Clear emotional patterns, support digestion and the nervous system. Prepare the soil for the seeds you’re planting this season.
Spring is when your body starts asking for a cleanse. When you work with the gut-heart-mind-Spirit axis, cleansing goes far beyond the physical. Years ago, I heard one of my mentors say that just one Ayurvedic cleanse can change the trajectory of your life.
A cleanse gives you the opportunity to clear conditioned patterns. Those patterns take up space in what I call your Stress Bucket. Spring is an ideal time to make headway on some of your spiritual assignments. When you make space to do this work each year, you’ll notice yourself taking more aligned action.
Three years ago, I did one of the most powerful cleanses I’ve ever done. I got quite sick, which surprisingly, is actually a very good sign! In my case, I got croup, an illness I experienced repeatedly as a child. As I learned, croup easily turns into pneumonia. I contracted it as a 2-year-old and was hospitalized for it.
Getting croup as an adult opened the door for me to clear that difficult experience. It wasn’t fun, but getting sick offered reflection time I wouldn’t normally take. I’d known intellectually that this trauma was active. But that time, it came up for clearing through my body’s wisdom, not through the mind.
A cleanse provides the container for the body to speak up. The conscious decision to do a cleanse is how all aspects of our being can work in cooperation. It sets your whole being in motion toward the goal of letting go. Clients commonly object to doing a cleanse, saying, “I don’t have time to get sick.”
Let’s be clear, if you’re an accountant, you’d be wise to wait until after tax season to do a cleanse. Do you need to use up your vacation time? No. You can be productive and still do a cleanse.
What I would suggest is the following: Set boundaries around work. If you need to work 60 hours this week, it’s probably not the time to do a cleanse. (If it’s never a good time to do one, this is your cue to reassess!) Reduce your social commitments. Plan on getting some extra sleep, and taking some extra reflection time.
During that cleanse, I also did some extra-long meditations (one of them was four hours!). They restored my vision for what I wanted to create in my life.
Now, I’m not necessarily saying you’ll get sick every time you cleanse. I certainly haven’t. And yet, clients often come to me because their health and habits are impacting their joy in life. This silent, low-grade energy drain can keep you off purpose for decades, if you let it.
If this describes you, an Ayurvedic cleanse can help you get your life back on track.
Let me help you make some important connections:
- Old emotions reside in the fat tissues. In addition to pesticides, herbicides, and environmental pollutants your body has stored. It’s normal to be holding a little extra fat at the end of winter. And, if you shed it in the spring, you’ll feel both physically and emotionally lighter for the rest of the year.
- Programs and beliefs reside in the glymphatics. (That’s the lymph between the scalp and the skull). In an Ayurvedic cleanse, scalp massage helps to release these. I’ll share how to do it below.
- Comfort foods and emotional eating show you where you’re “recycling” your emotions. That coping mechanism isn’t available to you during a cleanse, so you can complete them instead.
- Cravings often relate to your microbiome, which is created by your food choices. That’s why there’s a connection between the microbiome and your ability to set boundaries. During a cleanse, you’ll be eating more fruits and vegetables and leaving out packaged foods. It doesn’t take long to rebuild your microbiome and reset your palette.
- The detox pathways are connected to your ability to let go. It’s natural for things to get a bit clogged up over the winter. And, this is an opportunity to work with letting go consciously. This is a lifelong skill!
This is exactly why I don’t just help people sort out their guts. I help them alchemize their entire gut-heart-mind-Spirit axis.
Late winter and early spring is Kapha season. Kapha is earthy, grounded and tends to hold. Even if you’re not a Kapha type, you still have a body, which is made of water and minerals. It’s wise to attend to it each spring.
Physical signs that an Ayurvedic cleanse is in order for you:
- Bloating, gas, not “regular”
- Holding extra weight
- Achy joints or itchy skin
- Brain fog, or low energy
- Hormonal symptoms
- Feeling grumpy or blue
Kapha also tends to hold onto old hurts and emotions when out of balance. Those don’t easily come to the surface right now, you have to dig them up. As is often the case with Ayurveda, the hardest thing to do brings the biggest transformation when you do it.
Movement is essential right now. Not only for physical health but to prevent stagnation and low mood. Unless you’re feeling very depleted, spring is a good time to do a little more movement than usual. Given how much stress most of us are holding right now, I recommend moving in a way that doesn’t spike cortisol.
