Tag Archives: Gift

Let Me Sleep On It

Anger, Decision Making, Detoxification, Gift, Planning, Psycho-emotional, Wood Element, , , ,

When I was a lad, my mother used to tell me that an hour’s sleep before midnight is worth two hours sleep after midnight. No doubt she was trying to curb my teenage tendency to stay up late. Of course I didn’t believe it at the time.

Now I see that this notion echoes the Chinese medicine prescription of going to bed by 11 pm. This is so that we are resting during the time that the high tide of Qi is moving through the Gall Bladder meridian (11 pm to 1 am) and the Liver meridian (1 am to 3 am). It is said that the these organs and channels of the Wood Element like to be horizontal during this time of peak Qi.

Another concept that relates to these meridians is the idea of “sleeping on it”, meaning “I won’t make a decision right now but I’ll sleep on the question or problem and decide tomorrow”. This is excellent advice, for it is the Gall Bladder official that is in charge of decision making. By allowing the passage of time for the high tide of Qi to pass through this functionary of decision making, the answer or solution usually looks clearer the following morning.

A particularly thorny problem or decision may take more than one sleep, but don’t put the decision off too long. Procrastination is the other side of rashness, and both states can be pointing to an imbalance in the Wood Element. A balanced Wood provides us with the capacity for wise judgement followed by considered, appropriate action.

The season of spring, when the high tide of the year’s energy is passing through the Wood phase, can provide us with more than usually significant challenges in the areas of planning, decision making and taking action. If this describes you at the moment, then consider it a call to support your Wood. Go early to bed, eat green and sour foods, take herbs and supplements to gently cleanse the organs of liver and gall bladder. Avoid alcohol and rich, fatty food. Look at the emotion of anger (over-expressed or suppressed) and how that may be injuring these organs. Most of all, Wood likes to move, so get plenty of exercise.

At the level of spirit, the spirit of Wood is the hun, the ethereal soul. During the daytime the hun resides in the eyes, helping us to see how we can best act in alignment with our soul’s direction. But at night the hun descends to the Liver where it organises dreams that are beneficial to our soul. Sleeping soundly during Liver time (1 am to 3 am) is essential to that purpose, while sleep disturbances during that time are pointing to issues that relate to Liver.

All this talk of Liver reminds me of another saying, this time a Russian proverb: “The morning is wiser than the evening.” While I suspect this advice may have something to do with the nocturnal consumption of vodka, it is nevertheless another reminder of the clarity that can arise from just “sleeping on it”.

We’ll have fun fun fun

Fire Element, Gift, Heart problems, Joy, , ,

(till her daddy takes the T-bird away)

t-bird-girl

 

In the final blogpost for 2016, we look at one of the gifts of the Fire Element. Fun!

 

Years ago I made a new friend and early on in our friendship she asked me, ‘What do you do for fun?’ I had never been asked that question before and it actually took some thought to answer it. Lately, as I’ve been thinking and writing about the Fire Element, I have been asking others the same question and they, too, have to think about it for a while. First of all we have to think about what fun means. Something amusing, pleasurable and enjoyable. Something that is entertaining, diverting or comical. But above all something that is light-hearted and brings happiness. Then we think of the ways we seek to bring this sense of fun into our life.

In our fast-paced modern world, we can sometimes get very serious about taking care of the many strands of life and forget to have fun. The Heart needs to be tended and one of the ways to do that is to engage in activities that bring pleasure, amusement, laughter and light-heartedness.

Five Element acupuncturist Neil Gumenick offers this advice:

Have fun on a regular basis, even if you have to work at it at first. Make it a priority – schedule your fun, if that’s what it takes. Don’t compromise. Consider fun as important to your well-being as work or anything else you do.

Summer is a great time to work on your fun. For one thing there is just so much fun stuff happening in the summer, from parties and barbecues to fairs and festivals everywhere you look. Haven’t you noticed how many events there are on the same weekend in summer? The energy of the Fire Element simply suffuses summer. It calls forth and supports anything that sustains and heals the heart.

Here’s a suggestion: find one thing that you’ve always wanted to do for fun but never got around to and find time to do that this summer. Your heart will thank you.

skydiving