There are five basic elements to everything that exists... earth, water, fire, air and space.
Earth is the solidity, substance and weight.
Water is the fluidity, moisture and flow.
Fire is the ignition, driving force and transformer.
Air is the movement, lightness and instigator.
Space is the vacant-ness, open-ness, and nothing-ness that allows everything to be.
Everything is made up of varying proportions of these fundamental elements, including ourselves.
When you know the various attributes of each element, it is possible to maintain balance within yourself by simply increasing or decreasing any of the elements... just like cooking without a recipe book... too dry, add some moisture; too wet, add some dryness; too heavy, add some lightness; too cold, add some heat; too dull, add some spark etc.
These basic principles can be applied to every aspect of your life, i.e. the food you eat, what you do, environmental conditions etc., in order to maintain balance and well-being. This is quite often done naturally to a certain degree anyway because it is part of your innate intelligence, but the more aware you are of elemental qualities, the more you can incorporate the balancing of them into your daily life for optimal balance and subsequent well-being.
The qualities of the different elements:
Earth - heavy, dense, cold, solid, dull, sticky, firm
Water - wet, flowing, agile, soft, smooth, cold
Fire - hot, sharp, vibrant, intense
Air - movement, mobile, light, cold, dry
Space - cold, weightless, absent, ethereal
Not rocket-science by any means but realistically who ever needed a rocket to live well, and because the human mind has a tendency to over-complicate things, it is often the simplest, most basic fundamentals of life that are so often overlooked when it comes to maintaining wellbeing and having a deeper understanding of the universal forces at play.