In Traditional Chinese Medicine, summer is the season between the expansive yang energy of spring, and the inward yin energy of fall and winter. There are a few weeks at the end of August and the beginning of September where we are in what TCM calls late summer or “Indian summer”. This season is all about grounding yourself and digesting or processing your emotions. Emotions often have a physiological effect on the body and can be felt in the belly. The term “go with your gut” implies that intuition can be determined by feelings in the gut, and there is deep truth to this phrase. In “Unwinding the Belly: Healing with Gentle Touch”, Allison Post and Stephen Cavaliere discuss the effects breathing from the belly have on processing and understanding emotions. Late summer is the perfect time of the year to learn these techniques to support the body as the seasons change.
The spleen, stomach, and pancreas are associated with late summer, and there are many ways to support these organs. This includes: proper diet, maintaining balance, exercise, and breathing. Post and Cavaliere also suggest that there is a connection between the belly organs and intuition, and that the notion of intuition is, in a sense, the recognition of emotions and external stimuli felt within the belly. They encourage the following ideas:
Listen to your body. Since late summer is the time before fall where energy turns inward, now is the time to begin the process of turning inward and processing your emotions.
The center is essential with health, both emotional and physical, because the center houses the organs responsible for absorption and transportation of nutrients and feelings.
It is important to nourish our bodies the best we can so that our organs can function their best and so that we feel our best.
Understanding when the body is responding negatively to an improper diet and then changing your diet to better suit the body is the beginning of reconnecting to our center.
Emotions are the connection between the brain and gut. The belly digests emotions as well as food and can be either nourished or damaged by what lies there.
Emotions that we feel in our stomach- butterflies are excitement or anticipation, heartbreak is heartache, fear is felt as the rapid beating of the heart or the desire to urinate, worry eats at the stomach, and jealousy wastes the liver.
If unresolved negative emotions are held inside too long without resolution, internal tissues, muscles, and fascia become stiff and blocked, inhibiting these organs from functioning their best.
Unresolved emotions can cause stress, high blood pressure, and even the hardening of arteries.
Positive feelings like excitement, joy, love, and happiness are also felt within the belly.
The initial attempt to alter emotions is to change our thoughts, but you can not think feelings away, you have to feel them.
Exercise the core to strengthen the core.
Post and Caveliere also teach the benefits of breathing from the belly, and how when we hold emotions in, we tend to constrict our breathing as well. Opening up our breathing, breathing fully and deeply, and feeling the belly expand brings all the feelings stored there to the forefront. They believe that changing the way we breathe is another way to reconnect to our core and the benefits are vast.
In her experience, whenever Allison Post met with a patient who was experiencing difficulties with digestion, movement, connecting with her body or emotion, or with healing, there was also an issue with the way the patient was breathing.
Bringing simple awareness to your belly and how it feels immediately relieves tension and stress.
Imagine constricting air flow and panting through life, and then imagine allowing yourself a strong and healthy air flow. Breathing is synonymous to living.
Inhibiting breath is learned, and relearning how to breath is an essential step towards becoming comfortable in your body again.
Breathing from the belly increases pressure below the diaphragm, creating a vacuum in the lung cavities. This causes air to rush to fill the void, providing ample oxygen.
Panic breath occurs when the diaphragm is pulled upwards on the inhale, creating a weaker vacuum, filling just the top part of the lungs, allowing insufficient oxygen.
Using touch is a technique to learn the feel of your belly and the points of tension or where you have difficulty filling with breath.
The circuit of healing: stimulating the skin accesses subtle energies within the body. The nerves in the skin contain information about the internal stress levels of the body. This information is sent from the fingers to the areas of the brain that process these internal levels. Gentle touch creates a feedback loop between the body and the brain.
Give yourself time to learn your body, rushing it can break the circuit.
Delve deeper and stimulate the abdominal lymph nodes. Place your hands to the side of the navel and feel the vertical creases that lie on each side of the torso. Gently press deeper to stimulate the lymph nodes, all the while breathing deeply.
Stimulating this spot releases waste stored in the nodes, working like a filtration process.
How to belly breathe:
Lie on your back with your knees up, either on your bed or the floor. Make sure your knees are elevated, but not being supported by the hips.
First, draw attention to the way you are currently breathing. Are your breaths deep or shallow, do they flow or get stuck in your throat?
Next, bring your attention to your spine, and connect your breathing to the way your back feels on the floor.
Then, place your hands on your belly, index fingers pointing towards each other, but keep your elbows on the floor. Inhale and feel your belly rise against your hands, then exhale and feel your hands gently fall.
Attempt with each inhale to breathe in more air, and feel the expansion from your hips to your rib cage. Try to inhale and exhale without expanding the chest.
Inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth.
In these days between the busy and the slow, take the time to reconnect with your core, breathe deeply, and let yourself feel everything you have been holding inside. Feed your body the proper nutrition to allow proper digestion of both nutrients and emotions. The better you feel physically, the easier it will be to process your emotions. Try bringing attention to your breathing, and see what awareness comes to the forefront of your consciousness to allow yourself to heal.
References
Cavaliere, Stephen and Post, Allison. “Unwinding the Belly: Healing with Gentle Touch.”
Pulsifer, Jeremy. “Late Summer: The Fifth Season”. Retrieved from https://www.yinovacenter.com/blog/late-summer-the-5th-season/.
“Eat with the Seasons: Late Summer”. Retrieved from https://fiveseasonstcm.com/blogs/traditional-chinese-medicine-101/eat-with-the-seasons-late-summer.
“Late-Summer Health: The Chinese Medicine & Taoist Way”. Retrieved from https://www.wuweiwisdom.com/late-summer-health-tcm-taoist-tips/