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This is Bronwyn Isla, and I'm going to be talking today about the beginning of spring and about the inspiration there, some different rituals you can do to help bring spring more fully into your life, and how to renew relationships, the symbology of food and seeds, the kind of sleep that is best this time of year and the dreams that can accompany that sleep. And then I'm going to end up with a guided meditation to help let go of last year's happenings and bring in the new year. That will be the most highest manifestation of consciousness for you in this moment of time. This is usually the time of the new moon in February and the Chinese New Year, and in many traditions it's the new year actually, as it's a time when the seeds are just beginning to stir underneath the earth. And these teachings are based on the Tong Shu, which is the most published book in the world much, many, many more copies than the Bible and it's actually an almanac which talks about the timing of things.

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So qi in the West is often translated as energy or qi. We say energy, but actually it's more about time. Qi is based on notions of time and cycles as well as energy, but not only that, and my teacher Lu Ming would say that there's two major causes of death. The first major cause is birth and the second one is a failure to live in accordance with the cycles of time, with the cycles of chi and the cycles of the earth and the stars an agricultural society's idea of the correct time for planting. But it's actually a timing of everything from weddings to social gatherings, to burials, to signing contracts, to a type of conduct that's appropriate. And failure to live in this appropriate conduct can cause many kinds of disease and patterns of imbalance in the body. So this is mostly Tong dynasty. That's like 600 AD China medical theory. But as we begin to work with these qi nodes and this timing of things, it's not really like so much a shitting on ourselves, as it is a deep listening to the earth, to nature, to rhythms, and kind of a welling up of a knowingness inside ourselves about conduct that helps us grow and evolve and step into the next level of consciousness that we're ready for in our lives. Actually it's a practice of cultivation.

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So the idea being that health is not simply a measurement of our levels of blood, it's not a biomechanical level of health that you can go get lab tests for. It's actually like are we good people in the world? Are we behaving well? Are we kind to our neighbors? This is actually what is better or more appropriate indicator of our health. So spring, so we're coming out of winter time.

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So spring, so we're coming out of winter time, which has been a deep time of hibernation and listening and inwardness and nothingness, a time void of manifestations and doing and being busy and more a time of silence and quiet and listening to the water element. And at the end of winter, if the yin that is so pervasive in winter, this powerful yin quiet quality, does not at some point yang up, it is more of a spaced out spiritual vision. It doesn't have a lot of yang basically. So spring is characterized by the element of wind. In this way, spring is wind, wind is a kind of a spring tea and this is a invisible inspiration. Wind is like a breath or an invisible inspiration that initiates change in ourselves. Breath or an invisible inspiration that initiates change in ourselves. And we can't really quite see the change yet of spring. The seeds that are stirring are still underground or underneath the snow. They're just sort of beginning to become less acidic and more alkaline and preparing to sprout. And the invisible inspiration of the wind is that which initiates this change. And it's unstable by nature. It can be quite stormy, we've seen lots of storms, and the way that this is mitigated is through gentleness, modesty, practice, patience and actually education. These are the ways that we can develop and stabilize spring chi.

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The spring chi wind is naturally arising out of the quiet and activity of winter and it's important that we don't move too quickly towards the vitality of summer. And this is very endemic in Western culture. There's a tendency to immediately and as quickly as possible escape the winter and celebrate the spring, and this can mean becoming excessive, too early. But the wind? We can think of the wind as this sudden but gentle, warm, descending spring quality that's spreading in all directions. It's like a thawing of the ice, a relief from the cold and the stillness. And this pattern of ascending yang of spring and summer is accretion, it's acquiring and growing. So the true conduct of spring is unpretentious. It's a modesty, a freshness and an openness to life. In the wintertime we talked about the dragons that were in hibernation and the shamans that rode on their backs into hibernation, into the North Alpine lakes, where the dragons then froze, and now they're thawing and they're breaking the ice, that stagnancy and the lack of movement, and are beginning to move, which is what causes these lakes to thaw and the dragons rise up and break the ice and bring thunder and rain and the floods of the rivers of spring.

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So the three months of spring, according to the Neijing, are a time of birth and pervasiveness. Grasses, sprout and trees bud and all living beings flourish in the new dynamic qi that opens up and outward, and people, like all phenomena, are included. The Neijing says that one should breathe in the freshness of spring qi. Since spring is the season of renewal, one must not interfere with new growth. One should offer one's chi to help the new and weak survive and not kill. One should give, not take reward and not punish.

