Winter is the Season of the Water Element

Winter is the most yin of all the seasons: cold, dark, and quiet. It is a time for storage and rest in nature, when the plants die back to their roots and energy is conserved. Winter is a natural time for us to rest as well, sleeping more, staying more in the dream world, a semi-hibernation against the cold. It is also natural during this time of year to turn inward, reflecting on life.

Water exists within us as an essential medium in the blood, which carries warmth and nutrients throughout your body, and in the lymphatic system, which drains wastes and helps you fight off viruses. Just like our planet, we are 75% water, and our blood is our private ocean, almost identical in its concentration of salt and other ions to seawater. The urinary and reproductive organs are part of the water element and the flavor associated with it is salty, like seawater. If you crave salt or have a strong aversion to it, this may signal an imbalance in this system. If you have an unquenchable thirst, drinking many liters of water a day, or no thirst, where you have to force yourself to drink, that may also signal an imbalance. A good way to gauge if you are getting enough fluids is by the number of times you urinate per day (normal is five to six, or approximately every two to three hours) and the color of your urine ( it should be pale yellow, not clear or dark). Because of the challenges of the weather, it is especially important during this season to relax, eat well, and stay warm and dry.

Winter foods should be warming and, because we are less active, we must take care to watch our portions, so we don't gain too much weight during the season. A diet of mostly vegetables, grains, beans, dairy, and protein is idea. Fresh fruits are not naturally available around here during the winter and they are considered to be cooling in nature, so their consumption should be minimized (dried fruits and nuts are better for snacks). In general, hearty warming dishes like soups, stews, and casseroles are best. Winter root vegetables like carrots, onions, and potatoes are seasonally appropriate, as are winter greens like cabbage and kale. Ocean foods, especially deep, salt water fishes, come from the water element and provide us with healthy fats and easily digestible proteins.

Just as the energy of the plants retreats into the roots during the winter, many of the herbs that are helpful during this season are roots. For example, marshmallow root is often used for respiratory infections, soothing inflamed mucus membranes and thinning phlegm so it can be expectorated. Ginger root is warming and helps the body eliminate pathogens by sweating out fevers. Ginseng root is an excellent tonic to boost the chi, our internal source of warmth.

Fall Health: A Chinese Medicine Perspective

As the sun descends lower and lower and the weather starts to cool, we enter fall, the season of harvest. Just as our physical work over the past few months results in an abundance of fresh produce, what we have channeled our intentions and mental energy into comes to fruition as well. Like trees dropping their leaves, fall is an excellent time for us to complete projects and emotionally let things go. As the plants die back to their roots in preparation for winter's long rest, we also begin the process of energy conservation and consolidation. We naturally begin to reduce outdoor activities and turn inward, spending more time at home doing contemplative activities like reading and writing. The Autumnal Equinox falls this year on Monday, September 23rd.

Digestion is Like Fire, Digestion is Like Earth

I see so many individuals who have digestive conditions. In order to address the cause of these conditions it is important to understand that digestion is like fire and digestion is like earth. What does this mean? Well, digestion is like fire in that this is how we burn up, or metabolize, nutrients and reduce them to "ash," or waste material. This literally is our metabolic fire, the juice that keeps we warm-blooded creatures moving. We don't want our fire to be too low or we are always tired, with poor appetite and susceptibility to cold. However, we don't want our fire too be too high either, or we end up with heartburn, stomach ulcers, excess thirst, or acid reflux.

On the other hand, digestion is like earth because this is how we dissolve and break down foods into smaller particles so that their nutrients can be absorbed and utilized by our cells. Think of the soil and how anything that falls on the forest floor is slowly broken down and absorbed by the soil and its microbes. This is exactly how our digestive organs work. We use stomach acid and digestive enzymes to reduce foods to smaller and smaller particles and then absorb them through our intestinal walls into our bloodstream. And, just like the soil, our digestive process depends on the beneficial bacteria in our intestines to help up do this effectively. In fact, we actually couldn't live without the bacteria in our guts! This is why supplementing with digestive enzymes and probiotics can be so beneficial for those who have poor digestion.

I started thinking about all of this and its implications on diet just the other day when I came across an article from the BBC, "Did the Discovery of Cooking Make us Human?" It's quite an interesting hypothesis, you really should read it. In the article, the author proposes that if we ate nothing but raw foods, like chimpanzees, we would have to eat around five kilos of raw food per day to get enough calories to survive. Not only that, but we'd have to spend a staggering 6 hours per day chewing in order to properly extract the nutrients from our foods.

