Preparing Instead of Reacting

This week brings “Frost's Descent”, or Shuang Jiang, the last of the six solar terms that make up autumn, the Metal phase, in the Chinese calendar. After this, we move into the terms that mark the beginning of winter. This week is a natural time to prepare for the colder temperatures and the quiescence of winter.

Reacting looks like this: you get hit with your first cold of the season, then you scramble for elderberry syrup and vitamin C. Your energy crashes in December, so you start drinking more coffee to push through. You notice in January that your joints ache more, or your lower back is bothering you again, and you figure that's just what winter does to you. Each of those is your body telling you something after the fact, and you're responding to the damage instead of the cause.

Preparing looks almost boring by comparison, which is probably why most people skip it. It's building your reserves up now, while the weather's still forgiving, instead of waiting until you're already depleted. In Chinese medicine terms, winter draws hard on the Kidneys, more than any other season asks of any other organ. Kidney energy is your deep reserve tank, the resources that carry you through the cold, dark months when everything in nature is conserving rather than spending. If that tank is already low going into winter, because you spent fall running on caffeine and no real rest, the body doesn't have anywhere to draw from. That's usually when people end up sick more often, more tired, achier, and slower to bounce back from even minor illnesses.

This is really the whole logic behind Chinese medicine as a system. It was not built for you to wait until you’re in crisis. It was built to help you to notice the small shifts, a little more fatigue, sleep that's not quite deep enough, a low grade sense of being run down, and to address those before they turn into something bigger. Reacting treats the flare up. Preparing treats the pattern underneath it.

Preparing in Chinese medicine terms means supporting the Kidneys before winter fully sets in since Kidney energy is what winter draws on most heavily. It also means using what's left of autumn's more moderate weather to build reserves rather than waiting until December or January to address exhaustion that may have already set in. This is the whole logic behind why so much of Chinese medicine is preventive rather than reactive. By the time a pattern is obvious, it's usually been building for a while.

I'm putting the finishing touches on a ten-day guided course called Winter Grounding, designed to help with exactly this kind of preparation. It'll be available soon, and my newsletter subscribers will be the first to know when it launches. You can join the list at windingpathguide.com.