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We're transitioning from this enormous yin at the end of winter to a more diminished yin, and there can still be cold. That permeates our weather because we're not yet. The Yang Qi is not really visible quite yet, but the yin is exhausted and lacks a kind of texture or a boundary. My teacher Lu Ming, would compare the cycles of the seasons to that of people and saying that now, this time of year, the grandmother, the yin, is old and senile and has already begun talking to the other world. She's already starting to transition into speaking with ancestors and ghosts and maybe she's calling you by a different name and she's not quite in this world. But yang is infant. It's infantile and doesn't have a lot of ability yet to actually take shape and form, and it's impulsive, and so we can't really expect an infantile yang to actually do things for us. We're more still cultivating it. So in this way, yin is exhausted and yang is infantile, so there's actually not quite yet a lot of qi available to us.

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So the year begins with tremendous vacuity, and the wisdom of this time is to realize there is very little yin or yang available, and if we act as if there is, it can be very expensive to ourselves and to the planet. If we race around and try to get things done at this time of year, there's a tremendous potential to create chronic deficiency in our bodies. We are all in this situation. There's no one who is exempt from the rules of nature. So this tiny bit of yang that is available to us, the seeds that are stirring underneath the earth, perhaps just starting to poke their heads out, are weak. However, if we cultivated winter well, the yang qi is beginning to become available. The springtime is how we get out of any negative things that happen to us in the winter.

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And the intelligence? This time of year? It doesn't know anything, it's too little, it's too tiny and fresh, it's simply inspired. This time of year is about recalibrating our sense of life. Like being a child, it's very fresh, and so the conduct that is sensible this time of year all begins with the word modest. So the main caution is to not try and use the yang. Even though it may be giving a few signals that it's back, it's not really ready to be used full steam ahead, and partly this is because we want to stay a little bit with habits at this time, to give continuity to the yin and not waste this tiny bit of new yang energy.

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On discipline, it's more about inspiration than discipline, and the exhaustion that we can get from overexerting ourselves now can last for years. So the counsel is to go back to a childlike quality of openness, as we are still in the first moon of February, and train our impulsive qualities a little bit. We don't want to have this kind of attitude, like I'm going to take over the world with this little seedling sprout that I just dug up out of the ground. If we dig up our seedlings now, we destroy them. There's very little nutritional value that will sustain us for a long time, although it will give us the sense of freshness.

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We want to find ways to feel and encourage the growing of spring in our lives. This is a kind of sense of inspiration and morning rising up inside of ourselves. So spring chi has a hope in it, and we can find this hope within our own lives. We can seek inspiration with reading, studying and going to new places, or simply with waking up early, going outside and breathing in the morning air. As we evolve in our lives, we need to let go of old patterns in order to break into higher levels of consciousness. So this is the time for our new year's resolutions. If we don't shift the stale and outmoded ways of being from the winter time, the summer will be difficult and tiring and patterns of illness that we have may harden. There's a wonderful suggestion to build a fire the night before Imbolc, before the new moon, and throw away all of the old patterns that no longer serve us. This is a kind of ritual In the Chinese ancient culture people would walk around with a pretend moon at this time of year.

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These lanterns were originally circles of light and everyone would go out at night with the full moon lanterns on the full moon in February and there was a ritual to have. The poets would talk about having a big enough cup that the moon will be in the cup, and then you drink this moon. This is a reset button for the new year. All the past negativity now can be gone. Wonderful time to renew relationships. It's potent time to practice any kind of acts of renewal and generosity, and this will recalibrate the entire year. So invite over all of your friends and families, host dinners with the people you care about the most. This definitely does not mean partying to excess, but simply eating with the people that you love, and the opposite of this can instigate patterns of illness and arguments. So it's important that everyone is friendly with everyone and no one gets angry or fights and harms anyone else around them During the full moon on February. It's a great time to go out and meet new people and generally give people the benefit of the doubt.

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Seeds are symbolic of this chi node. This time of year, the white sesame seeds were especially seen as beneficial for the blood and black sesame seeds for the heart, and in Taoist rituals black sesame seeds are presented as the food that will placate the demonic. Basically, that means it would control fire, heart fire, any kind of out-of-control blazing liver fire. In India they use black mustard seed instead of the sesame seed and to this day in Taiwan the exorcists will throw black sesame seeds at your house if there is thought to be a possession in the family. So they basically would walk around the home looking for things and throw black sesame seeds at them. Seeds are an important image for this chi node and macrobiotic practices. They sprinkle sesame salt on everything and this is the Gao Mao's Gan Ma Zao.

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Food-wise, one wants to eat small meals more often rather than big meals, and what is available to us now is still in stored food from the autumn and the winter. There's still the bone broths and the beans and the nuts and the grains, so there's not really a special food this time of year. But microgreens can be wonderful. They have this juvenile young, as well as arugula and mustard greens. You can also eat seeds that are toasted and soaked in moderation. The idea is to refresh your appetite, so eat things that are outside of your habits, be curious and modest, but allow there to be a certain kind of recalibration like oh, I didn't realize, I liked dried cranberries, or whatever the thing is.