How do you do that? Some of the best ways are through yoga, walking, hiking, and gentle strength training. Most people either exercise too much or not enough, but few find a happy medium. If you’re working out hard and still holding onto weight, consider taking it down a notch or two.
Ideally, you get your breath moving without going into fight or flight. You’ll know you’ve found a good balance when you’re calm and focused during the day, and are sleeping well at night.
Have you been experiencing extra stress?
Spring offers an opportunity to ground, rest, and regulate your nervous system. If you’ve been in overdrive, this is a chance to relax and bring your stress levels down. You can do it more easily now than at other times.
Let’s Talk About Food
Spring calls for simplicity and lightness.
Eat a little less and move a little more.
Reduce or eliminate dairy, sugar, and gluten. Your body needs to clear the accumulated “goop” from the winter. You can go back to enjoying your treats later!
Eat mostly cooked foods, and use slightly warmer spices than usual.
Lower fat intake right now.
Shifting your metabolism to fat-burning for the spring and summer is ideal. Trimming down your tummy supports deeper emotional and physical clearing.
Focus on foods that stimulate and support the liver. Beets, green vegetables, parsley, cinnamon, lemon, and olive oil are examples. These help cleanse and support the liver.
This is especially important given exposure to environmental toxins, pesticides, and pollution.
The Change of Seasons
Ritusandi is the transition between seasons, which is the hardest time on the body. For climates with big seasonal shifts, March, April and May are especially significant. The more dried out the body became during the winter, the more mucus will be present in the spring.
This is why it’s important to avoid mucus-forming and clogging foods. As your nervous system relaxes, cortisol drops. Your body begins to release weight naturally. There can be a natural shift toward eating what your body needs, without forcing a rigid protocol.
In winter, weight often does not move because it is not meant to. In spring, it becomes much more possible.
Lifestyle Practices
Spring cleansing can sometimes feel intense. As the body releases, there may be what feels like a healing crisis. Spring colds can be the worst! But they can also be the most transformational when understood in this context. When the body produces mucus, it draws moisture from the tissues. This is part of the clearing process.
The body is actively removing the “material” of stored mental and emotional patterns. Work with the natural rhythms of the season.
Rainy days allow for deeper rest, as the body and mind may relax more easily. On sunny days, get outside and receive light.
Journal Prompts
Before you plant new seeds, you must till the soil first.
- What’s emotionally incomplete right now? Let this come from your body rather than your conscious mind. Instead, be quiet and let your body answer. You can do that by asking this question in a moment where you crave comfort foods.
- Boundaries start with yourself. When you honor your own boundaries, others naturally follow suit. Where are you expecting others to honor you, without first honoring yourself?
- Which old ways of being do you need to let go of and why? Once you’ve written a response, ask yourself, why is that important? Ask seven times, and note the deep wisdom in your final answer.
5-Day Gut-Brain Reset
Spring is an opportunity to work with the body, not against it. The 5-Day Gut-Brain Reset brings these elements together.
The Reset includes:
- A meal plan, shopping list, and recipes with nourishing and delicious foods.
- Gutsy Yoga practices to reduce cortisol, support the liver, and move lymph.
- A Welcome call to help your mindset and get your questions answered.
- Group support and daily messages to encourage and inspire you throughout the process.
Join the 5-Day Gut-Brain Reset and give your body the space to do this work.
Spring is a season for clearing to create the conditions for what wants to grow next within you. It isn’t necessarily easy, but the benefits are tremendous. Who can’t use a little more room in their stress bucket right now?
Holly Blazina is a member of the Wellness Universe. You can visit her profile here.
Connect with Holly on The Wellness Universe and follow her on Facebook and Instagram.
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Holly Blazina’s Gutsy Type Method is an alchemy of the Yoga and Ayurveda traditions, Embodied Vision™ Coaching, and her work as an author, flamenco guitarist, composer and recording artist. She helps empaths solve their gut issues, amplifying their personal power in service of their life’s purpose.
Thanks, Holly, for your beautiful and heartfelt reminder that cleansing is about so much more than the physical body. I love the way you connected the gut-heart-mind-Spirit axis with emotional healing, self-awareness, and creating space for what wants to bloom next in our lives.