Have you been feeling out of bounds lately? Try our wellbeing #ContentRitual for the month of October courtesy of the inspiring wellbeing expert Jane Kersel to restore your balance. She advises us to take a leaf out of Chinese zen masters and harness the power of nature and its elements for our wellbeing. Get it below.
Whenever you find yourself feeling depleted, alone, scared, victimised, tired, struggling, striving, pushing, martyring, know that you have hemmed yourself in to a tiny corner of your lofty ice palace mind and you are trying to over-analyse and over-think your way back to balance. This vice-like grip to control and force creates tight muscles, tight joints, migraines, clenched teeth and stuckness.
That’s a bit like King Canute trying to hold back the flowing tides of the ocean. In those moments we literally leave home (our connection to our bodies), we avoid listening in and feeling our big beautiful hearts and we rip the socket out that connects us to our passion and desires that lie deep in our souls. That soft, fluid, dreamy, romantic, not a care in the world, long days of summer girl has been frozen over and we are brittle to snap like the twigs falling off the trees in the last days of Autumn.
This month: “You gotta go where you feel the flow”. Why do I say this month in particular? Well, we are just stepping out of full and red moon craziness where some of us sensitives have felt we’ve been mashed to a pulp in a washing machine – all our old ways of doing/thinking things have been spun dried out and we find ourselves being asked to find a new balance to our lives, to find a new integrated wholeness otherwise if we don’t own things in ourselves, we’ll be projecting it out onto others and communication will be a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows.
“The Tao, the energy that moves all things, teaches us to be like water, to flow without resistance, to trust that the process will take us wherever we need to go. We need to let go of all our security blankets – physical, psychological, political – and just be. We need to topple the fortress of fixed ideas, personas and agendas walling us off from our own two feet and the earth they walk on.”~ Gabrielle Roth
This month has the tendency to make us feel we are balancing on the tip of a pencil point: if we use too much mind, over-think and over-analyse, we will freeze on that lofty point, when we are really being asked to take a leap of faith, to jump off the golden cliff and to learn to swim to new depths. A way of helping us live life more sensorially and less through analysis and head – which tends to be historically driven and have us resist the new – is by tuning into the ancient seers of old. They had a lot of time on their hands: there was no internet, mobiles, televisions, they were picking up the radio waves of the mystical channels and downloading through their dreams and gut feelings the way that life really rolls. And guess what? It’s not how our minds would like to think it is.
What these guys could tell us about energy would literally create nuclear fusion! They saw the world in a much more collaborative, unified way. Heads and intellect like to polarise, reduce, compartmentalise – which is great when you’re doing a scientific study, but really hopeless when you’re trying to make sense of your life. You can’t separate out logic from feelings and body; inner nature from outer nature; in that folks we truly do move in unison, as one. So this month, begin to understand yourself less as a machine with a computer chip in your head and more of a sentient being: you are after all made up of exactly the same compounds as everything you see and touch around you, as much as your mind would like to keep you separate from that. In the most ordinary ways, we are losing the touch and guidance of nature to live in accord with the natural rhythms and cycles. We eat food out of season, we try to bend time by changing our clocks to control daylight and we forget that our physical, mental and emotional life is musical with all sorts of sensations, feelings and dreams playing through us.
Meet your world and yourself as an elemental being. The Chinese zen masters had a beautiful way of looking at the world through the five elements to bring ourselves to harmonious balance: I’ll give a brief outline of each one below, together with the meridian line which passes through each organ. To use: see where you feel you land and use the suggestions to help restore rebalance. Remember that unlike western allopathic medicine, Chinese medicine sees the human being as a holistic/whole parted entity, with the organs all relating and in symphony with each other and not compartmentalised off into specialist departments. As Carl Jung said: “I’d rather be whole than good!”
WOOD
Meridian – Governs liver and gallbladder.
In balance – People have clear goals and know how to bring them into fruition.
Out of balance – People are indecisive, lack a strong direction in life and maybe constrained emotionally unable to express their range of emotions clearly and cleanly. They may be addictive.
in personality – work long hours, over drink, over eat. Digestive problems bloating, gas, autumn is a vulnerable time when the liver meridian is out of balance can lead to frustration and irritability. Good to do physical exercise and eat sour bitter flavours over hot and spicy.
Physically – Imbalances can show up as migraines, eye and sinus issues, rashes, PMS, heavy bleeding.
Colour green – Wear it or have it around you – fill your pot plants with chlorophyll infusing colour.
FIRE
Meridian – Governs heart, small intestine, pericardium.
In balance – People are charismatic and social.
Out of balance – Anxious, insomnia, talk too quickly or laugh nervously, excitable and overly excessive in all things, emotionally cold or withdrawn.
Physically – Palpitations, heart problems, sore mouth or tongue.
To bring balance – Eat dark green leafy vegetables and walk the earth.
EARTH
Meridian – Stomach and spleen
In balance – People are grounded, compassionate, earth mother types, social, peacemakers, collaborators, love cooking and sharing.
Out of balance – People worry and over work, stress builds in the tummies, gain weight easily and lose it with difficulty. Over produce mucus, sinusy and have muzzy heads, lack of clarity.
Physically – Fatigue, gas and bloating, food allergies heartburn – mucus in lungs. Can affect periods.
To bring balance – Avoid dairy and raw foods. Eat warming foods and grains to help stay grounded. Curb sugar cravings by getting sweetness from roasted root vegetables not from sugary foods and chocolate. Start a meditation practice.
Colour – Have yellow around you like an Indian summer: waning light, golden sun.
METAL
Meridian – Lung, skin and large intestine.
In balance – People feel on top the world – like they could achieve anything, well organised, self disciplined, conscientious. inner strength like a mountain.
Out of balance – Sadness, overly Critical, trouble letting go.
Physically – Lung issues, asthma, allergies, frequent colds, coughs.
Colour – White – wear it or have it around you.
WATER
Meridian – Kidneys/bladder.
In balance – People feel strong, fearless, determined will power, longevity.
Out of balance – Metabolism issues, urination , sexually disinterested, fertility issues, anxious fearful, withdrawn.
Physically – Water energy declines as we age – think of a leaf in full bloom on a tree branch and autumn how it dries and falls to the earth – that in a nutshell is the aging process! Forget anti-aging nonsense which is again like Canute trying to force back time and motion and instead do naturopathic things to help hydrate the body – such as flaxseed tea, castor oil wraps on your liver,
and ginger infused wraps on your kidneys. Weak water energy might result in ear issues – the kidneys are the same shape as your ears so relate organ to organ, you might have night sweats,
dry skin and mucous membranes, dark circles under the eyes and weak lymph movement.
Colour – Black – wear it or have it around you, enjoy early nights.
Thank you Jane for another fascinating read!
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Read More: Set Your Life Goals with Jane Kersel
