Springtime brings an air of possibility, a freshness of potential. In Ayurveda, we say that springtime is the best time to make life changes. Spring is the season of the baby and child, the kapha season—a time of sweet gentle love, of new and tender life, and of drippiness and mud as the snow melts in some climes. Springtime brings both syrupy love vibes and allergy misery in the midst of proud daffodils and swollen rivers. After months of being stuffed-up indoors, spring beckons us to lose a few layers—it’s time to eschew the hoodie, and cast off the unwanted burden of a few months or a few years of stagnancy. It's a great time to slough off all those things that don’t serve who we really want to be and reinvent.
Spring is a great time for a makeover, however you want to define that.
You don’t have to think you’re homely or flawed to want a makeover. It can be about blowing the dust out of the grooves and pits of our physical bodies—get the sweat going! Or it can be about polishing the heart, which is scuffed from family issues or unfulfilling work. It can be about getting serious about eliminating habits that we aren’t admitting are holding us back—too many beers, too much crap food, too much television, etc.—and establishing routines that remix life vibes and purpose. It can also be about having long-overdue defining conversations.
We all take life so seriously and self-improvement sure is a serious topic. We are facing serious issues as a planet as well. I believe our self-worth is deeply connected with the low self-esteem that comes up as most of us are engaged in lifestyles that we know are seriously eroding the potential for our planet to sustain life into the foreseeable future.
You’re going to laugh at me when I suggest this small medicine for these serious and big problems of our planet and ourselves, but I have one word meant to stoke your sense of humor: play.
I believe play to be the gateway to the mystical. Play is the way self-care should go down! Play is about making meaning in your life—and you are the chief meaning-maker! Play is unproductive creativity. Play takes the seriousness away so innovation and discovery can happen in grace, without awkwardness. Play is something some of us gave up too early in life. Play is something some of us have no idea how to do. Play is medicine for an over-stressed, unimaginative world with too few answers.
Maybe play is especially for you if things aren’t going right or you just don’t feel good. Forget the whole “crack the whip” crap when it comes to self-improvement; nothing sticks if it’s not fun or interesting!
It can be a bummer to be in a place of transition, or unhappiness, or disease, or restlessness, but states of discontent lead us to discovery, clarity, spirituality, and so much more. Spring is a reminder that when things die back, there’s a refreshment and restrengthening of life that emerges from the decay. It’s fearsome and quite awful to be in a state of jeopardy. But the pressure of my difficult life experiences formed a diamond-fist of faith in me: The only way to make sense of the losses and pains of life is to know that adversity helps to build the popping muscles of spirit, identity, complexity, knowledge, and luster.
May this spring remind you how to buff away the inevitable smudges and persist in the shine. May everyone's troubles bring them into connection with each other, themselves, lost traditions, and importantly: PLAY.
I love the excerpt from the herbalist Susun Weed's book "Down There," quoted below. I think it’s a straightforward introduction into the art of health care as play. She teases out the layers of potential healing experiences, from sleep and dream work, through placebos and herbs, right into surgeries and MRIs. There's so much out there, and especially in the realm of not-so-serious health issues and preventative approaches, there's so much to play with. Laughter, colors, mantras, smudges, baths, loving relationships, yoga, moxa—even bad experiences can be medicine! People love this stuff because it is so creative, playing with songs, plants, rituals, and more to bring levity to life and sparkle to struggle. Go ahead and give yourself permission to explore the first four steps of the six steps of healing as outlined below by Susun Weed.
Draw a tarot card. Try a placebo. Employ magic. Spark up a smudge. Experience a healer in your community.
Skeptical? Well, you probably didn’t make it this far into the article, but if you did, know that I’m not suggesting using a mantra for a broken finger or expecting serious depression to be lifted via prayer. I’m not suggesting sparing the scalpel of science. I am suggesting however that self-care and prevention are your best bets for longevity and peace and importantly, fun, especially if you aren’t already dealing with serious mental or physical health issues. Life is more beautiful when adorned with the practices of the wise old traditions of the countless healing modalities on this planet.
Refresh and renew this spring with the wisdom of old! I love that statement—we are always recycling, contracting and rebirthing, getting lost and then found again. I returned from India recently and I am full on the richness of life and the tastiness of the contradictions. In India, my concept of what humans are was stretched; people sometimes seemed alien in their abilities and choices, reminding me that we often get bogged down by our short-sighted perceptions of ourselves and our world. India helped me to face and play with the mystique and incomprehensible dimensions of life, and enjoy the succor of the mystery.
Read Susun’s outline of the six steps of healing as she sees it, and read it with a sense of play. Think about it in a meadow of dandelions, ponder it with a cup of hot nettle tea in the zesty spring winds, journal about it while sunning your belly. According to her paradigm, you may have already healed yourself with a subliminal wisdom—let us celebrate that!
There are miracles in the mundane all around us. Play with life and experience another dimension of possibility. Thank you, Susun, for a key to the map of the mystery of healing as you have seen it. Get into the spirit of spring and play with these ideas as you toy with the notion of renewal:
"Six Steps of Healing
(Parentheses suggest a few of the modalities of each Step.)
Step 0: Do Nothing/ Serenity Medicine (sleep, meditate, unplug the clock, don't look at email). A vital, invisible step. Listen to the voice of the Wise Healer Within.
Step 1: Collect Information/ Story Medicine (low tech diagnosis, support groups, books, dreams, divination). We want to know why. Listen to the voices of the wise healers without.
Step 2: Engage the Energy/ Mind Medicine (prayer, homeopathy, visualization, ritual, laughter, reiki, placebos). This is the shaman's playground. It is flashy, colorful, scented, lush. Here we will it to be so, and it is as we will, with harm to none.
Step 3: Nourish and Tonify/ Lifestyle Medicine (nourishing herbal infusions, food, movement, yoga, tai chi, walking, moxibustion, tonic herbs). We create ourselves with every choice we make.
Step 4: Stimulate/Sedate/ Alternative Medicine (acupuncture, chiropractic, naturopathy, herbalism, hydrotherapy, massage). A good place to start when dealing with a chronic problem. Tonic herbs are safer than drugs, but overuse can lead to dependency.
Step 5: Use Drugs/Pharmaceutical medicine (all prescribed and over the counter drugs, all supplements, essential oils). One of the leading causes of death in America is reactions to prescribed drugs.
Step 6: Break and Enter /High-tech Medicine (surgery, MRI, CAT scans, x-rays, injections, colonics, psychoactive drugs, invasive diagnostic tests). Side effects may include death and disability. Think twice about invasive screening procedures such as mammograms.
The last three step are fast-acting, but have harmful side effects. Use them only as needed, and for as short as time as prudent."
- Susun Weed Excerpt from Down There: Sexual and Reproductive Health the Wise Woman Way