Cooking our food saves us from all of that chewing because it breaks down cells walls so that our intestines don't need to do as much work to release the nutrients. In other words, cooking predigests our foods, saving us energy because we don't need to work so hard to digest it. Apparently cooking our foods may have even precipitated an evolutionary leap for us, freeing up energy to power a larger brain, and freeing up time for the development of culture. In fact, once we started cooking out foods our digestive system reduced in size by 20% and our brains grew by exactly the same amount, 20%! As the article states, "Cooking is essentially a form of pre-digestion, which has transferred energy use from our guts to our brains."

History of Ginkgo, Chinese Medicinal Herb

There are many reasons why ginkgo is a popular symbol. Ginkgo trees are not only beautiful, they are an important medicinal plant with a fascinating story. The ginkgo is considered to be a living fossil and is the only remaining representative of the Ginkgoales order, which had 19 original varieties. Fossils from these plants date back 270 million years, putting the ginkgoes on the planet before the dinosaurs. At one time they were common and widespread throughout Asia, Europe, and North America. If you look closely at a ginkgo leaf you will notice how the veins are all the same in width, beginning at the stem and fanning out, and there are at most two lobes. This is quite different and simplified compared to the leaves of more modern tree species, like maples, which have multiple lobes and a central vein that branches out into smaller and smaller veins. Like redwoods, ginkgoes have very long life spans, with some individuals estimated to be more than 3,000 years old.

Ginkgoes were first discovered by Europeans in the 17th century in Japan by the German botanist Englebert Kaempfer. Up until then the plant was considered to be extinct by many, as it was known mostly through fossil records. The tree, however, had survived in Asia in Buddhists monasteries and Shinto shrines, where they had been revered and cultivated since around 1100 AD. These monasteries and shrines acted as ancient nature preserves, offering protection for the trees and conserving the natural landscape around them. Ginkgo is thought to originate in eastern China in the Xuangcheng province, spreading first to Japan, around the same time that Zen Buddhism was introduced there.

Ginkgo is used as a medicinal plant in both eastern and western herbal traditions. In the west the leaves are taken to enhance blood circulation and oxygenate the heart. They are also known to increase the supply of oxygen to the brain, making them applicable for conditions marked by memory loss, such as Alzheimer's. They are anti-oxidant, reduce blood pressure, and inhibit clotting. They are also used for tinnitus, vertigo, hearing loss, impotence, and Raynaud's disease. In the east the seed is favored over the leaf. It is prescribe for chronic coughs with wheezing and copious sputum. It is also taken for vaginal discharge and cloudy urine. The seeds are first mentioned in Chinese herbals published a long time ago, way back in the Yuan Dynasty (1280-1368).

Today ginkgoes are widely cultivated and propagated in both the east and the west, primarily as ornamental landscape trees. They are very hardy and are not easily susceptible to environmental pollutants so they thrive in places where the air quality is poor, such as in New York City, where they line the streets of Greenwich Village. There are even some ginkgoes in Japan that survived the 1945 atomic blast at Hiroshima in an area where all other life was obliterated. All are all still alive today, located in temples or public gardens. Because of this the Japanese consider the ginkgo tree to be a powerful symbol of hope. Though the seeds of the ginkgo are edible and considered a delicacy in Asia, they are covered in a fleshy coating which some consider to be untidy for landscaping. Because of this, the seedless male tree is preferred to the female as an ornamental. This, unfortunately, has made it difficult for the tree to propagate itself naturally, and ginkgoes are still considered to be an endangered plant. Still, for a tree that was almost extinct not too long ago, the ginkgo is doing quite well.

The ginkgo is an important symbol for many reasons. First, it is an amazingly ancient tree. Surely there is an inherent wisdom in a plant that has survived for 270 million years. Second, this is a tree of great beauty. Who hasn't appreciated the ginkgo in the fall, with its beautiful golden leaves? Third, the ginkgo is a powerful medicinal plant. It has been used in many healing traditions and over many centuries. Even today in America it is one of the top ten herbal supplements. And finally, the ginkgo is an example of how humans can consciously choose to help save a rare and endangered plant. This began almost 1,000 years ago with the Chinese Buddhist monks and continues today all over the world where this plant is appreciated and revered.