Healing with the Seasons: Summer (Part 1)
Such a buzz of busy-ness this time of year! More hours of daylight and yet not enough hours in a day. Sometimes, I feel like a pup leaning out a car window, with the world speeding past so fast, all I can do is hang on and grin as it flies by. I want to ‘Make hay while the sun shines.’ But I still have pots of little plants on the porch, waiting to root in my garden.
Summer flies. So fast we can miss its unique healing gifts.
So before it peaks, here are three quick reminders about how to connect with the miraculous healing possibilities of Summer.
TOUCH AND LOVE
Summer is the Season of the Heart. In Classical Asian Healing Arts, we see the Heart as the center of it all. It’s the center of our universe – and connects us with all the rest of the universe.
Our heart pumps our lifeblood out to the furthest reaches of our limbs, then collects it back in our center for before sending it out again. That’s the physical role of our heart. On mental and spirit levels our heart expands even farther, sending our ideas and our spirit out to the farthest reaches of our universe. Then we gather and collect ourselves before the next pulse outward.
Touch is what we call what happens at the edge of our reach. We connect, sometimes briefly, with whatever we find that’s come from the pulse of another being’s heart. Love is what we call this movement of our spirit outward.
Love takes us right to the edge of what we can control. We never know just what or who we will encounter from one moment to the next – or how we will respond. Whatever we touch affects us, often in surprising ways!
What touches us affects us, just as we affect whatever we touch. Like it or not, everything we encounter shapes what comes back into our center. This, in turn, affects how and where we reach out next and how ‘open-hearted’ we can be to whatever we encounter next. Consciously or unconsciously, we make choices about this with every beat of our hearts.
On physical and other levels, all of this flows more freely come Summer. Our reach is greater, our movements are quicker. We are ‘warmed up,’ so we can nimbly touch and retreat. With this light, limber touch, we can explore places we wouldn’t dare to go without it!
It’s like tasting the world with the tip of our tongues – as I learned from a bird friend named Brea. She was a parakeet I lived with years ago. She would open her beak and use her tongue to get acquainted with anything new to her. It was a safe way for a small, vulnerable creature to explore new material. Her sharp beak could quickly protect her from anything that didn’t feel OK!
PROTECTION AND COMPASSION
We also need some protection to freely explore sensitive places in ourselves or in the world around us. Some of this is built into our heart’s pulsing function. Every time our blood flows out, it flows back into the protected recesses of our heart. There it collects as we regain control of how and where it goes next. Only when our heart ‘settles’ can we open to whatever comes next.
Extra protection from too much of good things like sunshine and touch come in many forms. Sunscreen adds a lightweight layer of protection to shield us from injurious quantities of input from the sun. Lightly scratching the skin of your arms and back of your neck can fortify our boundaries to keep emotionally injurious stimuli from getting under our skin. We call this ‘Stimulating the Wei Chi’. Try it!
And enjoy exploring the world around you with touch. See where your heart takes you and where your passions connect you with all the beings you encounter. Compassion is the practice of doing this as open-heartedly as possible. This can show up more easily – especially in the Summer! – when our heart is healthy and whole. (Tune in next month for more about healing heart wounds.)
LAUGHTER AND PLAY
Protections like sunscreen and Wei Chi free us up to play. Just what we need come Summer!
Remember how the beginning of Summer felt when you were a little kid? I remember a passage in Ray Bradbury’s ’Dandelion Wine’ about his delight in new Summer sneakers. How he suddenly felt he could jump higher and run faster. That magical, speed-of-light take-off into Summer at the end of the school year.
It may be trickier now for us to connect with that ‘anything’s possible’ feeling of early Summer. Our keen awareness of risk and heartache can nudge carefree-ness right out of our lives, even for youngsters! We may have to go to greater lengths to find ways to ease up and just play.
Games and goofiness are not just fun. They’re excellent medicine for the heart. Spontaneous smiles and laughter are expressions of a heart opening up to welcome something unexpected. This is the single best cardio exercise in the world! So watch for what makes you smile. And seek out company that helps you find your sense of humor if you’ve misplaced it.
I’m not talking about video games, by the way. Or watching sports from a sofa. Only games that include other people at close enough range so you can notice when their eyes sparkle. Very rare through a screen and often easier outside than indoors. Heart-healing humor requires partnership. Laughter WITH others is not the same as making fun OF others.
MEDITATION AND MINDFULNESS
Seeking out quiet time may sound contradictory to other Summer pursuits. But it’s absolutely essential to prevent burnout. Summer is a great time to feel out how a bit of mindfulness serves, by starting a practice or taking and old one out of mothballs. I sometimes call my practice of this mindLESSness. Because it helps lets me notice my mind a little less and my heart a little more.
In Asian Healing Arts we say consciousness comes with communication between heart and mind. The more these two communicate, the more conscious we are of choices we make in the moment. We can, with practice, cultivate ‘higher’ consciousness – and enjoy the great gifts that come with this: The satisfaction of seeing our moment-to-moment choices align with our deepest intentions and being able to partner with others, collaborating for the greater good. Also clarity and acceptance of what is beyond our control. Sounds like everything we ask for in the famous Serenity Prayer, yes? Everything our heart desires, one might say!
Helping us settle and find the stillness in our center is the other part of what our heart does, after all. We draw all the parts of our spirit into our heart of hearts, just as we draw blood into our physical heart. As everything comes to rest there, ever so briefly, we reclaim whatever control we can have over where we go and what we do next.
Modern life encourages us to practice the pumping out more than the drawing in movement of our heart. This strains our hearts, sometimes to the breaking point. No wonder we suffer so much from heartache, heartbreak and, even heart attacks.
Breathing is key to balancing the outflow and inflow of our hearts. So breathing and meditation practices can vastly improve our capacity to do this. This helps us sleep better sleep at night. It improves our attention and focus during the day, and allows us to experience more joy. All good! The effects of even a minimal practice is particularly noticeable in the Summertime. I say you can get by with just a few minutes of meditation per day – unless you can’t find a few minutes to meditate, in which case you probably need an hour or more!
For anyone looking to begin or reclaim a meditative practice, here’s a link to some excellent assistance from Deepak Chopra.
BEAUTY AND DELIGHT
Beauty and love are what Summer is all about. Beauty feeds our soul. Love is how our souls show up in the world when they’re nourished. We can reclaim our childhood capacity to delight and be delighted as the Summer sun warms our hearts. We can boost our health all through the next cycle of seasons by getting out there to soak up enough of this to carry us thru colder, darker times! So put away the gadgets, hold all your ‘To Do’ lists lightly. Be open to surprises and follow where your heart calls you. I promise you won’t be sorry!
Next month’s blog will tell how mid-Summer can help to clear blocks that keep us from enjoying the healing gifts of summer and will include a video of a Summer-enhancing Qi Gong practice.
Cynthia Zanti Jabs, L.Ac., has practiced Acupuncture and Medical Qi Gong for two decades. She can be reached at her Ruscombe Mansion office by calling 443-226-6626.