Chinese medicine turns to nature and analogy to help you understand your body. Each season is associated with a natural element, a color, a yin internal organ, and a yang internal organ.
Spring is associated with the following:
- the natural element is wood,
- the color is green,
- the yin organ is the liver, and
- the yang organ is the gallbladder.
Balancing your "wood" energy will help keep you liver and gallbladder strong and healthy. This in turn leads to flexible tendons and joints, healthy vision, calm, stable emotions, and overall health.
The Wood Element / ? (Mu)
The wood element symbolizes change. Change is unavoidable, and spring overflows with change. At the same time, it can prove difficult, especially if you are more like a stiff oak tree instead of bending bamboo.
Disease and illness
If you have too much heat, because you are not releasing yang energy in the spring, you may suffer consequences from a wood element that is too strong.
Consequences of a strong wood element
- abrupt, physical sensations that migrate from side to side, or up and down to different parts of the body
- symptoms that fluctuate in terms of frequency, intensity, and duration
- temper tantrums
- strokes
- seizures
- uncontrolled anger: shouting, hitting, committing violence
- drive to plan long-term revenge
An over strong wood element forces wind to lose control in your body. As a result, your emotional control is uprooted, like a tree torn from the ground.
Fallen tree with roots in forest after hurricane
Consequences of a weak wood element - feeling stuck
When your Wood is weak, you may allow others to dominate you. You may even support them in their aggressive or manipulative actions against you.
- lack of follow through
- inability to see alternatives
- getting stuck in negative or non-supportive habits
- inability to find a way to create new goals
- lack of insight on how to accomplish goals
- staying in abusive relationships despite physical and emotional harm
According to Chinese medicine, bringing Wood back into balance and strengthening it will allow for breakthrough and change.
Flexibility
Most noteworthy, when the wood element is just right, you can be more FLEXIBLE! Yin keeps Wood flexible, like a tree that bends during a storm, maybe sometimes losing a limb, but staying pliable enough to not fall over and die.
You have heard stories about people overcoming adversity against all odds: an abused child who goes on the find happiness and success; people from impoverished conditions accomplishing great things; people who have suffered death all around them and continue to move forward with loving and giving natures.
Hence, when someone survives, it's a sign that they have a balanced wood element. The flexibility it brings, and the desire to achieve goals and build something better, comes from this element.
Due to its nature, wood will not give up, even in the absence of positive role models or outside support. As you cultivate personal strength, as you grow in your ability to lead a calm life, full of gratitude and joy, you honor your Wood.