by Carmen Cicotti, LMT, CAcP, Senior Faculty
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Here in the Pacific Northwest, late summer is a season of extraordinary abundance.
Gardens that began with tiny seeds are overflowing. Berries, tomatoes, squash, apples, pears, herbs, and flowers have reached their fullness. Fruit hangs heavy on the branches. Seeds are forming. The landscape still carries the warmth and expansiveness of summer, yet something is changing.
What has been growing outward is beginning to gather itself toward ripeness.
In Five Element medicine, this is the movement into Earth.
Earth brings us to center. It is associated with nourishment, transformation, digestion, assimilation, and our capacity to receive what life offers and make it part of ourselves.
One of the things I find myself thinking about during Earth season is that abundance and nourishment are not necessarily the same thing.
We can have an overflowing garden and still need to choose what we will eat. We can be surrounded by food, information, relationships, responsibilities, and opportunities and still feel undernourished.
The Spleen and Stomach receive what comes from outside the body, transform it, extract what is useful, and make that nourishment available to the whole system. This gives us a beautiful way to think about our lives as well.
What are we taking in?
What can we digest?
What truly nourishes us?
And what are we carrying that is still waiting to be transformed?
Yi: Digesting More Than Food
The spirit of Earth, Yi, is often translated as thought or intention, yet its landscape reaches into clear thought, reflection, integrity, devotion, and our ability to make meaning from experience.
We digest not only what we eat, but what we live.
Healthy Earth allows us to take in an experience, stay with it, learn from it, and allow it to become part of our understanding. When Earth becomes burdened, this same capacity can become worry and rumination. Instead of digesting an experience, we continue to chew on it.
Earth asks:
What would allow this experience to become nourishment rather than something I must keep carrying?
And once the harvest is gathered:
What will we preserve?
What will we share?
What becomes seed for another season?
Chiron, Ceres, and the Medicine of Nourishment
As late summer moves into Virgo, I find Chiron particularly resonant with the Earth landscape.
Within Acutonics, Chiron carries us into healing, service, stewardship, and the ways our lived experience can become part of the medicine we offer.
There is something deeply Earth-like about service. We tend, feed, care, support, and respond to what is needed. Yet sustainable service grows from nourishment.
How has what I have lived become medicine?
Our experiences become medicine as we digest them, integrate them, and discover what they have taught us.
Ceres brings another dimension to Earth through nourishment, agriculture, harvest, mothering, fertility, loss, return, and the cycles through which life continually feeds life.
The soil feeds the seed.
The seed becomes the plant.
The plant produces food.
We tend the garden, and the garden eventually feeds us.
Earth reminds us that nourishment is reciprocal.
For many of us, giving is easier than receiving. Earth asks whether nourishment can travel in both directions.
Can I recognize what sustains me?
Can I allow myself to receive it?
Listening to Earth Through Acutonics
Several Acutonics frequencies speak beautifully to this season.
Earth Day carries the generative and fertile quality of the living Earth, resonating with ripening, vitality, abundance, and harvest.
Earth Day and Chiron together create an interval of a fourth. The fourth offers structure, grounding, and stabilization while bringing together the generative qualities of Earth Day and the healing, integrative qualities of Chiron.
Ceres, as a high-frequency asteroid fork, brings nourishment and sustenance into the field.
And Ohm brings us home.
If Earth Day speaks to the abundance Earth creates, Ohm reminds us of the center from which that abundance can actually be received.
After the growing, tending, harvesting, thinking, serving, and giving, we return to ourselves.
We settle.
We listen.
We receive.
A Simple Earth Element Self-Care Practice
Begin with Earth Day and Chiron together, creating the interval of a fourth.
Bring the forks to ST 36, Leg Three Miles, the Earth point on the Stomach channel, first on one side and then the other.
Then move to SP 3, Supreme White, the Earth point on the Spleen channel. ST 36 and SP 3 offer a beautiful expression of Earth within Earth, supporting nourishment, center, stability, and assimilation.
You may also bring the interval to KID 3, Great Ravine, the Earth point on the Kidney channel, allowing the stabilizing qualities of Earth to reach more deeply into our roots and reserves.
Next, bring the high-frequency Ceres fork into the field. Begin above the Middle Jiao, moving slowly in a clockwise direction around the abdomen. Gradually widen the circles and carry Ceres through the field around the whole body, inviting nourishment, sustenance, and the capacity to receive.
Finish with the Ohm Octave to gather, ground, and integrate. You might bring Ohm to the Three Treasures, or choose REN 4, KID 1, or KID 3 for a simple grounding close.
Then rest for a moment and listen.
Earth Season Reflections
What is abundant in my life right now?
What has ripened?
What truly nourishes me?
What am I ready to receive?
What am I still trying to digest?
What experience has become part of my medicine?
The harvest reminds us that nourishment is the result of relationship.
Sunlight, soil, water, seed, time, tending, rest, growth, and change all participate.
We receive.
We transform.
We integrate.
And from what has ripened within us, we have something meaningful to give.
Continue Learning With Me
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With warmth and harmony,
Carmen Cicotti, LMT, CAcP
Senior Faculty, Acutonics Institute of Integrative Medicine
Northwest Acutonics