Feeling Fall

One day a couple of weeks ago, I said to myself “I'm feeling Fall”. Though the changes happen gradually, it seems to happen overnight: the angle of the sun felt, the air flowing through my open window at night is cooler, in the afternoon the trees are drenched in that rich golden light that seems to come from underneath. 

It makes sense - this Friday, Sept 22, is the Autumnal Equinox. One of two days in the year when the length of the day and the night are equal. My body has taking note of the subtle changes over the past weeks, but often bodies are way ahead of brains. When the mind finally notices, it sas "What happened to summer?!".

Many people feel a sense of mourning with the passing of summer. From a Chinese Medicine perspective, the Fall is in fact associated with letting go, with grief and loss, and with shedding that which is not serving us currently. It makes sense on a lot of levels that there is a bit of melancholy associated with this shifts in our natural environment. 

What does this mean for your health? For one, it is a time to recalibrate your sleeping patterns. If the long days of summer found you staying up later, now is the time to re-adjust your bedtime to allow for more sleep - one of your best self-care strategies. 

To keep it simple, you can think about the 6 months between the Autumn Equinox and the Spring Equinox (the months when there nighttime hours exceed the daylight hours) as the time for emphasizing more sleep. Interestingly, these months are when we see the worst of the cold and flu season. Could be that our national pattern of being chronically underslept is part of the problem? 

And, if you find yourself visiting feelings of grief, whether recent or from long ago, be kind and gentle with yourself. Give yourself room amd privacy to be with the feelings. Your body knows this is the season of loss, so may bring up a new layer of grief to shed.

Living with the seasons,
Kirstin Lindquist
Owner, Licensed Acupuncturist