It’s autumn! Four tips for making it a healthy one

What I am going to share with you today might sound somewhat “far out”, but bear with me…

For those of us in the northern hemisphere, today is the autumn equinox (it’s the spring equinox in the southern).

The equinoxes are the times of year when your body has the highest energy for pushing toxicity out of your cells. This is because the body absolutely must undergo a big “clearing out” at these times.

Hinder its efforts to do this and you can set yourself up for a whole season of low energy and even ill health.

Let’s back up a little. The word ‘equinox’ means ‘equal day and equal night’. After the autumn equinox, the days get shorter and the nights get longer (and vice versa after the spring equinox).

Your body is designed to go through a deep detox at the time of the autumn equinox, and this is its big preparation for winter.

During winter the fluids in your body naturally thicken but as long as you’ve gone through this autumn cleanse first, things still stay moving (albeit naturally at a slower rate, due to the season).

And at the end of the winter comes the spring equinox, when the body is designed to throw off what’s accumulated during this slower time.

If you’re living the standard lifestyle, it’s easy to be completely oblivious to all of this. The cleaner your body is, the more you’ll feel the equinoxes, and if you’re really clean you’ll really feel the full force of the earth’s energy at this time.

But regardless of whether we’re aware of it or not, as College of Natural Nutrition founder and director Barbara Wren writes in her book Cellular Awakening: How your body holds and creates light, at the time of the equinoxes,

“There is a huge surge of energy which detoxifies our cells. […] Our bodies work hard to take full advantage of the high energy of the equinoxes as a means of clearing toxicity. Although the equinoxes are times of potential healing through the removal of a high level of toxicity, they are also potentially times when the body can become overwhelmed and be unable to move on in a positive direction. This could be an inability to fully resolve an acute illness, so symptoms drag on for weeks or months afterwards.”

If you’ve noticed that many people get colds or ‘flu around the times of the equinoxes, this is why. And if it happens to you, don’t take it as a bad sign.

Acute illnesses are the body’s way of throwing off toxicity and they arise when we really need to do that.

But that’s not to say that not getting ill at this time is necessarily a sign of health. In some people it’s the very opposite: they are so toxic that their body no longer has the energy to mount a detoxifying acute illness.

Many people who’ve transitioned to a healthier lifestyle find that they have the biggest ‘flu they’ve had in their lives at this time of year.

Seven years ago this happened to me when I started a juice fast and was soon in the midst of my “worst” acute illness ever: a sore throat that lasted three weeks and was so painful it was hard even to sip fluids.

But after that my health and energy recalibrated at a new and higher level: it had been a really major cleansing.

So if you develop a cold or sore throat at this time, just know that your cells are throwing off a lot of toxicity and that it is especially important that you support this process by taking care of yourself, getting enough rest and eating good food.

Your cells will throw out a huge amount of toxicity at this time even if you’re not doing anything.

If you don’t support your body through it, your organs of elimination may not be able to keep up with what’s being thrown at them and sooner or later it can start to back up in your bloodstream.

This will cause your blood sugar to drop and you’ll find yourself strongly pulled back into any past patterns of addictive behaviour, whether that’s to sugar, caffeine or harder drugs.

Succumb to temptation and you’ll only become more blocked and this can set the stage for a very low winter, or even for a chronic illness.

You can avoid going down this road by being aware of the massive effort your body is making right now to throw off toxicity, and supporting it in its efforts to do so.

The secrets to doing that are:

1. Alkalise your body with plenty of vegetables, salads and green juice.
2. Get plenty of rest to leave your body maximum energy for its cleansing endeavours. Aim to be in bed by 9pm every night, and asleep by 10 as your organs of elimination require those two hours of sleep before midnight in order to function optimally. And if this isn’t possible, just get as close to it as you can.
3. Have a hot-cold shower every day – alternate 30 seconds under water as hot as you can bear with 30 seconds at the coldest temperature you can stand. Repeat. Repeat. This really gets the circulation going through the body and also boosts the body’s production of glutathione, an antioxidant that is essential to the liver’s detoxification processes, and that many of us run short on.
4. Invest in a holistic treatment or two this week if your budget allows. If you can stretch to two, go for an all-body deep-tissue massage using essential oils, and follow that up with a colonic.

You can’t avoid the autumn (or spring) clean – the shift in energy that takes place at the equinoxes will throw toxicity out of your cells.

But depending on what you do at this time, you will either move in a direction of greater healing or greater dis-ease – and with a little knowledge, planning and effort it’s easy to make sure it’s the former.