You can create nurture and support from within. Late summer is the time of Earth Element related to your stomach and spleen in Traditional Chinese Medicine. This translates into better digestion as well as a better ability to adapt to transitions on the emotional, mental, and spirit levels. You are what you digest and then assimilate whether that be food, ideas, feelings, or where you place your attention.
Nurture and Support on the Physical Level
The spleen plays its part in the digestion process and transformation of liquids, blood in filtering out old blood cells and storing white blood cells for immune function. When Spleen is out of balance you might be experiencing issues with digestion, fatigue, menstrual issues, processing of blood sugar, issues with abdominal pain, anemia, edema, insomnia, hypo-or hyper-acidity, gout, or eating disorders particular to anorexia.
If you find yourself in a spin cycle of worry, look at how, when, and what you are eating. It is important to choose whole foods, eat slowly so you can savor and appreciate what you are ingesting. If you find yourself craving sugar for endorphins, know that you are needing sweetness in your life. If you crave sugar and are having digestion issues, you might have an Earth Element imbalance. This imbalance can actually create an increased growth of bacteria that can create greater disharmony in your body-mind system. However, again, this craving is a signal to create a calm, nourishing, and supportive environment in your life.
To encourage healthy digestion and assimilation for energy for your body-mind system, you can also use food and fragrance to support your overall health and well-being. Some of the essential oils and herbs that you can use in aromatherapy such as Frankincense, or cooking with some of these herbs, making teas like fennel, wintergreen, peppermint (spearmint if peppermint is too hot for your digestion); lemongrass, or lavender. Are supportive for digestion of both food and ideas, nurturing and letting go.
To create more tissue and muscle tone, nurture and support your body by taking walks two or three times a day while swinging your arms. This is good for your back and for healing your stomach area. This will also allow you to experience more energy in your body and engage more deeply in the present moment feeling more secure, stable, and balanced.
“Your mind takes its shape gradually from what you routinely rest your mind upon.”~Rick Hanson, Ph.D.
Handling transitions in life can produce worry when you do not feel at home within your own body or have a sense of direction for what is coming next. When Earth Element is out of balance, you can feel out of sorts within yourself meaning that you feel ungrounded, perhaps more in struggle, and disconnected from appreciation andgratitudefor what is present to offer you true support and nurture in the moment.
Shift your attention to what you love, to your friendships, what you enjoy, and what brings laughter into your life. Get in touch with your own creativity, sense of purpose, spirituality, and what brings meaning to your life. Give yourself time for relaxation, sleep, and experiencing beauty within yourself and around you.
“Your mind takes its shape gradually from what you routinely rest your mind upon.”~Rick Hanson, Ph.D.
Nurture and Support on the Emotional Level
In order to create more harmony and balance, it is important to work with transforming the energy of resonance from lack of support to resonance with support within and from the world around you. This imbalance can be expressed in self-doubt and a poor sense of self-worth. One way to shift this material is to work with gratitude for your own life. Become more aware of your body, your journey through life, and the ways you have been able to choose what is life-energizing. Use affirmations like,“I am grateful for my intentions for what I know is right for my life,” and “ I appreciate who I am.”Make a practice of looking for the sweetness in your life as you go through the day.
Nurture and Support on the Mental Level
The same holds true for transitions and change in your life. Worry, speed and pressure take you out of your center. The stress from these states narrow your physical vision and send you into a spiral out of your thinking and problem-solving brain into your emotional and survival brain where expansive thinking is not possible. Taking time to “rest and digest’ allows you to create, sustain, and let go of what is needed to create sustainable and tangible change in your life. When you are faced with change, acknowledge your need for stillness to process your feelings, thoughts, and body sensations to allow you to be more present to create a broader vision of what is possible.
At the same time, it’s important to take a look at where you are overextended in taking care of others and in situations where you attempt to be needed or wanted based on your offering of sweetness. Grounding yourselfcreates balance within that creates true nourishment for your life while setting loving and healthy boundaries with others. This allows you to resonate with being enough while you support yourself moving through life in the moment.
Asking for or receiving support and nurture from others is also another possibility on your palette for coherent giving and receiving. Internal awareness allows you to move towards recognizing and taking what benefits your life and attracting empowered people.
Resonance Repatterning sessions work to create greater harmony within to benefit your awareness, and personal, and relationship coherence. In this time of transition. it is an opportunity to work with the strength of Earth Element to create greater integrity in your wellness and well-being. Experience a personal, relationship, Meridian or Seasonal Repatterning to identify where in your life you can update your resonance with greater support and nurture from within yourself and in your relationships.
