Elemental witchcraft and your experiences

[Neha_rose]

Hi everyone,
I recently have taken upon calling on the elements for protection. Today I got two new tarot decks and when asking for blessing and protection, I prayed to each element for its blessing and protection (along with the universe's and the God and Goddess's). Before I go to bed at night I pray to them for their protection and guidance. Praying to the elements feels natural to me and seems to click intuitively. But when I looked up Elemental Magic, and Elemental Witchcraft, the main information Google lead me to portrayed this type of craft to be focused solely on one or two elements ("a witch must study for years with one element to master it, or else the volatility of the elements will work against her" basically). Other sources focused not on the spirit of the elements, but of the spirits attached to those elements- "elementals". I am reading a book called "Shouting at the Wolf" and the author details appealing to the 'spirit of' whatever the thing you are struggling with. She mentioned she appealed to the spirit of something (maybe the east?) and he appeared to her in the woods and helped her, and then gave her the message to give to people that he is very real, as real as you and me and every other living creature, and that made me think of the spirits of the elements. That's why I decided to go to them to bless and protect my future work with my new decks.

My question is, do you have experience with working with the elements all together regularly? Do you have any advice for this kind of work? I would love to hear from other witches who have more experience with this than I do, any stories or points of reference you can share would be wonderful. Right now I feel deeply connected and protected, but I know from experience that this feeling can come and go. I've set up altars around my room in the respective directions for each element because I don't want to ask for their help without offering something back. I have been going to them as "spirit of fire", "spirit of water", "spirit of earth", and "spirit of air". What do you call them?

I have been unable to connect to any gods for longer than a couple months, I think largely because there are so many out there that I get overwhelmed and don't want to make the wrong choice, or not be able to identify the gods who are present in my life already and disrespect them by honoring other gods. The gods don't stay around for very long- for example, I felt Brigid at the start of February, and by midway she'd left even though I honestly believed she was my mother goddess (I'll be honest, it hurt to know she wasn't super present with me anymore, but I don't think she's *totally* disappeared). I feel like working with the elements might be a way to simplify my practice and kind of become more earth based and focus my energy better.

[barker]

I have found that you only must affirm 2/4 elements to have the complete story. If you invoke fire and earth, for example, you get air and water free. Grace.

[SpiritTalker]

My only experience with the elements showed me the need to keep them balanced. And that's done by including something of the opposite element that you're mainly working with. Using a color wheel works. --

. So if I'm setting up an elemental altar of one element it will contain a majority of symbols & colors of that specific element. Then I'd drop in a couple colored glass marbles of the opposite element's color. Glass is sort of energy neutral. It's the color I want to use.