Customer Reviews

The Way of Four: Create Elemental Balance in Your Life

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book shows you how to create balance in your life using the four elements: air, fire, water, and earth. The author shows you how to experience and "feel" each element for yourself through guided meditations and conscious ritual. Also included in the book are a variety of cutom-made quizzes and checklists to help you determine which element/s are abundant or lacking in your life. Quizzes and checklists include What I Like About Myself and The Elements In Daily Life, where the reader assesses the elements in home, clothing, art, work, and so on.

Perhaps the neatest aspect to this book is that the author has amassed a comprehensive perfume/cologne database listing the primary elements for popular fragrances. (For example, Happy from Clinique is Water, while Tommy for men is primarily Air.)

I am not a Pagan or Wiccan (I'm a "New Ager"), so the "spells", rituals, and pagantalk were lost on me. Still, even those not of the Pagan traditions will find value in consciously learning how to promote balance in life. For example, I'm primarily Airy and knew this from both my astrological chart and from intuition. My weakest element, by far, is Earth. (This "air head" needs grounding sometimes!) So I appreciated the practical help this book affords so I can consciously add elements into my life to remind me of the need for balance.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go collect some rocks...

Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. The author tells us that they are *everything* and she shows us how to take advantage of that knowledge.

I love the nature exercises and meditations, which seem deep and real. I love the quizzes, which are fun and informative. There's humor (like why each element gives flowers), there's practical tips (like home decorating for the elements) and there's magic.

Deborah Lipp's book The Elements of Ritual, was for Wiccans and was very structured. But The Way of Four is for everyone, really--Pagan, Wiccan, or New Age--and is very do-it-yourself.

Five stars.

After reading this book I feel that I have a much firmer grasp on the concepts related to each element and their balance with each other. I thoroughly enjoyed the quizzes throughout to better understand how the elements are coming through me and my lifestyle. I found that to be most enlightening. The book was very well written, and has wonderful exercises for bringing any of the elements into your life more, as well as attuning with any of the elements.

I was disappointed in this book, especially since I had read so many good reviews and was really looking forward to it. I get the feeling from this book that it doesn't really know what it wants to be. I bought it because I thought it would help me better understand how to use elements in my tarot reading, but it seems to me to be more of a mish-mosh of elements, wicca, and personality analysis.

It only covered the most basic elemental information with regard to the cards and the book, overall, was much more focused on Wicca rituals than I had anticipated. It has one useful chapter about what the elements are, with correspondences and such, but I didn't even agree with all of the correspondences and I'm not sure it was much more than you could find by a search on the internet. That goes, as well, for the appendixes at the back corresponding stones, colors and herbs with elements and such.

Beyond that, the quizzes, while sort of fun to take, seemed not to be accurate, for me at least. I think this might be because the focus of the information she is presenting seems too simplistic. I find it very difficult to categorize that maybe I'm a water person in this specific area of my life, without taking into account my Leo Sun Sign and many of the other elements that are so significant in the make up of our personalities.

Furthermore, there is a section on Jungian and Myers-Briggs personality types that seem wholly out of place. She was sort of able to tie in the Jungian stuff, but it really added nothing to the book and the insertion of both of those theories seemed to me to be put in there for no other reason than to put "data" in there.

Finally, it was a little oddly laid out. Sometimes she would put the quiz before the information about that specific quiz, other times she would not. I found myself, at times, reading and thinking, "how do I know which one of these applies to me?" Yet, because the quizzes didn't seem that accurate to me, I could never really tell anyway.

The bottom line is that I'm not sure I get the purpose of this book. I wanted a very advanced book on elements, and while she had some basic elemental information in there, it seems as though a lot of the information is in there so as to make enough to write a book, when the really useful stuff could have fit on a blog -- and is probably easily obtainable on many blogs, for that matter.

There are some meditations interspersed, and spell work at the end that some people might find useful. It was a nice effort, but missed the mark for me.

Deborah Lipp has done an excellant job of providing practical and easy to follow ideas on how to restore and maintain a sense of balance including easy to understand assessments of our balance.
This book focuses on balancing the four elements-earth, air, water and fire in our homes and our daily lives. In this regard the book is very enriching offering ideas for decorating and rituals that enhance our appreciation of our lives and our world.
This book reminded of Thomas Mores books on reestablishing a sense of enchantment in our lives.
Given our modernistic focus on being productive and being acquisitive this book is a counterbalancing force to the excesses and deficiencies in our modern world which tends to impoverish and disenchant our daily experience.

I am fairly new to Wicca and I can say that I didn't know what to expect from a book written by a traditional point of view. I received it in perfect condition and I started reading immediatelly.
I am very satisfied by the quality of the book and the writer's style. She is very informative and specific. She gives plenty of information and the total is solid and full of helpful ideas. It is obvious that she knows well her subject and it is an excellent tool for someone who wants to work with the elements. I would recommend it without hesitation to anyone who wants to seriously work with the elements. If you are looking for just superficial work don't buy it but if you are truly ready to discover yourself and the elements by hard (and sometimes fun) work then this is the book for you.

I wish I had read all the reviews before I bought the book. Just like one of the other reviewers I found it disappointing.

Even though there was a lot of work involved in gathering the information for this book, I thought a lot of it was fun, but ephemeral (to say the least). What I was looking for was a book with deep elemental understanding. I didn't get that.

The only useful part of the book was the exercises but I was looking for something like a serious elemental attunement.

The concepts were incredibly simplistic, but (even worse) they were also trivial. Most of the book was concerned with concepts that most people with a relatively good grounding in witchcraft and wicca practices could work out for themselves - like how to use the elements in ritual and the elements at play in the home and at work.

For me the worst and most irksome part of the book was the elemental correspondence supposedly found in commercial perfumes (many of which are synthetic).

I wasted my money on this book and it's a shame because it is such a great concept.

Deborah Lipp once again writes a book we can all learn from. From a newbie to a elder of the craft. I highly recommend this book.

For anyone who has said "What is beyond 101?" This book is a good answer. Exploring the elements like this takes you back to the basics of magick, and expands upon that knowledge to give you a more solid foundation for future workings.

Fantastic book, received it on time for class to begin! Full of information I knew nothing about. Really going to help my daughter and myself with learning about the elements the real way. Thank you so much!