The Correspondences of the South
• Electromagnetic Wave Forces – Emotional Intelligence
• Emotions – learning to understand their value as gauges
• Water Element – fluidity and recognition of emotions
• Summer
• Red – the color of love, passion, anger
• Childhood
• The past – survival behaviors/patterns absorbed by the subconscious mind
• Here we can remember the joy of play, what we naturally gravitated to, the unadulterated expression of who we are, the child within
• A time of rapid growth, exploration, investigation, expansion and interaction with our physical world
• Plant life
• Passion, sexuality, mating
• Trust
• Learning to give from the heart, loving another human being, the beauty and pain of relationship
• Laying a foundation for the future
• Expression of innate intuition, precognition, clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience
• Governing Animals: coyote and wolf – the characteristics of these animals provide metaphors which define the correspondences for the South: their habits, methods of coping with stress, their culture, who their enemies are, how they raise their young, their strengths, diet, habitat, etc.
South is the time of summer, the spirit of rapid growth, exploration, experience, and investigation; it is the power that guides and grows, representing childhood when we learn about trust in feelings and intuition. As children we are incapable of knowing what is right or wrong. We are at the mercy of our environment and form beliefs based on experience. The meaning of love is filtered through our survival instincts and we learn what is “good” or “bad” behavior from the reactions of others around us. Our true self is repressed through this conditioning and our emotions serve as gauges that help us to recognize when we have an acquired belief that is out of alignment with who we truly are. Strong “negative” emotions are particularly enlightening and indicate that we must look within at what we believe so we can change it, re-frame it, adjust it, tweek it. For example: there are 7 billion people on the planet each with his own definition of what love means. All these definitions are “real” for each person and express the broad capacities of human nature. That means each of us has 7 billion beliefs to choose from! It is not our job to express anger outwardly, but rather, to look within to change what we believe. Animal totems here can remind us who we are, connect us to the child within, answering the questions: “Who am I? Where did I come from? Were my feelings acknowledged and allowed to flow in childhood or were they restricted? What was my environment like where I grew up? How did I respond? How can I learn to express myself now? Was I nourished emotionally, spiritually? This quadrant is where our current culture is most unbalanced. On the wheel of human evolution, most of us are living through this phase. The phase in childhood or adolescence when narcissism was part of our development, it is a cultural phenomenom. Many of us were raised by parents who were not nourished spiritually, so how could they know how to raise us in that way? That is the case for many peoples and races of the world. Red is the color of passion and corresponds to the root chakra, our roots…what emotional patterns and belief systems did I inherit from my ancestors? Which of those do not serve me now as an adult?
