Anthroposophy for Dummies

[LukeJTM]

It's been a while since I last posted on here, but I hope everybody is doing well. I am just wondering if anyone understands what elemental beings are? Steiner mentions them sometimes, but it still isn't clear to me what they are actually are. For instance, here in this lecture excerpt (from Six Steps in Self-Development: The 'Supplementary Exercises') he says:

Through this awakening etheric body, we gradually learn to experience ourselves in the etheric world. In reality, every time we move - for instance, if I grasp an object or knock against it - this is an attack on the outer world. The non-esotericist has no inkling of this, for he is protected from such knowledge by the Guardian of the Threshold; but the esotericist gradually makes his etheric body independent, so that it experiences itself in the etheric world. His organs become more sensitive, and he increasingly acquires a sense of the fact that every space is filled not just with physical objects, but with a countless number of elemental beings who make themselves felt through pricking, prodding and burning. In this elemental etheric world, one has to make space for oneself everywhere through will impulses such as stretching, withdrawing, pushing, walking forwards, etc., and such movements must occur with the full awareness that one wishes this out of one's inmost being. That is the second thing: initiative in actions. Someone who cannot make space for himself in this etheric world through his initiating will can achieve as little in this world as someone in the physical world who tries to dance on a stage crowded with chairs. First, the chairs have to be removed. The second exercise teaches us how to do this in the spirit.

Here, he is, of course, describing the second will exercise - the one where you basically choose something simple to do each day, which could be clapping your hands at 12 o'clock each day, or watering plants at a certain time, or something like that. The idea I have of this is that elemental beings are spirits who live etherically within the physical elements (e.g. fire, or air) and perhaps give them their distinct inner qualities. Am I getting the right idea? What do they have to do with sensations as Steiner is describing there? I know at least that the etheric body is where we experience physical sensation and it somehow translates intention and will from the "I" and astral-body into physical movements.