SPRING & AWAKENING – GROWTH & CHANGE
The days slowly become warmer and brighter and nature rouses from its winter sleep. It is preparing for a next growth and is initiating a new beginning and cycle. Spring is a surge of rising energy, an expression of life at its strongest. The seedling is bursting from it’s casing, pushing through the dirt or moving around rocks to reach the light. Plants, like the dandelion can even burst through concrete. This growth process is sometimes with ease and joy, and other times with growing pains, which stretch us beyond our comfort zones. Spring represents an outward movement from ourselves into the world.
Spring is also inspiring us to renew, clear, regenerate, grow anew and getting ready for the next evolutionary step. Look ahead and make plans, formulate new ideas, make decisions, and determine your direction, and take action. Be aware of the contribution you want to make.
Questions for the season:
• What seeds (intentions) do you want to plant?
• What is your vision, what do you want to harvest?
• What are your concrete steps and plans?
• What are your gifts that you want to bring into this year?
• With how much joy and passion do you go about it?
Physical correspondence with the season
On a physical level springtime is associated with liver and gallbladder. The liver is the strategic planner of your direction and vision, and the gallbladder helps you to make decisions and gives wise direction. If there is imbalance, your vision might be stifled and blocked, you might feel anger, frustration, restlessness, or passive aggression. It will be hard for you to experience growth, rebirth and your springtime within. If your liver and gallbladder system is strong, you are able to re-adjust and create new visions easily.
If there are no visions and plans there is no movement possible and you might experience confusion about where to go and why.
The physical manifestation of an imbalance and a sluggish liver can result in many ailments. The liver is one of the most active organs and a powerhouse with its detoxification functions. A malfunction can lead to serious fatigue, weight gain, water retention, gall stones, poor fat metabolism, poor detoxification, headaches, tightness in the shoulders and upper back, sides of the body, sides of the legs, pain in the hips, allergies, stiff groin, and digestive issues.
An emotional imbalance can show up as anger, frustration, feeling ‘stuck’, and depression. The liver is also the provider of bile so that the gallbladder can do its job.
If you are having concerns or questions regarding your health, please contact me.
Inspiration for the season:
• Feel the sunshine pull you up and out, like plants and animals do. Feel the life force within you thrust you out of
darkness into new possibilities.
• Begin new things – Reinvent yourself, at home, in your work. Be creative, make things, do things.
• Visualize your intentional harvest. Use spring’s bountiful energy wisely, so that the crops you sow in yourself, in
your work, and in your life are those you wish to harvest.
• Do a detoxification and cleansing program with teas, fasting, or increased raw foods.
Diet Tips for Spring
Note:
People are getting more and more concerned about the possibility of radiation fallout and the need for iodine. Know, that there are foods that contain high levels of natural iodine. The best choice are sea vegetables. They can provide sufficient levels of iodine to help prevent radiation poisoning of your glandular system. Table salt is not a recommended choice for iodine!
Some sea vegetables with natural iodine are:
Kelp, Nori, Kombu, Hijiki, Wakame, Dulse, and Sea Spaghetti.
General tips:
Eat organic whole foods, many fresh fruits, raw vegetables, sprouts and whole grains. The more your body is saturated with quality foods, the less susceptible it is for harmful influences. Combined with a peaceful inner mind and heart your body stays stable and healthy.
If you want a spring cleansing as a preventative medicinal approach, March, April, and May are the great months for it. You might eat less or do a fast. Green is the color of the season and you might eat as much as possible to supercharge your cleansing diet. The spring diet should be the lightest of the year.
Include also the fresh greens that nature provides in great quantities all around you: like minor’s let- tuce, dandelions, nettles, sorrel, and daisy for ex- ample.
• Drink generous amounts of water
• Prepare fresh juices, green smoothies with citrus fruits, pear, apple, celery stalk, carrot and other greens like
spinach, kale, chard
• Eat sprouts from seeds like beans, mung, and radish
• No refined carbohydrates such as white flour, pasta, cookies, cakes, and crackers. They all gunk up the colon and
rapidly increase the blood sugar. The liver helps to modulate blood sugar, so keeping blood sugar low is a good
strategy for a liver cleanse
• No deep fried food, fast and junk food during this cleansing time
• No late meals
• Reduce or avoid salty foods
• Be aware of your eating habits: For many people, emotions are closely tied to food, some tend to eat more when
they are joyful, while others tend to eat less.
• Understand your craving and how various emotions affect what and how you eat. What do you need instead? How
can you nourish your soul’s longing?
HEALING PLANTS
VINE (Vitis vinifera)
The Authority Flower – From Leading to Being Led
Key Questions:
• Are you inflexible and feel you know more than anyone else?
• Do you feel the need to always be right?
• Do you tend to be domineering and overbearing?
Vine people are the born leaders and they are very strong-willed. In a healed and balanced way they are the wise leaders and serve the world.
In an imbalanced way they are the ‘boss’ or ‘dictator’ personality. They insist that others do things their way. They act and think hierarchically, which is an obsolete pattern in our days. It causes more and more trouble in all kind of relationships and seen all over the world, not least in the uprising of the people against totalitarian regimes.
Dr. Edward Bach, the founder of flower essences, said that those who dominate require ‘much help and guidance to enable them to realize that great universal truth of Unity and to understand the joy of Brotherhood’. The imbalanced Vine state loses sight of compassion and fellowship in the sureness of their will.
Analogy in the Vine plant:
Vine is one of the oldest recorded plants. Wild and cultivated vines are found throughout the world where the climate is right. The common grape vine is a perennial, trailing climber. It is usually seen in the cultivated form when it is pruned back to a stubby rootstock. In the wild state stalks can be a considerable length of 50 feet. It needs careful tending and if wrongly selected may bear bitter and unpalatable fruits. The pruned and restrained cultivated vine has a twisted and cramped old stock forced by the growers to their demands. Compared to the free stretching of the trailing stalks of the wild variety it is a harsh treatment. Yet both forms of Vine reach out and grip whatever is nearby, twisting the tendrils to fasten hold.
Vine is a climber that is extremely strong, with tendrils that bind themselves around the host plant pulling itself up by using others for support. It can become several hundred years old (up to 600 years) like a tree but does not have the trunk, so it comes to a position of dominance by a will to expand rather than through a natural stature. The flower is colored green, which suggests a connection to the heart centre, a balancing through the heart. It is in the heart that the Vine state becomes positive and the dominant becomes supportive, the assertive becomes receptive and the demanding becomes generous. In its positive potential it provides, great riches for mankind, like the Vine plant as is grape.
The Bach-Flower essence of Vine is strengthening the mind’s wisdom and heart’s compassion, which will lead to:
• accepting the rights of others and paying attention to their needs
• helping others to help themselves to find their own way
• an understanding, a wise leader, who has natural authority.
Empowering Statements
• I empathize
• I show respect
• I value and support
My heartfelt wishes for you in this new season. Be, who you really are and let your light shine.
Warmly, Lisa
