Sometimes I formulate my morning tea blend the night before, placing my tea-set on my desk so I’m ready to sip and write first thing. Other days, I blend in the predawn darkness as water boils, fingers caressing rough pu’erh 普爾, soft chrysanthemum, fragrant tulsi. 

My mountains are on fire. I watch the hungry flames lick at my familiar skyline. Fire trucks zip up and down our canyon road as helicopters wheel overhead. I smell smoke, and know what comes next: weeks of gray skies raining ash, then months to years of barren blackened slopes and tree stumps where yesterday I petted my favorite sages and lingered under expansive old oaks.

“Guasha” (刮痧) translates as “scraping petechiae.” Gua (刮) is scraping, the act of pulling a guasha tool across the skin. Sha (痧) is petechiae: pinkness or redness on the skin that can arise from scraping, a result of increased blood circulation to the area. Guasha is one of the many tools in our East Asian medicine toolkit, which also includes acupuncture, herbs, massage, moxibustion, energy work, lifestyle medicine, and more.

Many of us experience busy mornings, juggling personal preparations with the needs of our children and other responsibilities. But it’s important to make time for breakfast, to give your body something substantial to solidly start your day. By making blends ahead of time, you can quickly and easily nourish yourself with either a hearty oatmeal blend or a lighter chia blend, topped with nuts. You

can also mix and match my “power powder” herbal blends according to your seasonal needs and individual constitution. Have fun, create something delicious in bulk, and store it in a big jar to easily and quickly satisfy your daily breakfast needs! 

I love small rituals. Having lived out of a backpack for most of my twenties and still traveling a lot in my thirties, small yet potent packages of transportable sweetness help me create a sense of belonging no matter where I land. On most adventures, I commune with the landscape of my inner and outer terrain with my traveling trifecta of tea, journal, and incense.

My acupuncture clinic is perhaps similar to a martial arts studio. Nobody punches or kicks in my clinic, at least not on purpose, but I support people as they fight through aches and pains from injuries both acute and chronic. After treating pain-related conditions with acupuncture, I often aid recovery by rubbing a liniment, or Die Da Jiu (跌打酒), into achy joints and tissues. The aromatic herbs and precious resins in this formula scent my treatment room like an ancient apothecary, while moving stuck traumas, helping tissues release their stored issues, and lending a golden glow to affected areas.

As the days shorten, plants send their energy to their roots and go to seed, while deciduous trees shed their leaves. We cozy up in warmer clothes, stack firewood, and start storing up our food and energy reserves for the winter. In autumn, we transition from the more active yang seasons of spring and summer into the more restful yin seasons of autumn and winter. We too send our energies underground, sleeping and eating more, and moving and doing less. In autumn, we bundle, store, and prepare for the more fallow winter season ahead, when the world rests.

As our days lengthen into the summer months, we welcome more time with the sun and fire, the Element associated with summer, according to Traditional Chinese Medicine. Going on vacation with our families, playing with kids, and celebrating with friends, we welcome joyous playfulness into our lives, igniting and inspiring our Shen (神), or Spirit.

As we welcome spring into our worlds and bodies, we also welcome the energies of the Wood Element, and its associated emotion of anger. Anger manifests in many forms. It’s a natural and powerful energy that rises up from our values and our sense of self. We can choose to express our healthy anger clearly, calmly, and with integrity. We allow anger’s upward moving energy to move through and out of our bodies, initiating the powerful changes needed in our lives and worlds. Exercise, fresh foods, nervines, aromatics, and bitters can help support this natural movement.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine’s (TCM) Five Element theory, water is the element of winter and it governs the kidney and bladder meridian channels. Welcome to the north, place of coldness, the Great Mystery, that liminal place between birth and death, hibernation, and gentle yet powerful underground transformation. Miles and miles of infinite expansive water flows, seen and unseen, across the planet. 60% of our bodies are water. 

In autumn, seeds drop to the earth and lie still. Similarly, we prepare to hibernate for the winter by drawing inward and consolidating our energy. Traditional Chinese Medicine’s Metal element is associated with autumn. Metal governs the Lung and Large Intestine meridians, with their functions of inspiration and excretion, appropriate storage and release.