The element of metal is the guidance of a young adult’s powerful life, and how it moves from the transformative teenage influence of the Earth into the storing up phase of the water element. Metal’s primary action is to reap, as the realization of all that one has gone through and grown up for finally comes around. At one point, you are all potential. But when you reach the metal stage, it is time for all of that potential to really assert itself usefully. The parts of the body that are most representative of metal are the large intestine, skin, hair and lungs. After all, the skin and hair are the most yang parts of your body, since they are the parts which face the world most directly.
Metal’s dominant flavor is pungent, perhaps because the experiences of young adulthood are the most powerful in one’s life. As a young adult, you reach outward knowing that you can grasp and keep hold of what you reach for. No longer must you swat tentatively at things- now you can (and indeed, you must) actually take them up, in the reaping action that characterizes this element. It is the perfect uniting point between the less self assured period of the Earth element and the more conservative period of the water element. In metal, there is the strength and the cleanliness necessary in the early years of establishing something new.
Overall, the element of metal symbolizes the period when one moves off to begin something of one’s own. It is the strongest and most lethal of all the elements. The early days are a time to rend through obstacles and accomplish as much as one can. This is the element which makes all of the other elements possible. After all, what good can anything else do, if it wants for the strength to continue onward in life? Metal is the time and place where a life’s mission begins.
