Liver spring

The season of spring is vigorous and forceful because things have to grow. We need to move like the wind and in fact, wind is the weather of spring.

Spring is the the color of bright green, the element is wood, and the organ is liver. Liver’s partner is the gall bladder.

Anger is associated with the liver. I just read about the roots of anger and it’s easy to understand why there is so much of it because it emerges from: outrage, injustice, injury, lack of attention, lack of respect, and also from the sheer terror of being forced to face the unknown.

Taichong, the Liver 3 acupoint, is called the Great Rushing. It spreads, soothes, nourishes, clears, and regulates. I use it on everyone.

As a personality, this season contains contradictions and it’s easy to see how our feelings get twisted around, run into each other, insult and react to opposing tensions. For some this results in an outward explosion of anger. For others it shows as zero anger, a complete lack of expression, which sometimes leads to an inward block of frustrated resentment. It leaves you waist deep in your own bile, the fluid of the gall bladder.

The best way to sort of manage or care for emotional currents is to create outlets and valves to open, twist, route and eventually direct knotted-up feelings toward a neutral sand pit. Sand can absorb the echoes and reverberations that need to run their course but also have a grounding point. After enough time they become agates and people pick them up for their purified polished nature.

It’s not so much about controlling sharp edges or dull thuds within as it is about allowing them to sit at the table with you and open the windows on both sides of the room to allow for cross ventilation, open release among friends.

Best to be proactive rather than avoid dealing with anger. It will pop up at some point down the road. By then we may be alienated from that part of ourselves and not want to claim or help the little yipping, scurrying monsters we turned away from.

Try to not waste energy engaged in internal battles.

Spring means regeneration and birth across most traditions and the same is true with Chinese medicine. The liver meridian passes through our reproductive organs to encourage new life. This doesn’t always mean the birth of offspring. It is also the birth of ideas through internal vision. The liver connects with our iris, which is a portal for our mental and spiritual eyes to project and receive.

Elements and organs, seasons and senses are a way to pause from mentally intellectualizing the qualities of being alive. It is a way to inspirit the act of daily living. Inspirit is a new word for me and it means “to fill with spirit.”

It’s easy to leave it to others and feel helpless or lost when a broader source is always there, a tangible energy that we have been taught to un-see.

This spring open a fertility clinic in your mind and body to expand, adjust the valves, release pressure, open the pathways, stretch your understandings, amend your soil, rotate your crops within. Grow.