Late Summer / Earth Element

Late summer is associated with the Earth element in Daoist wisdom. The Earth element governs our bodies' digestive function. The Yang aspect governs ingestion, and we relate it to the Stomach organ. The Yin aspect is the Spleen, which attends to assimilating what we ingest. The mandate is to transform raw material into nutrients, to transform burden into nourishment. But how do we know what to ingest? How do we know what to assimilate? How do we know what’s good for us, and how much is enough? After the Stomach takes in, the Spleen turns inward, ever listening to the Heart and updating its instructions based on the Heart’s clear connection to spirit. This connection allows us to know what’s good for us, because we know what spirit wants for us. The Spleen assimilates only what aligns with spirit. But if the stomach gets greedy and ingests more than it needs, things get tricky. The stomach meridian touches our eyes, our tongue, our nose, our ears, our brain. It is ingesting everything we are experiencing. It takes that data and brings it down to the Spleen indiscriminately. It loves to take in. And all that sound, all that sight, all that taste, all that thought is distracting. The Spleen has to turn its gaze from the internal knowing outwards to what the Stomach has gathered. And that externalized gaze sets us up for a never-ending, ravenous hunger. A hunger that is not grounded in knowing. It’s a hunger grounded in wanting. Eventually, instead of transforming burden into nourishment, we start transforming nourishment into burden. We are left searching outside ourselves for some unknown truth. We forget altogether that the truth is already quietly in us. We reach for highly processed, nutrient-poor sustenance in our food, our relationships, and our community. It’s a cycle that perpetuates and centers consumption. So what’s the move towards coherence? How do we move our attention from external back to internal? How do we unburden the Spleen from the labor of assimilating for the Stomach, and remind the Spleen that its attention is rightly with the Heart? Stillness. “Do you have the patience to allow the mud to settle and the water to become clear?” Tao Te Ching, Chapter 15 The Heart hasn’t gone anywhere. Our connection to spirit hasn’t gone anywhere. The internal knowing hasn’t gone anywhere. Our gaze has simply moved. If we can sit through the discomfort of the noise, we can recognize that the noise lacks nutrition.