It’s time to step powerfully into the waking energy of the spring season. What is calling you forth? What creative energy is ripening and waiting to express through you? These are the questions of spring, the season of life’s forceful energy requesting you to show up year after year, winter after winter, to burst through the soil and blossom. Step into life refreshed and alive, revealing beauty that you have never witnessed in yourself before.
This journey of self-discovery, of stretching beyond your own comfort zone, is the energy of the wood element, which is very alive and awake in the season of spring. The energy of spring is our call to wake up out of winter hibernation and stretch and move our bodies, ignite our creativity, and allow life to move through us. To not honor and acknowledge this calling is to stagnate our Qi, or life force energy.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), each season is identified with an element and certain emotional states. Spring is the season of the wood element, a time in which we move from the winter element of water and emotions of fear and courage into spring and emotions of anger and compassion. To skillfully ride the spring energy is to access your creativity and compassion alleviating irritability and anger.
Imagine yourself stuck in a traffic jam crawling along slowly. With each push on the gas and sudden jolt of the brake your body grows more tense, your mood more irritable. This is similar to what it feels like to disregard the calling of spring. When life steps on the gas and we step on the brakes, an internal traffic jam develops. If you are experiencing anger and frustration these emotions are often indicators of unexpressed vision and creativity.
According to TCM, the wood element and the spring season are connected to the liver energy system. The liver energy system is linked to the eyes, “vision,” the color green, the emotions of anger and compassion. The sound of the liver energy system is correlated with shouting.
Here are some ideas to keep spring/liver energy moving fluidly through your body:
∑ Sighing: Long loud sighs help move the liver Qi. Over-exaggerate these sighs. (Feel free to be very dramatic.)
∑ Nutrition: Consume sour and bitter foods such as lemons and dandelion greens to help gently and effectively move stuck liver Qi
∑ Movement: Running, dancing any sort of cardio vascular exercise will move the liver Qi.
∑ Creative Expression: Free up your intrinsic artist — collage, draw, write a short story.
∑ Meditation: For the Wood Element, download this free, 12-minute guided meditation from the home page of Resonation Acupuncture (katiebriggs.net).
Heed the call of spring and move this creative life force energy. Ride the energy of the Wood element and let your life force flourish. When you attune your personal energy to the changing season, you allow life’s grace and ease to surround you and surprise you.