The crisp, white snow has smothered summer. It appears as if someone has laid a sparkling white sheet over what was once summer and put it to bed. I love winter. I love the hot chocolate with marshmallows melting into the whipped cream, snuggling up with a fire burning, blankets draped over me, and most of all a brilliant book.
In winter and as the world becomes cold, we go inside. Nature tends to freeze and die and there is a stillness like no other time of the year. It is in the deep stillness that gives us a moment to look into our depths, reconnect to our inner being, and embrace the darkness that surrounds us.
This is the season that we celebrate holidays, eat and drink, and go to parties with our friends, but it is also the season where our inner world is most accessible because winter is represented by the water element, the most yin of all the five elements. This is a time of contemplation and reflection.
Here are a few things I do during this yin season:
- Practice self-acceptance – for me, this means spending five minutes a day looking in a mirror at myself and I don’t criticize what I see.
- Listen and recharge – Listen more to others and listen closely to what your heart might be saying. It is a time of receiving, not doing.
- Drink lots of water – in this yin season we lose a great deal of moisture out of our bodies so it is important to hydrate.
- Dream – we all have ideas and dreams and this season allows us to slow down and have these thoughts germinate as if we were planting a garden. Nurture these images and allow them to develop and grow naturally. Do this and see what sprouts in the spring.
- Serve – so many are in need during the winter. Perhaps gather coats for the homeless shelter or make a pot of soup for the older people in your neighborhood. Each season provides us all with unique chances to help those around us.
Are you wearing the best colors for you? Each of us has a power color based on the five elements and the day we were born. Sign up for my email list and provide me the day, month, and year of your birth and I will send you your birth element and power color!
Bed Position: Try to position the bed so it sits solidly against the back wall and make sure it has a headboard. This will elicit and instill in the student with a strong sense of support.
The patio, deck, rooftop, or backyard is where most of your time will be spent during the next couple of months, so you might as well make it a place of peaceful balance and harmony. Below are six tips for bringing some feng shui to your own personal great outdoors.
Wind chimes or flags increase the flow of chi creating balance in your yard and making it comfortable and a welcoming environment for your guests. They are believed to produce healing energy.
I have noticed as I age, western medicine doesn’t seem to be as effective. For whatever reason, after I hit 50 I began to get all of those dreaded side effects printed on the warning labels of all the medication I was taking. But after a severe allergic reaction during a trip to India, an Indian doctor treated me with aromatherapy. For over two hours he applied essential oils, which seemed at the time, completely far-fetched. The treatment was labor-intensive, appeared imprecise and low-tech. But the treatment worked. The doctor explained that essential oils are multi-dimensional, filled with homeostatic intelligence that works to restore the body to a state of healthy balance. When body conditions change, oils adapt, raising or lowering blood pressure as needed, stimulating or repressing enzyme activity as needed, energizing, or relaxing as needed. “Oils possess an intelligence that we can’t comprehend,” he said. “Nature, Mother Earth does not need to read a textbook.”
Rene Gatfosee, a French chemist, coined aromatherapy over a hundred years ago. He worked with volatile plant essential oils, developing fragrances for the perfume industry, until one day he had an explosion in his lab and was badly burned. He plunged his arm into the nearest vat of liquid, which happened to be lavender. To his amazement, the pain stopped immediately, and no blistering or scarring occurred. As a result, he changed his focus completely to the medicinal effects of these oils.
Utilizing the wisdom of plants and trees medicinally pre-dates written history. Early man, as a hunter-gatherer, must have sampled different plants to find out if they were edible and if so, what effects the plants had on the body. He would have learned quickly that some herbs bring on stupor, some enliven, others purge and of course, many nourish the body. A deep understanding and connection would have been formed between man and plant. As anyone who has lived close to the land soon learns, plants have a spirit of their own and can commune their intent if one is open enough to listen to their energetic frequency. In early times, man probably had a much keener awareness of his environment and worked more closely with the rhythms and vibrations of the earth. His sense of smell would be more honed, the odor entering the brain allowing him to intuit the efficacy of the plant by tuning into its vibration and sensing whether it would be a healthy fit for his body.
