I have spent a good part of today going back and forth between writing what you are now reading and tending to the fire in my wood stove. Here in Northern Norway we are still in mørketid or “the dark time” where the sun does not rise for two months. A lot of my mørketid days are spent by this wood stove, which I find recentering —it feels meaningful to be able to create light and heat in a time of year where both are limited. Although I exercise caution with the use of technology in my life, I like to remember that fire too is a form of technology: a means by which we manipulate our natural environment to make it more suitable for survival and/or comfort. By this definition, it is true that most forms of healthcare are also technologies, including remedies that we consider to be natural or traditional.
The question is not whether or not technology is good or bad in some essential way, but how aware we are of its effects on us and if we are ultimately okay with them. Does whatever technology we are using help bring us into better equilibrium (thus giving us more space to connect with what we deem is important) or is throwing us more off balance? The winters in Tromsø are wet, cold, and dark, and so building a fire helps me find balance during this time. But it’s not a perfect remedy. I tend to have dry skin by nature, and so after several hours in a fire-warmed room, I usually have to use lots of moisturizer afterward. We humans are resourceful; we constantly find ways to correct for imbalances in our environment, which is always changing. The biggest problem, in my humble opinion, does not come from the fact that we have this tendency, but that we also have the tendency for over-reacting and thus over-correcting.
If Instagram is any indication of the latest wellness trends, there appears to be a growing awareness of how disconnection from nature, particularly how living out of synch with the seasons in post-industrial times, affects our health and wellbeing. While I don’t believe we can ever be out of relationship with the rhythms of the earth, we can certainly be numb to them and ignorant as to how they affect us. When we expect life to unfold progressively as if the the cycles of death and rebirth on this planet were something to conquer rather than something to joyfully participate in, it sets us up for disappointment and causes us to live in ways that make us unnecessarily sick.
Since seasonal living is becoming such a popular topic in yoga classes and wellness workshops, I thought I’d share what eastern traditional wisdom recommends when it comes to adjusting one’s life to be in better harmony with the seasons. A lot of modern yoga teachers will reference wisdom from Ayurveda (it’s sister healing science), but then break it down into overly simplified and instagrammable takes, diluting the complexity of the medicine, which at its heart is about understanding oneself in relation to all things, not a decontextualized set of tips. Mostly this is because yoga teacher trainings offer only brief introductions to Ayurveda, which is a science (yes, a science) that takes years to fully understand. I am still learning new things every day about these traditional systems since I embarked on my journey to formally study them several years ago.
In addition, I thought I’d offer some wisdom from how locals in the Arctic live throughout the seasons, where the weather is so extreme that failing to make seasonal adjustments has more noticeable health consequences than it does in other places. While much of eastern medicine and philosophy cautions against living in extremes, I find that this place has been a wonderful teacher in how to find inner harmony in a chaotic environment.
Elemental Harmony vs. Mimicking The Season
Something I think the wellness community wrongly emphasizes is the idea that in order to be well, we must always mimic what nature is doing, and can never make adjustments that energetically oppose it. Advice such as “In the winter, nature is resting so you should too” or “Only be awake when the sun is up” actually goes against the spirit of traditional wisdom, because they encourage memorizing a to-do list and applying it blindly rather than learning to pay attention and respond to the unique set of circumstances facing you in any given moment. When and how much you should sleep not only depends on the season, but it depends on the time of the day, your latitude and how much sunlight you get, your unique constitution or dosha (some constitutions need more sleep and rest than others), and other circumstances in your life. And in many cases, the better approach is to balance out the elements which are thrown off balance by the season, by doing the opposite.
For example, holding all other things constant, it is better to spend more time relaxing outdoors, preferably in the shade, when the sun is hot and bright. That means if you have time for long vacation every year like we do in Norway, it’s better to take it in the summer instead of the winter, which is what many people here do. We naturally have lower energy in the winter, and while it is good to be aware of that and not try to push ourselves too hard, it also important to not lean too deeply into rest when it is very dark outside, and to rebalance ourselves by gaining some momentum to move and generating heat in our body to offset the seasonal sleepiness. This is why outdoor winter sports, like cross country skiing, tend to be very popular in Northern Norway at this time of year.
Instead of being formulaic, the eastern traditional medicines encourage developing a consciousness of the five elements in order to gain insight into what’s happening at any given moment, so that one can make adjustments when certain elements are out of balance. The five elements are a way of categorizing phenomena, which allows us to make decisions at the pattern level by simplifying the process of working with many different individual and system-level variables simultaneously in an ever-changing system. The seasonal changes inherently bring with them certain imbalances, and these imbalances feed into any other existing imbalances we are experiencing, which can lead to disequilibrium (disharmony) if things tip too far in any one direction.
What are the Five Elements?
The five elements are the way in which eastern traditional medicine systems classify all phenomena, including health and disease. In Ayurveda the five elements describe the qualities of phenomena, from subtle (less material) to dense (more material). The first element is Ether and it represents space, followed by Air, which represents gases and movement, Fire which represents heat and metabolism, Water which represents fluid matter, and Earth which represents solid matter. In the human body, Ether is present within body cavities; Air consists of the respiratory gases (oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitric acid) and electrical energy (the charged particles which are responsible for nervous system signaling); Fire corresponds with thermal and chemical energy as well as molecules like hormones and neurotransmitters; Water represents body fluids, and Earth represents the solid parts of the body like bones.
