Though it’s snowing as I write this spring tea club, we’ve recently had unseasonably warm days here in the Colorado mountains.
If you pay close attention during February and March, you’ll notice hints of Spring in the air. More importantly, you may notice your energy shift as creative, yang energy rises. Sprouts emerge from seeds, animals stir from hibernation, the constricted frozen energy of the water element becomes deliquescent.
In the high country, snow becomes more settled and compacted due to warmer temperatures, leading to a change in texture from fresh powder to heavier, more granular snow, eventually transforming into the water that nourishes the seeds that burst into life.
April sees the spring migration of birds, butterflies and animals. Rhubarb, sorrel, cauliflower, sea kale, purslane, lettuce, watercress, and radishes are in season. Wildflowers like bluebonnets, poppies, and trilliums bloom. This is the time of Emergence, Vitality, and Rebirth.
The five-elements open a deep treasure chest of learning. They are a map for following the natural cycles of the seasons.
Aside from enjoying the teas and reflecting on the themes in this tea club, I encourage you to incorporate at least one practice to engage with the seasonal element more deeply.
For spring, review your diet and begin shifting to lighter foods, less fats, more carbohydrates, more greens, herbs to help detoxify, and perhaps a liver cleanse.
Having taken the time for meditation, rest and reflection during the winter, we emerge in the spring with new vision, vitality, purpose and plan.
The early spring is about sowing the seeds for the year to come. We work with the emergent energy to turn and face any aspects of ourselves that impede growth and integrity.
In the plant kingdom, this is the season of birth and growth.
What seeds are you planting? What is emerging for you in your life at this moment?
Face Everything Avoid Nothing
Many years ago I saw the late Vietnamese Zen monk, Thich Nhat Hahn, speak in Taipei. His teachings resonate deeply with me, perhaps in part because Thich Nhat Hahn was a tea lover and shared deep insights into tea.
I was speaking with the monks and nuns after the talk about a painting that was being sold that said “No Mud, No Lotus.” They explained that the lotus flower has long-held a special place in Eastern spiritual teachings as a symbol of enlightenment.
In traditional Chinese Medicine, all eight parts of the lotus plant have a medicinal use.
Aside from its therapeutic value, I believe the lotus holds a sacred space in eastern teachings because the long stem grows out of muddy, swampy places, rising high above the water and unfurling in a stunning whorled flower.
As it opens with the sun and closes at nightfall, the lotus is often thought to be a symbol of life’s ebbs and flows, renewal, and rebirth.
Despite their perceived delicate nature, these resolute plants are quite durable.
As metaphors for the spiritual path, the lotus contains many of the wood element qualities that we work with in the spring. Just as the canopy of a tea tree grows commensurate to the size of the root system, the lotus flower roots deeply in the mud below the surface of water.
For humans, our “root systems” are our core relationships, family dynamics, upbringing, unconscious beliefs, repressed feelings, deepest motivations and intentions, and essential character.
During the water season of winter, we spend time in meditation exploring the deep essential aspects of ourselves so that the intentions, plans and germinating seeds of the spring are rooted in wisdom. A healthy root system allows us to draw up vital nutrients for our growth.
Face everything and avoid nothing means looking at any areas of our lives that we have avoided.
The wood element is concerned with our clarity of vision, which is imparted by a healthy liver and gall bladder. Healthy liver energy supports us in facing anything that the ego wants to avoid, for the sake of freedom and integrity.
The emergent energy of spring speaks to a more wholesome future that we can embrace by facing anything “broken” in our past.
It is not a question of being “right,” but a question of being true to our highest integrity.
Where can you live with greater integrity NOW?
Humility
The forceful upward emergent energy of the wood element can manifest in a healthy person as humility in the recognition of the vastness of life, and benevolence towards all living creatures.
However, the ego can distort the virtue of humility into either false humility or arrogance, manifesting as dictatorial pushiness, self-righteousness, inflexibility and irascibility.
Unhealthy wood types exert their will outwardly, insisting that reality bend to their wishes and whims. A function of ego as filter is to prevent us from ever seeing our actual condition, focusing our attention instead on its own created, and most often flattering, self-image.
Identifying with this false image, we lose authenticity and the capacity to respond in the right way to events from a wholesome motive. The essential principle here is that we can only evolve from where we actually are, and the ego never wants us to see that because it never intends to change.
The process of facing everything and avoiding nothing calls us to humbly embrace an authentic perspective on our actual condition in the present moment for the sake of creative change.
True change requires deep humility.
Lonny Jarrett, in his groundbreaking work on the five-elements Deepening Perspectives on Chinese Medicine, describes humility as the:
“virtue that results from perceiving, and responding to the ever-present nature of the gap between the highest truth that has been revealed to us and the actual gravity of our condition. We exert noble effort in our aspiration toward what is higher while humbly never fixing a position by assuming that we are “there” (arrogance).”
Awakening requires a deepening in the limitless virtues of humility and integrity.
We can assess this depth through the flexibility (wood element), softness, vulnerability and wish for other’s well-being with which we live.