdom of these elements within us -thinking, feeling, loving, experiencing, learning, questioning and exploring. The permutation and combinations in every one of us can vary, but the elements remain the same.

In other words, regardless of whether my skin is brown and yours is white, we are made of the same stuff. Regardless of whether my body weighs 300 pounds and yours is a svelte 180, we are inherently the same. I may be a woman romantically attached to a man, while you might be a man who’s in love with a man, it makes no difference. You could have strikingly chiselled features, while I may never stand out in a crowd - we’re both the exact same story, just with different covers. That’s all.

For a while there, education and modern living had conditioned us to forget or deny our connection with the natural elements. The result was a loss of our natural balance and biorhythms, causing an alarming fallout in the environment around us. Fortunately, even science has now acquiesced to man’s deep links with the natural elements and we are now attempting to bring elemental wisdom back into everyday awareness. Awareness may just be the most powerful ability exclusive to humans. And therefore, living in awareness is the most elevated state a human could exist in.

This awareness is about the self and our connection with the world outside us. Self-awareness, while it sounds simple, requires letting go of the ego and examining ourselves for what we really are, not what we showcase to the world, or what the world tells us we are or ought to be. Most of us are overly self-critical, conditioned to live up to someone else’s standards and always falling short. Awareness is about letting society recede into the background, to be able to hear and connect with yourself. The inner voice in most of us has been bullied into silence by our self-criticism. While trying to be who we are told we should be, we have lost touch with who we really are. And that’s when the scales tip out of balance and the result is disharmony.

Human existence is about calibrating and recalibrating our lives to preserve our elemental balance -between our minds and our bodies, between our self and society, between our needs and our wants. We are all ongoing works in progress. Choosing to see the perfection in our imperfections is not just liberating, it is the secret to harmony. Only when we have seen and accepted ourselves as fallible and flawed, can we accept the same in another. And that is what harmony on a global scale will be about. Awareness and acceptance of self and another.