Good day Health Trekkers,
Here we are in the midst of the winter full sweep across the East Coast as we sit in toasty hands in gloves, feet in socks. I took a little hiatus from this with a nice trip to warmth in visiting family during the brutal beginnings in early January, only to come back to it ready for me waiting to welcome me with a cold.
I had enjoyed health and happiness in my comfortable stay of warm weather, salt air and water, good walks, yoga each morning greeting the sun for sun salutations and breezy days that brought fresh oxygen to me through the day.
To come back feeling so healthy and alive only to be disturbed by a knock to my system through days on end in bed with congestion, coughing, fever and aches was disappointing and emotionally unsettling.
Now in bed for several days I looked out the window with the wind and snow and felt unwelcome by my environment. I was sad to have returned to the cold, physically more isolated and with limited mobility. Along with this what was weighing me was the effects of my drastic environmental changes to less light, shorter days, cold air in my lungs, cold drafts and dryness.
Thankfully, I remained on course with my regime of rest, sauna, acupuncture and with adding in some cooking tip for a strong broth from my dear Virginia M. Harper, Founder of You Can Heal You (and my director see my About Me page ; ) that had me sweating it out I gradually have returned to feel better.
What I experienced is not unlike what anyone else might even if they had not taken a trip away. My body had to cool its fire and my spirit had to find its resting space within; to re-engage with the quiet and enter winter’s insular nature. This time of year tests our emotional capacity threshold. It is a dormant time, where the focus of Mother Earth is on nourishing what is underground, what is underneath what we can see on the surface. We too are similarly following this pattern.
The warmth we bring to our spirits is kindled by the fires we light from inside ourselves in the quiet of our hours spent in more darkness, enclosed spaces huddled together. If our minds are a drift with many thoughts, scattered from one thing to the next it is its own unrest pushing against nature’s calling to slow down and follow routines that are less active. Grounding prevails the culture of all things to this season when we follow the nourishment it can bring to us in the element of Water.
There is a Taoist reference to this seasonal time as “the Dao of Storage,” a time closing and storing. Limiting our energy, protects our kidneys from over excursion, helps us to keep balance with our external and internal flow manageable to a comfortable pace. Likewise emotionally, kidneys are associated with the Chinese word Zhi which means “will power.” So our tendency is to want to activate and stimulate ourselves to think and analyze, make big plans and create complexity when all about us is asking for simplicity, quiet and flow. Allow the water element to be within as you watch with quiet resolve and care to what is best left alone to sit and be nourished gradually.
May you draw grounding in this season of Winter and find yourself at peace with rest both physically and mentally. It’s the love by which your body and spirit is calling in answering to the will of the season.
In health,
Safara
