They don’t call it spring cleaning just for kicks! Who doesn’t think of cleaning and clearing out to welcome new life and beginnings when Spring rolls around?
While the focus is usually centered on garages, attics, closets and drawers, it’s a perfect time to cleanse the body and spirit (follow link to learn 5 steps to spiritual spring cleaning.)
Eating winter’s heavier foods and being more sedentary can take a toll on the liver, taxing its ability to process and filter body sludge. Celebrating and honoring this fine organ for all that it does for us by doing a cleanse is a lovely gift providing healthy results.
Cleanses come in many forms and durations. It is important to seek guidance from your healthcare provider before embarking on this journey to help you choose what type of cleanse would work best for your health and body system. Significant benefits can be seen just by the smallest steps:
- eating lighter, fresh fruits and vegetables that are in season where you live.
- drinking loads of filtered water
- adding tonifying herbs such as Stinging Nettle and Dandelion to your diet. Use stinging nettle fresh in soups and infusions (teas) and dandelion in smoothies, salads and infusions.
My go-to program is Elson Haas’s “Elimination Cleanse and Dietary Test” outlined in his phenomenal book Staying Healthy With the Seasons. This involves a progressive elimination of food groups such as meat, dairy and grains over a certain period of time, culminating with clear broths and water. Once you’ve maintained the clear liquids segment for a day or so, you add foods back into your diet starting with the last group you ate before arriving at the broth stage. While his plan is done over 30 days, I typically do it in 10 days since my normal diet primarily consists of fresh fruits and vegetables, little meat and no processed “food”.
I love Elson’s plan because it is gentle, gradual and brilliant, allowing your body to show you what foods it really wants and likes that are the most nourishing and healing for your health.
I am currently in Day 10 of my cleanse and it feels great: insights and results are occurring daily! My energy is lighter, brighter, and more abundant; the bloat is gone from around my hips (just in time for the new jeans to fit better :)); and clearer thinking is making a huge difference in what I am accomplishing.
Having a ‘cleansing buddy’ is really helpful. Creating the layout of the process, sharing body shifts and changes, encouraging one another and celebrating the accomplishments once the cleanse is over makes it more fun and easier to complete than if you do it solo.
Take some quiet time to ask if you could benefit from a cleanse. Discuss it with your healthcare person, pick a plan and a pal to do it with you, then bask in the benefits to body, mind and spirit.
Ribbet! (Frog medicine in the Native Peoples’ tradition represents cleansing and renewal.)