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As far as sleep goes, the counsel from the Nei Jing is that, to be synchronized with the seasonal qi, one should retire when night turns dark and rise early in the morning. The qi at this time of year is most vital at three in the morning. So if you wake up at that time it's fine, but one would ideally be able to go back to sleep quickly. So it's not a medical problem if you wake up in the middle of the night, if it's at three in the morning. But if it takes a long time to get back, it could indicate a yin deficiency, and the longer it takes to get back to sleep, the more of the yin deficiency there could be. It's good to experience the qi at three in the morning though, because it's very potent, and if you slept through it then you wouldn't experience it. The possibility for inspirational dreaming is coming back after a long time of more deep ancestral dreaming that now the dreams will have less influence from the matriarchal ancestors and more coming in, with the patriarchal ancestors influencing our dreams with more inspiration. Patriarchal ancestors tend to speak more lucidly. With the beginning of spring, the liver, or we say the hun, the spirit of the liver, comes alive, and in the early parts of spring the dreams can be very revealing of our physical and spiritual condition as well as the state of our ancestors.

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As for exercise, the Neijing states one should practice Neigong in the courtyard, wearing loose clothing and untied hair. One should breathe in the freshness of the spring qi. It should always be done in modesty, sessions of 10 to 15 minutes at a time, facing northeast in the morning, and you don't need to follow set movements of qigong or yoga or these habituated patterns or sequences that are, they say, been handed down. It's really about learning something new and about doing what's appropriate for your body. Then the counsel is not sweat necessarily, but do it more often.

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Do it in the morning, be spontaneous, just do a little bit of whatever. So it might be like oh, I'm going to do a headstand and I'm going to do some downward dog and I'm going to do a little qigong and then do a little pranayama. I feel like dancing, just like. Let let it unfold what you wants to happen so your appetite can be refreshed, you can recalibrate what actually is what your body wants, and it takes the ability to trust oneself in order to do this. So just be spontaneous, alone in your bedroom or out in the courtyard in the morning and make something up. Go out on your deck, mix it up, go for a walk. So the idea is to let the yang chi play rather than overexerting yourself, and in this way you won't need to do any more exercise than you actually need to and you won't end up lying to your friends or worrying about your finances. It's like a recalibration of what's actually in alignment for ourselves with food, with exercise, with movement, with our friends, with what we want to actually be doing with our lives. And if we practice too much or too excessively with anything eating, moving, dancing it can make everything else in our life feel excessive.

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And I offer a final visualization to help you move through into the new year Find a comfortable place to be able to sit or lie, take three deep breaths and, as you exhale, imagine yourself in a quiet place in nature. You can feel this fresh springness of wind in your face and a gentle, calm energy. And begin to walk through the forest, through the forest, and as you walk you notice that there is a rabbit hole you decide you'd like to explore and you go down, down down the rabbit hole until you find yourself in the depths of the earth, in the depths of yourself and your consciousness, and you enter through a door into a room, a beautiful room, and in this room you find an altar with two giant crystal balls on them. Them and in the bowl on the left you notice, is a your winter things that happened, all the things from the last year, your experiences, the joys, the grief, the patterns, all of the things from the last year as you go back through that year and you place them all into the bowl, all of the wintry stillness, that quiet, that deep, nourishing yin time. You place all these occurrences and experiences in there and you let them go. And you tap the bowl again with the wand and it turns dark.

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And then your attention goes to the bowl on the right and you look at it and you imagine all of what can be sprouting forth this spring, all of the beauty, the liveness and the things that you want to cultivate. And you pick up the wand and you know that not yet, but when you do tap the bowl, a symbol will emerge that will guide you into the spring and the summer. And so you bring your head over the bowl and you gaze into it and you tap the bowl, see the symbol and, if you're happy with it, take the symbol and place it over your heart. And if you're not happy with it, go ahead and tap the bowl again and do that until you feel satisfied, but no more than three times.

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And then you take that symbol that you've placed in your heart and you bow your hands to the altar and to your inner self and to your guides that helped you on this journey, and you begin to walk out of this temple of your inner self, out through the magical door that you opened to get into this inner chamber, and you find you can quite easily climb out of the rabbit hole all the way until you find yourself in this beautiful expanse of nature and you go back to where you were sitting when you first arrived there, and then you allow yourself to arrive back to wherever it is that your physical body is now sitting and, as you're ready, you can allow your eyes to open, and I invite you to bring out a piece of paper and paint your symbol.

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Do it now rather than wait. Paint your symbol and put it up on the wall somewhere by your altar, and allow this to guide you in the coming months. Thank you so much for listening. I wish you a beautiful spring of the next three months. May it be alive and renewed and recalibrating and fresh and gentle, and may you, if you've been listening to Bronwyn Isla this is my spring begins podcast and you can find more at the website on this link. I love you, happy spring.