In Chinese medicine the five elements are Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. When noticing that there are both five elements in Chinese Medicine and in Ayurveda and that three of them have the same name, it might be tempting to want to map them 1-1 in order to collapse the into one system. However, I recommend not doing this and respecting the two as different, yet potentially complementary systems. This is because the Ayurvedic elements describe the qualities of phenomena — how material or immaterial they are, while the Chinese five elements describe the way energy moves in and out of living systems — the dynamic laws by which phenomena transform into other phenomena. (If one wants to build a more accurate bridge between Ayurveda and Chinese Medicine, the five Prana Vayus in Ayurveda map more closely than the five elements do onto the Chinese five elements).
For example, take the process of digestion and metabolism: first we take in food by eating it (the Metal element), then we digest it (the Earth element), then we metabolize that energy and use it as fuel for the body (the Wood element) or as fuel for the mind (the Fire element), while eliminating what we don’t need (the Water element). In addition to food and oxygen, Chinese Medicine claims that we digest non-material things like mental, emotional, and spiritual energy in the same way — we take things in, we process them, use part of what we process, and eliminate the rest.
In fact, in the meridian theory of Chinese Medicine, food not only contains material energy, but also immaterial energy called qi, present in all things, which we are consuming and metabolizing all the time. While qi as a phenomenon is not accounted for within scientific materialist frameworks of biology, I caution one against rarefying it into a purely spiritual phenomena — in both daoism and yoga (where it is called prana) it is the bridge between the material and immaterial, and very closely linked with the physical body. It is not a supernatural thing to believe in or a primitive explanation for something that has now been solved by science, it is something that one starts to experience with a contemplative practice or mindful forms of movement like yoga or qi gong.
In
’s latest post in her publication The Pamphlet, she talks about how the quantum physicist Schrödinger, conceptualized how living systems worked with energy. Her description here is very similar to how Chinese Medicine practitioners think of qi. In fact, it is within physics, not biology, where I find the most overlap between Chinese Medicine and modern science. From Kristin’s post:In 1943, Erwin Schrödinger, the chain-smoking “is the cat in a box or not” pioneer of quantum mechanics, diverged from physics into speculative biology and delivered a now-legendary lecture titled, What is life? If you zoom out, he mused, what’s the special sauce that makes an organism appear to be alive?
His answer was original and counterintuitive: To Schrödinger, the essence of our aliveness is not that we eat, drink, and bonk. It’s that we succeed in freeing ourselves from entropy. We consume highly-ordered structures, and continuously rid ourselves of disorderliness.
Here’s another way to think of it: We get more than energy from food. From an energy perspective, a broccoli calorie is the same as a pancake calorie, but the order or information in these two foodly structures is different. When someone casually mentions that they’ve switched from a diet of processed junk to whole foods, what they’re actually saying is that they’re now consuming more order—more negative entropy.
The five elements in Chinese Medicine were derived from observing the energy dynamics present in each agricultural season. Wood represents the sprouting and growth of crops (Spring), Fire represents the maturation of crops (Summer), Metal represents the harvesting of crops (Autumn), and Water represents a break in the growing season, where the planeter make repairs on the farm, and plans for next season (Winter). Earth represents the transition between one season to the next — the time in April where the weather flip-flops between snow and warm weather, or the time in early September where it fluctuates between a windy fall day and a warm summer one.
In Ayurveda, certain elements predominate in certain seasons, where the five elements are condensed into three doshas. In the late winter/early spring the earth and water elements predominate (Earth + Water = the Kapha dosha), in the late spring and summer the fire element predominates (Fire + a lil’ Water = the Pitta dosha), and in the autumn and early winter the Space and Air elements predominate (Space + Air = the Vata dosha). When certain doshas predominate, it is better to balance them out with lifestyle practices that reduce them while simultaneously increasing the less dominant elements, rather than add more of what nature already doing. However, to what extent one should do this depends on their own constitution, or the unique way the doshas and elements are dominate/less dominate in their own genetic makeup. Both these things must also be balanced with way the elements are expressed within one’s own culture and local environment. For example, the Vata element is very predominate in Western culture, and it’s something we should always be aware of no matter what the season is. Therefore the seasons are important factors for our health, but aren’t responsible for everything.
Sowa Rigpa (traditional Tibetan or Himalayan medicine) uses the Ayurvedic five element system and the three doshas and uses the Chinese Medicine five element system, and incorporates them both into its overall lens on health, which is what I also like to do. One of the things I love about Sowa Rigpa is that it is not hesitant to take wisdom from other culture’s systems, and it is not hesitant to recommend adapting its wisdom to fit the local culture and the ecosystem of the practitioner. For example, substituting locally grown western herbs for eastern ones is emphasized at the Sowa Rigpa Institute, where I am currently studying. Adapting the wisdom of Sowa Rigpa (alongside Ayurveda and Chinese medicine) to fit the culture and ecosystem of Scandinavia is one of my heart projects.
Seasons and elements are the theme of 2024
In 2024, The Body Electric will focus on the seasons, the elements and the doshas, drawing on and comparing wisdom across the three eastern medicinal systems. Starting with late winter, look out for a post each season where I discuss how the season can potentially throw our bodies, minds, and energy balance, and adjustments one can make to live in better harmony with our ecosystems, culture, and ourselves.
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Thank you for this Christina! Over the past few years, much to my surprise I've been pulled into the seasonal flow more and more. Not only that my experience naturally takes this seasonal shape, but that the seasons draw more out of me than I could have found another way. Really appreciate your clear, concise orientation to these deep knowledge systems - their overlap and differences, the space you create for both rigor and nuance, and especially the beautiful nitty-gritty of your evolving practice. Excited to hear more this later winter!