Fall is wrapping up, and I want to talk about something I often encounter in treating patients. In Chinese medicine, grief is the emotion tied to the Lung.
The Lung has its own emotional terrain, the same way it has a physical one, and grief lives there. Grief is not just the feeling of sadness over losing someone. Grief is felt when you have any kind of loss: a season ending, a year moving faster than you wanted, a life chapter closing, regret over a path not taken. Fall tends to bring these feelings up whether you invited it or not. The trees are literally letting go of their leaves all around us, so it makes sense that something in us starts doing the same kind of internal sorting, deciding what to keep and what to release.
If you've felt more nostalgic or a little heavier this month, it might just be your Lung energy feeling this time of year. I see this constantly in the treatment room in October and November. People come in saying they can't explain why they're suddenly thinking about an old friendship, or replaying a decision from years ago, or just feeling weepy for no clear reason. Nothing new happened. The season did.
Trying to just power through it with more busyness tends to backfire. Grief depletes Lung Qi, and the Lungs are the factory of Wei Qi, your immune qi. So when grief goes unprocessed and just gets buried, it doesn't disappear. It stays in your system, using up the same resource your body needs to fight off the first cold of the season. This is part of why grief and getting sick so often show up together this time of year. It's not a coincidence. It's the same organ system trying to do two jobs at once.
Physically, unprocessed grief in the Lungs can show up as a cough that lingers longer than it should, a tightness or heaviness in the chest, shallow breathing, or a kind of low grade fatigue that rest doesn't quite fix. None of that means anything is wrong with you. It usually means there's something asking to be felt instead of managed.
One thing that actually helps: give the feeling five minutes instead of zero. Sit with whatever is coming up, name it if you can, even just to yourself, and let yourself breathe into it, literally. A few slow, full breaths where the exhale is longer than the inhale can help move stagnant Lung Qi and take some of the pressure off. It's small, but the Lungs respond well to the breath, which is the one thing you're always carrying around with you.
I write about this side of the seasons every month, the emotional part along with the practical stuff. If that's your kind of thing, sign up at windingpathguide.com.