The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

I am not sure if I am posting in the right place, so I understand if this post gets moved.

This is a possible right place! A couple of others might have been appropriate too, depending on your focus (like Worship and Ritual, or Faith in Everyday Life or a couple of others.)

Do you know of or can you suggest other activities that I can try to get in touch with the elements?

First, if you're interested in a book, Deborah Lipp's book The Way of Four has a ton of specific exercises, ideas, and techniques.

Some other common ideas are

1) Observing how elements change over time in a particular physical location(you've got fire, outside too, with the sun, even though it's fire a long way away). Taking notes probably helps.

2) Creating a small shrine to each element, and collecting items related to it (these don't need to be big or expensive things: you might use single beads, stones, shells, a small candle, colors of ribbon or fabric, draw images or symbols, etc.)

3) Create a list for your future reference of items and symbols associated with each element. (If you have any interest in something like sketch notes, this is a great application for that!) Try to expand your list to at least 20 items, and more is better. Symbols.com is also an interesting source for browsing different symbols associated with specific elements or ideas.
 
Other options:
My tradition actually has this as a significant part of second degree training. Some parts of that aren't suitable for individual practice (being specific to the tradition, including things like working with our particular guardians of the quarters) but I really liked the process, which was that we'd spend one or two months focusing on each element in turn.

We had to make a commitment to something that was at least weekly, and probably more often, about that element (our choice: one person might choose regular swimming, for water, another person might experiment with different kinds of sacred or ritual baths, another person might commit to charging water and drinking it every day, someone else might commit to regular divination practice.)

Usually in the process of committing to that for a more extended period, things would come up - for example, when working at length with earth, a *lot* of people find money issues coming up that they hadn't maybe addressed sufficiently, for example.

We'd wear something throughout that was a symbol of our commitment - some people did a simple bead hung on thread or embroidery floss, some people got more elaborate. Wearing something all the time gives you a particular touchstone which can be useful.

(When I did this, I normally set a stone bead up as an anklet with a clasp. Most of the time people really don't notice something on your ankle, and if I was in a situation where it might get unwanted attention, I'd just loop it around my bra strap for the duration. But I found an anklet something I felt more than a necklace, and less annoying to me than a bracelet.)

The other two things I did, both of which I found really useful, were this:

1) Set up a playlist of music that was related to that element for me (and have that be the primary thing I listened to during that time period, aiming for at least a few songs a day even on days I didn't have it on for long.) I found that 4-6 hours was a good minimum length so that you don't feel like things are constantly repeating, but I usually can't have music on all the time anyway.

2) Read at least one book every two weeks related to the element - mostly non-fiction. I read about a massive silver mine fire (with a lot of other stuff about mining) for earth, for example, and deep water diving for water, and how music works for air, and a history of spices for fire (plus lots of others, but that's a sample.) If you're not a reader, you could do something similar with podcasts or documentaries or other kinds of materials. (This is also a thing where your local public library probably has tons and tons of options.)

I found this really deepened my understanding beyond the sometimes sort of superficial level, because those kinds of books really go into how something changes people's lives, or our lived experience in all sorts of different ways.

Hopefully this gives you a whole bunch of possible ideas.