Summer
Late Summer: The Gifts of The Fifth Season
Greetings to all my precious people!
There’s a particular quality to these first days of September — nothing dramatic yet, nothing you could point to and say there, that’s the change. Just a cooler edge to the morning air. A slant of light that wasn’t there last week. Somewhere overhead, geese are beginning to practice their formation, long before they actually need it.
We are standing at a threshold. And thresholds ask something of us that the wide-open seasons don’t: they ask us to trust a turning we cannot yet fully see. continue reading
Health is Wealth: The Wisdom of Late Summer
Photo by Rodolfo Mari on Unsplash
Greetings to all my precious people!!
We are in the “dog days” of summer — that long, sultry stretch the ancient Romans named diēs caniculārēs for the rising of Sirius, the Dog Star, alongside the Sun. But even as the heat peaks, the wheel is already turning. Chinese Medicine recognizes a fifth season the West often misses: Late Summer — the transitional time when summer’s extreme Yang, all brightness and heat, begins to yield and soften into the cooler Yin of autumn. continue reading
Speaking Your Heart Outloud
Photo by Oliver Cole on Unsplash
“Courage starts with showing up
and letting ourselves be seen.”
— Brené Brown
Greetings to all my precious people!!
Longtime readers may remember The C.O.A.C.H. Method I’ve shared over the years — five movements I keep returning to: Curiosity (the radical act of not knowing), Optimism (hope as a practice), Awareness (seeing what’s actually true), Courage, and Healing. (New here? Welcome — you’ve arrived right where you need to be.) This week I want to dwell on the one that turns insight into action: COURAGE.
This is where insight becomes action. Where awareness meets the world. Where your authentic truth gets to have a voice. This is where transformation moves from internal to embodied. continue reading
The Medicine of Rest
Photo by Aleksandar Cvetanovic on Unsplash
“A good traveler has no fixed plans
and is not intent upon arriving.”
— Lao Tzu
Greetings to all my precious people!!
In the thick of summer, I want to make the case for something we’re strangely bad at: rest. Real rest. The kind with no agenda and no arrival time.
We live as though rest must be earned — as though we have to spend ourselves all the way down before we’re allowed to stop. But Chinese Medicine sees it differently. Rest isn’t the reward for depletion; it’s how we prevent depletion in the first place. The whole system runs on the balance of Yin and Yang — Yin being rest, stillness, receptivity; Yang being activity, drive, output. A culture like ours runs almost entirely on Yang, and then wonders why it’s so tired. A true rest — even a small one — is a deliberate return to Yin, and it’s how the body restores balance. continue reading
You Are The Magic
Photo by Austin Ban on Unsplash
“Maybe the most important teaching is to lighten up and relax.”
— Pema Chödrön
Greetings to all my precious people!!
We are living in interesting times. For ourselves, our country, the world — there’s rarely a clean, clear signal about what’s beginning and what’s ending. We live in the middle of things, slipping between past, present, and future, partly in harmony and often in confusion, reminded that two opposing things can be true at once. Shift is constant. The emotional clarity we long for can feel just out of reach. continue reading