Kimberly Rex
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning® practitioner, Person-Centered Expressive Therapist, and Wellness and Well-being Life Coach. She works with people all over the world via Skype, phone, and proxy.
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Expressing gratitude and appreciation for life may seem as though it is easy, however, the process of experiencing these feelings within your body-mind system is often underestimated for their beneficial effects for naturally creating health, more pleasant relationships, and greater learning.
The research is out: Spending time with gratitude internally benefits your body-mind system including your brain and your heart. To invite gratitude in as a steady companion for your wellness and well-being, a shift in awareness and attention is necessary to assert itself into the hard wiring of human neuro-chemistry. This takes practice and diligence so that gratitude and appreciation for life create new neural pathways as alternatives to long-standing bias for automatic survival mode.
The brain has a negativity bias, which is like Velcro for bad experiences, but Teflon for positive ones. ~from Buddha’s Brain
Buddha’s Brain, a book written by Rick Hanson, Ph.D. and Richard Mendius, MD, details the practical neuroscience of happiness, love, and wisdom. The evolution of the brain’s need for fight or flight in the face of danger over thousands of years of reinforcement is an important reason for the brain’s tendency to suspect the worst and remember difficulties long after the danger or situation has occurred. This pattern affects internal self-talk, relationship patterns, learning capacity, and even world politics.
The book continues to build upon the research that, indeed, the opportunity to transform the patterns of negative thinking is within each person’s reach today. The shift in consciousness to benefiting more from positive experiences leads to greater inner peace, self-esteem, heart health, and resilience on a day-to-day basis. By doing so, it is like building an emotional bank account that helps you through days that are more challenging personally and in your relationships.
In order to build the capacity to experience more beauty, joy, grace, and ease within, it’s important to appreciate all the aspects of yourself as they come up. When you feel as though you’ve made an error, or fixate on a problem in your life, take the opportunity to notice something around you that is fortunate, happy or supportive in your life. This allows the brain to associate more than just the issue or problem in your awareness. It starts to build new neural pathways with less stress attached. This is self-compassion in action, and this also does your heart good. When the heart is in a state of appreciation, gratitude, love or joy it functions better expanding the electromagnetic field surrounding it, and this then expands the function of the brain. This helps the brain’s capacity to work with not just the survival or feeling brain. It activates the thinking and problem-solving brain that takes intention into action based on heart wisdom.
To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour. ~William Blake
InJust One Thing, Rick Hanson, Ph.D. suggests that one simple practice at a time builds new neural pathways with neurotransmitters that support better memory, sense of happiness, and outlook on life-based on truly experiencing what is positive in your life.
Here are a few ideas from the book, as well as some from my own practices.
1) Begin with Intention: Start the day with the intention to notice what is different about your experience or day. This can be done for a short amount of time, perhaps during a meal or in a transition time.
2) Change Your Awareness: Start by simply focusing on something that draws your attention visually to a sense of awe, pleasure, or beauty. This can also be done by closing your eyes by focusing on one sound and then changing your focus with the intention to a different sound in your environment you experience. Notice what is different. Choose sounds and sights that bring calm and joy to your heart. By doing so, you create the opportunity for new awareness and create a more optimal flow of energy in your body-mind system to filter your choices.
3) Dine on Gratitude: Bring Thanksgiving into a meal each day, savor the colors and tastes of what you eat. Appreciate what has gone into creating the food you are eating including the sun, the earth, water, people and cook who has prepared this nourishing energy for your body-mind system.
4) Appreciation is In Your Hands: Look at your hands. They are the sub-chakras of your heart. Appreciate all the things you do with them throughout the day and through the years that have been beneficial to you and to others in the world.
5) Drizzle with Honey: To gain the full effect of these practices, allow the experience to stay with you, and fully saturate your experience. Visualize or feel this experience as if honey were being poured through you. Take your time. Make the space for this to stay in your heart by imagining that you are breathing the feeling directly into your heart space.
6) More than Just “Thank you:” Share what you appreciate specifically when you speak to another person and yourself. For example, “ I appreciated the fact that you did all the shopping for the party. It really helped me feel like I’d have more time to get ready and to relax.” OR “ I did my best on that test, and I give myself credit for giving myself positive feedback while I kept working.”
I’d like to invite you to continue on the path with monthly healing modalities and repatterning events from Windows to the Heart Repatterning.
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning practitioner, Master Wellness and Well-being Life Coach, and Person-Centered Expressive Therapist.
