Welcome to Notes from Hearthroot!
In this space, I’ll be offering practical reflections on Constitutional Vitalist (CV) recommendations for health and wellness, as well as thoughts on CV’s combination of Western and Eastern traditional medicinal systems (grounded in an Eastern Orthodox sacramental view of the body and human person).
A favorite topic of mine is why this unique blend has an astonishing amount of tangible, useable, and important health info to offer those who feel ill (or least uncomfortably physically and mentally jostled) by the hectic tech-saturated overstimulation of modern life, which at its worst can feel both numbing and agitating at the same time. Here, we don’t pretend that our dynamic bodily organisms work like rote machines, but we also don’t offer any clinically/spiritually dubious New Age woo. Our interest is in rigorous pattern recognition, focused on the often overlooked realities of how specific bodies are currently actually interacting with their environments and what this tells us about the health protocols most likely to bring about deep balance and healing.
To get us going, I can think of no better day to first post than Indiction, the Orthodox Church New Year and beginning of the liturgical year, celebrated on September 1st (the civil date September 14th, for those of us on the Old Calendar). My first few posts here will be making significant reference to the Orthodox liturgical/theological concepts that helped me formulate CV, but the material will be very relevant to our non-Orthodox or non-Christian readers, as there’s a lot of practical implications here for CV’s lifestyle approach.
In Orthodoxy, we see our festal commemorations not as mere remembrances of the past but as participation in events that transcend time and space. Without getting too deep into Orthodox theology of the Church as the tangible yet mystical body of Christ, this strong emphasis on sanctification of spacetime relates to a core conviction of CV. To summarize that conviction, health is neither the absence of disease nor the outward appearance of strength, but rather a graceful relationship with time and space.
By “a graceful relationship,” I don’t mean anything overly abstract. A graceful relationship with space means looking at the inherent properties of 1) Our bodies and 2) the food, drink, and medicines that our bodies interact with, then making sure our bodies meets their inputs in a way that creates harmony rather than chaos. That’s where traditional Western medicine comes in, with ancient Greek philosophy of health giving excellent practical clues on that front. A graceful relationship with time means sustainable rhythmic participation in the cycles our bodies undergo on a daily and yearly basis. Traditional Chinese Medicine is remarkably sophisticated on that front.
Back to Indiction, the hymnography of the feast is exceptionally beautiful. “All Thy works, O Lord: the heavens, the earth, light, and the sea, the waters and all the springs, the sun, the moon, darkness, the stars, fire, men and beasts, praise Thee together with the angels.” Going beyond such exquisite imagery of the earthly and angelic realms praising God together, it provides a spiritual perspective on an insight that CV often leans on, that the variation of the seasons are a blessing worth paying attention to: “do Thou grant unto Thy servants a year of varied seasons, crowned with mildness, fruitfulness and blessings.”
In the Matins service for Indiction, the reading from the book of Leviticus speaks of God’s covenant in terms rooted in seasonal agricultural realities: “If ye walk in my statues, and keep my commandments, and do them; then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. And your threshing shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing time; and ye shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely.”
In CV, we don’t reduce seasonal change to psychological metaphor (spring as a time for new beginnings, autumn as a time to reflect on endings, etc…). We’re interested in the practical work of helping the body thrive rather than recoil as it experiences environmental shifts. For example, if we think about about how different the body feels in the heights of summer heat and the depths of winter’s cold, and how various foods demonstrably differently impact bodily temperature regulation, it makes little sense to eat an identical diet in July and January.
The Indiction services ask that it would be granted for us to “safely to pass through the cycles of the year.” To help discern what that safe passage might look like on a health level, the CV approach avoids common extremes that pop up in seasonal thinking. When springtime comes around, we might often be encouraged to start new projects, socialize more, and ride the energy that comes with the weather getting warm again. Letting rising energy emerge is a good thing but CV would emphasize moderation and steadiness, so that we don’t spend all that newfound energy too quickly and leave ourselves overcommitted and depleted. Or, during winter cold we might feel like withdrawing, resting, or generally turning inward. Rest and inwardness during the cold time of the year can be restorative, but CV cautions against too much disengagement or heavy comfort food at that time, because we don’t want rest to turn into stagnation.
Similarly, we don’t want to try to fight our environment, through leaning on the opposite extreme. Cooling excess heat during hot weather is important, but shocking our bodies through intense cold at those times can weaken digestion and further confuse our internal temperature regulation. Measured comforting warmth during cold weather is great, but too much compensatory heat can lead to dryness, agitation, or congestion.
In short, we don’t want to lean in too hard to our bodily/emotional impulses as the seasons change, and we also don’t want to overcompensate in the other direction. We want a steady but adaptable body that can ebb and flow with the seasons without losing healthy temperate levels of warmth and moisture.
And if the emphasis on balanced seasonal rhythm is part of a graceful relationship with time, the “space” part of the equation helps us figure out how that rhythm looks different in subtle but critical ways for different bodies. A body that, when stressed, inherently tends toward heat flares and rigidity will need somewhat different seasonal guidance than someone who tends toward energy depletion and congestion when unbalanced.
In our work with clients, recovering a natural sense of daily rhythm is even more important than yearly seasonal rhythm. Countless health issues, both chronic and acute, can be soothed by slowly moving to recover the daily pattern that humans have followed for most of our history but is frequently obscured by the noise of the modern world: namely, use warmth and light to emerge in the morning; steadily spend strength on necessary tasks throughout the day; take nourishment and rest at predictable supportive times; and then slowly descend with the evening into quiet stillness and restorative sleep.
When our days become blurs of technological stimulation, mental/emotional processing, and food/drink input with no clear pattern/rhythm, we lose touch with that cycle and it becomes much more difficult for our bodies to smoothly adapt and recover when illness, injury, or other stressors arise. Rather than the best of both worlds wherein our bodies are calm but dynamic, we end up with the worst of both worlds, feeling the constant buzz of overstimulation in way that leaves the body off-balance and never truly relaxed.
For those of us who are Orthodox and live in regions of vibrant autumnal foliage, it’s a blessing to have the Church’s most direct celebration of the glories of seasonal changes right at the moment when nature is beginning to display one of its most striking images of such annual transitions. Orthodoxy doesn’t see yearly cycles as an endless wheel that exists for its own sake. Rather, these cycles are an opening into the deeper purposeful movement of God’s plan for His creation. Similarly, in CV, we see the cycles of the body as centered upon an organ axis meant to generate clean sustainable physical energy, that allows for sturdy purposeful presence in the world. But I’ll save the details on that for my next post.
I’ll leave you for now with a final reference to the Indiction hymnography, which quotes a beautiful line from the Psalms:
Giving thanks for all things, we cry aloud: Bless Thou the crown of the year with Thy goodness.