As you study Chinese Medicine, you will quickly learn that it is a medicine based in paradox. That is why, when asked to write a blog post about the Heart for Valentine’s Day mid-February, I smiled, knowing that yet again I would have the opportunity to reflect upon some righteous paradox. If you’ve read the last few entries from our blog, or any writing that has to do with seasonal medicine, you’ve learned that in the season of winter we are met with the invitation to go within and to cultivate our rooting system before we arrive in the emergence of springtime. Just as we need to know how to keep enough logs on the fire on a snowy day, it’s important to explore how to keep ourselves warm and tend to the matters of our Heart this time of year.
First, just to jog our seasonal memory, we remember that the Heart is associated with the season of summer, the element of fire, the expression of joy. The warmth of the Heart can be heard in the sound of authentic laughter, seen in the twinkle of the eye, felt in the warmth of loving touch, and shared through a spark of connection. As quickly as fire comes, it can vanish.
Teachings from the Chinese medical texts talk about the Heart as the sovereign ruler, the one for whom all the organs and body systems exist and perform their functions. The Heart is said to be a clear and quiet place in order to house our magic power (Tessenow & Unschuld, 2011). The Heart is our capacity for presence, and stripped away of all of our projections, it is simply an empty space where the spark of life happens in us. Often times, when we are experiencing challenges of the Heart, we are experiencing too much or too little warmth. Too much warmth can feel like chaos, like we’re being consumed and loosing our footing in our lives. It can feel like anxiety, obsessing about whether someone likes us, or a constant need for engagement with others that has us avoiding being with ourselves. Too little warmth, can feel like depression, isolating ourselves when we are secretly longing for connection, or a lack of joy and passion. This spectrum of warmth reminds us that fire is not a static influence in our lives, and just as our Heart calls us to be in the present moment, fire is always asking us to recalibrate and readjust in response to our internal and external environment.
In this way, the pause of winter is the perfect time to check in with our heart. When things aren’t so heated or moving quite so fast, we can use the pause to listen deeply for the quiet space of our Heart; to hear where we might be in need of a little more or less warmth; to hear the life happening in us.
So, with that, I will leave you with a poem, written from my Heart, this winter…
Where Love is Leading Now
If we are present,
if we are open,
if we are willing to learn,
Love kisses open the bars of our cage,
Quiets the eerie pitch of the terror of connection,
Ushers us forward and upward,
Inward and outward and downward,
all at the same time.
Without discretion, Love reminds us that we are Longing,
that we are Connected,
that we are Alive.
If we let it, Love takes us into a clearing
Into new space
And if we aren’t eager to make the new space old;
to build another cage with the scraps of the old melted one,
Love will show us what to do next.
So as we are able,
we can still our plans,
and listen for the low hum
of where Love is leading now.
Happy fire keeping, my friends <3
Tessenow, H., & Unschuld, P. (2011). Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen: An Annotated Translation of Huang Di’s Inner Classic – Basic Questions, 2 Volumes, Volumes of the Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen Project (pp. 155-162). Berkeley: University of California Press.
