Haas - Staying healthy with the seasons : 21st-century edition

The Five Elements and Seasons

I AM GRATEFUL for the timeless information set forth here by Dr. Elson Haas, as I reflect that each generation has both its similar and different environmental concerns and health challenges. When Staying Healthy With the Seasons was published in 1981, it was one of the first books to look at traditional Chinese medicine and to examine health and food from a seasonal perspective. In the American marketplace of ideas, this was a revolutionary concept.

With the first publication of this book, Dr. Haas began his career as an educator. Today we need him and his many insights more than everto empower us in demanding our basic human rights for wholesome food, clean air, and pure water. With thirty years of practicing and teaching Preventive Medicine, he is giving us back our health and showing us the choices we need to make.

Thank you, Dr. Haas, for your commitment to our health and well being. And thank you, reader, for acknowledging his commitment and for your own efforts to affect change one person at a time.

Blessings to all.

Jo Ann Deck

Publisher, Celestial Arts

January, 2003

ENTERING the world as a young doctor afforded me my first real choice from the infinite possibilities in the medicine and healing realms. I had followed a solidly traditional educational path in my medical training and internship in order to build a strong foundation. Early in my career I chose to balance my life between city and country living, and between a conventional Western hospital practice with a continuing education in health. However, I discovered that I was drawn more and more to the natural, ancient, and spiritually oriented healing traditions. I began studying herbs and working with herbal therapy, with Chinese medicine and acupuncture, including sonopuncture (using sound vibrations applied to acupuncture points), with Jungian therapy, dream work and visual imagery, as well as with various methods of stress reduction and relaxation. I also made a personal study of the interrelationships within the intuitively based metaphysical sciences that focus on experience and knowledge beyond the purely biological realm. I believe this analysis helped me to begin to bond with the part of me that has a deep, inner knowing.

To this day, I continue to explore the truths in Natures cycles and how they relate to human life, as well as the causes and relationships that determine health and illness. What makes us tick? What affects our subtle balance? Why do some people get sick often and others rarely? What are the well ones doing (or not doing)? My studies moved me from my left brain (rational, linear thinking with a vast array of medical details) toward my right brain (the imaginative, intuitive, spatial, and creative). What emerged for me, in part due to my own healing process, was the realization that disease is conflict (primarily mental/ emotional, male/female, and right/left brain) and results from the stagnation or congestion of energy circulation which generates physical symptoms.

My interest in the effects of balance, contrast, and conflict grew out of my study of acupuncture. The understanding of imbalance is reflected in the flow of life-force energy called chi and in the theory of yin-yang , which is the dual nature of the universe and the potential for polarity or conflict. If this chi energy is flowing freely throughout our being, every organ, tissue, and cell will be nourished and work optimally. These theories left me with questions like, How do we keep this energy moving? and equally importantly, What are we doing that blocks it?

Synchronistically tied to my interest in bioenergetics (the movement of physical, mental, and emotional energy) was the second positive learning process for me: nutritional awareness and the experience of fasting, or more specifically, juice cleansing. This brought the beginnings of needed changes to the 4050 pounds of excess weight I carried and that I realized caused my congestive symptoms: persistent low back pain, digestive problems, sinus clogging and daily allergies, early morning lethargy, and late afternoon fatigue. And what was I congested from? You name it. By the age of 27, my past had caught up with mea rich diet, excessive and undigested food, as well as psychological stuff, such as old experiences, thoughts, fears and other unexpressed emotions, including the turmoil from the intense evolutionary changes during the early to mid-1970s. This accumulation of physical and psychological sludge got in the way of me being totally present, totally in my own body. Juice cleansing started things moving with the healthful flow of chi through all levels of my being. In a relatively short period of time, this process resulted in peak physical energy, mental clarity, emotional awareness and expression, and new spiritual sensitivity. As my intuitive self balanced my rational self, I began to write, draw, play music, breathe, study tai chi, and more. This was a beginning for me. I was so profoundly affected by my cleansing and healing experiences that this area of medicine has become a focal point in my own personal seasonal health care, in my writing, and in my practice.