Earth Motivator

I wanted to write to you earlier, but admittedly I procrastinated and here we are, drinking the last drops of summer nectar. I have been savoring these last bits of gold. Goldenrod, golden sunflowers, golden grasses, gold(en) finches, golden sunsets. I gather these treasures like a squirrel preparing for winter, placing gold’s warmth, enduring love, and youthful hope in my body’s memory for darker days.

Late summer is blessedly complex. Somehow the energies of the earth are persistently, devotedly generous, while they are also beginning to move through various states of decline. 

It could be argued that it is one of the most challenging transitions of the entire seasonal wheel. We are in the borderlands. Late summer colds surprise us. A subtle nostalgia and early fall depression may set in. A bittersweet awareness of things coming to an end seems to rise with the low-light dawns and the dried plant-bodies in the garden. Luckily there is a certain kinship here, an experience shared by all things.

We are in the later stages of the Earth element season and the beginning of everything falling down. We are no longer flowers blossoming towards the sky, we are no longer in the floaty realms of peak summer but instead we are really feeling our feet on the earth. This is an element of substance, form, and feeling into the solid weight of our beingness. Themes arise related to the harvest, gathering, and digestion, all the while we are drawn deeper into our flesh, our embodiment, our dark soil centers. Hunger, pluck, chew, savor, swallow, ripen, rot, compost down in one long interconnected pathway meant to fill us with life force. 

There are thousands of ways to seek mediocre nourishment, but it is more challenging to connect with what genuinely enriches our lives. The truth is that most of us skim the surface of sustenance from our choices in life, the people, the food, the images, the entertainment, and the other environments we choose to engage in, leaving us with a kind of psychospiritual indigestion. We are taught to be overly fixated on external sources of nutriment, taking and extracting, without focusing on a soul nutrition that fills our true inner needs. 

This can also be a powerful time of year to recommit to how you are physically nourishing yourself with food, tuning into poor eating habits that have snuck in over time, disordered eating, rushed eating, and excess sugar. Sugar may feel like it gives us an energy rush but really it weakens our bodies over time, creating a unrooted, frenetic energy field in the body.

Your body is a vast, rolling landscape of consciousness and hidden in plain sight, the acupuncture points are gathering places of potentiality. My teacher, Lori Dechar, says that  “each point is a poem made up of flesh, muscle, tendon, nerve, word, image, soul, emptiness and a bit of starlight. Like a haiku, each point comes to life again and again, a singular event, a moment in time, an awakening to beauty, a unique new possibility (Kigo).” 

The acupuncture point, Earth Motivator, or Di Ji (Spleen 8), breaks through stagnation, procrastination, lethargy, over-thinking, worry, general apathy, and bogginess, all the shadow sides of the Earth element. This point is a remedy for the overindulgences of summer, allowing us to reconnect with a healthy appetite and sense of deep enoughness in our bellies (and minds). On a psycho-spiritual level, Earth Motivator encourages us to be available to whatever fresh change, growth, or opportunity is arising. Like the golds of late summer, it energizes our desire to seize the day, to rise up to greet life’s challenges with optimistic enthusiasm and to move forward with resilience and grace even when the ground is rough or the territory distant and unknown (Dechar).” 

To find this point, locate your inner knee and then begin to palpate downwards along the medial side of the bone. Hang with this ridge line of bone until you find a divot. It may be sore. You can use intentional acupressure here, or slightly warming, spicy therapeutic essential oils, such as Coriander, Cardamom, or Nutmeg.

I love exploring the spirit of the points (it never gets old after all these years!) and I look forward to posting more about these "somatic geographies," in the future.

In the meantime, wishing you peace in the last notes of the cricket's song,

Kendra

Excerpt from the Seasonal Love Letter: Earth element style, '24

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