September is the Fifth Season

Have you noticed that something changes in September before anything on the calendar does? The heat is still here and the leaves are still on the trees, yet the light and the air have shifted.

September is my birthday month and my favorite month of the year. I always felt an energy change, a new beginning about to unfold. I loved the start of school and the feeling that anything was possible, though sometimes it felt like hurry up and wait. A period of time in between.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, a system roughly four thousand years old, September does not belong to Summer and is not quite Fall. September is its own season, and that season is Late Summer.

The Chinese term is chángxià, long summer, and it runs from roughly the back half of August through the autumn equinox, which this year falls on Tuesday, September 22. It is a gentle turning point in the cycle of the year, where the vibrant outward Yang energy of summer softens into Yin, a quieter, grounding pause. September is a transition season, and as I write this I am in a transition of my own, a season built between two versions of me.

Fire Gives Way to Earth

The five elements move in a generative cycle where each one produces the next. Wood feeds Fire, Fire burns down to ash and becomes Earth, Earth yields Metal, Metal collects Water, and Water grows Wood again. Earth follows Fire directly, which is why Late Summer follows Summer directly, and what burned brightest becomes the thing there is now to digest.

Late Summer belongs to the Earth element, which governs the spleen and the stomach, the organs this tradition treats as the body’s center.

Directions are assigned to each season. Spring is east, summer is south, autumn is west and winter is north, and Earth alone is given no compass point at all. It is center, the still place the others turn around. Earth is the grounding work of transformation, where neither the growing of summer nor the storing of winter occurs. The body and the mind are meant to digest what has come of the high Yang season behind them, and to contemplate what is next.

Our four season calendar is anchored to astronomical events, a solstice or an equinox, a measurable day when the light demonstrably turns, and Late Summer has no such day. Like so many things we simplified and lost the meaning of, our Western calendar let it go and lost a season.

Acting in tune with Late Summer can profoundly improve your digestion, immunity, mental clarity, energy and overall wellbeing. Aligning your food, your movement and your self care with the rhythm of the fifth season creates:

• A noticeable increase in daily energy and stamina
• Better digestion, less bloating, and feeling lighter
• Stronger immunity for the colder months ahead
• Improved mental clarity and emotional resilience
• A stable foundation for the life and health changes you want to make

What It Looks Like When You Are Out of Step

When the Earth element is supported, digestion is efficient, the mind is clear and the emotions hold steady. When it is depleted, we can feel ungrounded.

In the body: heaviness after eating, bloating with no obvious cause, puffiness in the hands and ankles on humid days, digestion that is unsettled in a way that does not track with what you ate, and a foggy fatigue.

In the mind: worry that circles without resolving, overthinking a decision you have already made, scattered focus and rumination, and a hard craving for something sweet in the late afternoon.

The emotion assigned to the Earth element is worry and its distortion is rumination, the same thought going around without ever breaking down into anything useful. A season whose subject is digestion assigns itself the mental state of being unable to digest something. The gut and the mind are not separate systems, which I wrote about in Eat the Rainbow: Your Gut Craves a Full Plant Palette.

Food is the Medicine of This Season

The stomach and the spleen are ruled by the Earth element, and they need easily digestible food to do their work as the body’s center.

Favor warm and cooked over raw

Cooking performs half of your digestion before the food ever reaches you, which matters in the season already working hardest at it. Soups, stews, steamed vegetables, congee and slow cooked grains all lighten the load on the spleen and stomach.

Eat the sweet, grounding foods of the season

Sweet potatoes, winter squash, pumpkin, carrots, yams, corn, millet, and the last of the peaches and figs. The orange and yellow foods the season is producing are the ones the tradition points to, and warm porridge or congee with cinnamon in the morning is close to the perfect food for this window. I wrote more about eating in harmony with the season in Cultivating Harmony with Food.

Sweet here means the natural sweetness of a roasted root vegetable and not sugar. The taste of the Earth element is sweet, and the theory holds that a body denied the gentle version goes hunting for the extreme one.

Let the summer register recede

Raw salad at every meal, iced drinks, heavy dairy, rich and greasy food and cold fruit by the bowlful are all called damp producing, and they create heaviness in the digestive system as the days turn colder.

Keep mealtimes regular and eat without a screen

Consistency anchors digestion, and eating at the same time each day, regardless of what the light is doing, anchors the mind. Chewing thoroughly and eating unhurried are ways to slow down and focus on nourishment.

Move to Ground Yourself, Not to Empty Yourself

Late Summer favors moderate and grounding movement, which means earthing, walking, yoga, tai chi, qigong, easy swimming and light to moderate strength work, ideally in the morning when digestive energy is considered strongest. Intense sessions still have a place in small doses, whether that is a short HIIT block or a burst of jumping jacks. I believe in training hard and wrote about why in Exercise is the Key to a Healthy Brain and Butt. This season is asking about timing rather than intensity.

The most on season thing you can do in September is a long unhurried walk after dinner, which is also one of the better documented interventions for post meal blood glucose.

The most specific practice of the fifth season involves nothing but your own hands. Warm palm, slow clockwise circles around the navel, several minutes of it with deep steady breathing, or acupressure at the middle jiao, the digestive center of the torso. It stimulates digestion, eases bloating and settles the nervous system at once. Marking the turn of the day does similar work, whether that is breath or gratitude or five minutes of stretching, and when the mind starts spinning the way it does in these weeks, the route back is through the body.

All of it feeds the parasympathetic state that produces deep sleep and not merely long sleep, and a strong Earth element in September is what carries immune function through the cold months. I wrote about that recovery window in Why Rest and Recovery is Essential, and about what the moon does to it in Exhausted Before a Full Moon.

The In Between is a Real Place

Nothing visible happens in Late Summer, and without it none of the growing amounts to anything. My own transition is the unglamorous kind, transitional work and transitional housing and a body running on an instrument that stopped being dependable a while ago, not young and not old, with no name for any of it. I wrote about that in On Becoming, and environment is one of the eight things I count in Health Is More Than Diet and Exercise.

Before the equinox, take a moment with this. What have the last six months meant for you? Where will you be in the next six? What is still sitting there unconverted, waiting for you to take it in, and what would change if you stopped treating this stretch as a delay? What would happen if you got comfortable being uncomfortable, and let the in between be worth something on its own?

Eat something warm this week. Walk after dinner. Embrace the in between.