The Emotional Effects of Autumn
Autumn acts on the lungs. In addition to regulating respiration, emotionally, the lungs relate to grief. Therefore, grief can easily impair the lungs, especially in the fall.
The connection to nature is apparent. The grass, trees, and flowers wither. The leaves fall and scatter about. The sight easily strikes a sad chord in many people’s hearts.
For some this sight makes them feel desolate, dreary, lonely, old, and feeble. Depression and restlessness of the mind can occur as a result.
Cultivate Optimism
To harmonize the mind, you should cultivate optimism. Just like a farmer tends to delicate seeds and creates the right environment for them to grow, so to do you need to care for your optimism. It is more fragile in the autumn. Think of the joy of the fruitful harvest instead of the withering crops.
Cultivate optimism
Calm Your Mind
Tranquilize your mind through movement and meditation to get through the more difficult times. Calming the mind will preserve your yin essence, keeping you healthy and strong in the fall and winter to come.
Failing to keep your emotions stable or letting yourself feel excessive melancholy and anxiety can impair the lung qi. Weakened lung qi in itself is harmful, but it can also lead to digestion problems and diarrhea, both dangerous conditions for yin energy.
Express and Let Go of Grief
Grief that is expressed and resolved strengthens your internal basis of health, but repressed grief causes long term contraction in the lungs, which interferes with their role of dispersing nutrients. Fewer nutrients mean illness and possibly even disease.
Virtually everyone with lung and large intestine (colon) problems, regardless of their source of the problem, has unresolved sadness that need to be cleared. Understanding this inward nature of this emotion will help you deal with if more effectively.
Work through and let go of your grief and sadness.
How do You Balance Your Emotions?
The emotion of autumn is grief, loss, or sorrow. Loss can include everything from losing a loved one, a relationship, or your health. When left uncultivated and explored, these emotions can fester and harm you deeply physically and emotionally.
As a gentle reminder, if you need help, it’s okay. Find a friend, family member, or therapist with whom to talk. At the same time, you can do emotional work on your own, and here are two tips to help you do so.
Make Time for Your Emotions
Set aside time each week, or if you’re struggling, each day to feel the sorrow or sadness. If melancholy comes upon you outside the designated time, acknowledge the feelings.
Gently tell your emotions that you have created a special time to sit with and learn from them.
However, right now, you have to work, think happy thoughts, spend time with loved ones, etc.
Spend quality time with loved ones
When your emotions “know” you will create space for them, their voice quiets. Just like toddlers are more likely to run free when they know their parents are always there for them, the same is true for your emotions. Their demanding energy only increases if you do not “shed the tears” that need to be shed.
Focus Your Mind on Your Senses
When you feel especially low, and it’s not your time to sit quietly and feel your sadness, turn to your senses. Overthinking and worry use one part of the brain, while listening, looking, feeling, and smelling use different sections.
Do a 360
When you engage your senses, you immediately shift brain activity and give yourself some relief. One exercise is a 360. Stand in one place and slowly turn clockwise. Label as many colors, objects, patterns, etc. that you see as you turn. Repeat and turn counterclockwise. What looks the same? What looks different?
Feel the World Around You
Another sense exercise is to go outside and feel. That includes using your hands to touch objects around you. It also means feeling the temperature of the air, whether there is a breeze, how the ground feels beneath your feet, etc.
Engage your mind to tune into what your body is feeling.
The Sense of Smell
You can do the same exercise but use your sense of smell. Smell is the most powerful sense for triggering memories.
Therefore, the challenge is to really describe the smell. Do not let different aromas take you to a past memory. (Unless of course it’s your time to sit with your emotions.)
Engage your sense of smell.