Elemental Wisdom During Transitions with Dr. Sarita Cox

Elemental Wisdom During Transitions

Dr. Trevor Cates: Welcome to The Spa Dr. Podcast. I am Dr. Trevor Cates. Today we are talking about how living closer to the rhythms of seasons plus using Chinese medicine, elements, benefits your health and wellness. My guest is Dr. Sarita Elizabeth Cox, who provides diet, nutrition, and lifestyle prescriptions to break cycles of disease and optimize health through traditional medicines, elemental and seasonal wellness practices.

Her primary clinic is in a developing food forest on a rehabilitated tornado land. She also serves the Mississippi band of Choctaw Indians and works to advance integrative health. In this interview, Dr. Cox explains how the five elements of Chinese medicine relate to the seasons and she shares wellness suggestions for transitional times. And how living closer to the rhythms of seasons benefits your health and wellness.

She even shares specific foods and teas that help during the transition. And she has these beautiful elemental wisdom cards that she shares. And we talk about how to use these to help integrate into your health plan. So please enjoy this interview.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Sarita. It is so great to have you on The Spa Dr. Podcast. Welcome.

Dr. Sarita Cox: Thank you, Trevor. Nice to be here.

Dr. Trevor Cates: I am really excited to interview you about elemental wisdom. Before we dive into some of the questions I have for you, can you give everybody a little background on how you came up with this system?

Dr. Sarita Cox: I can, I was working with a group of supportive colleagues and I had for a long time, wanted to write a book of 365 days of self care. And when I started really speaking with people that were in the industry, and also speaking to my accountant, one of the things that came out of this was breaking down the information into small daily self care tips that correlated to the seasons versus giving somebody one more piece of information, one more protocol to follow.

So it really came out quite organically just over time. I am really proud of the elemental wisdom structure because it really encompasses source and our relationship to source.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah, that’s amazing. And you have such a unique background of all kinds of different wisdoms of Chinese medicine, Naturopathic medicine. Tell everybody, how did you decide to do all of this and how do you bring it together?

Dr. Sarita Cox: What happened is when I started last year actually producing the wisdom cards, I basically just started writing down what I was saying to my patients in the clinic day after day. And I noticed that it changed season by season. I also started trying to translate the ways in which I have become healthier. I have found that there was a great deal of healing that started with me when I really unplugged as much as possible and plugged into natural rhythms and cycles.

So specifically two years ago, I built a tiny house over a little Creek on my property and it’s completely solar and propane energized. And I started realizing when I would stop technology at sunset. I would go into this space where I would use books or try to play the guitar or do some creative projects. I slowly started acclimating to a much more wholesome rhythm that started healing my own burnout.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah, I think oftentimes we do disconnect from the wisdom of nature that is around us and you and I, as Naturopathic physicians, we really believe in the healing powers of nature. But even with that, we sometimes lose a connection with nature until we spend time like you did, and really immerse ourselves in when the sun comes up, when it comes down the seasons and how that impacts us and our health and our happiness, our overall well being.

Dr. Trevor Cates: I love this aspect of it. Let’s talk more about the five element constitutional types that you created, because I think this is fascinating, especially with, during times of transition when we have been through a lot of stressful circumstances throughout the world recently. And I think it helps us to understand these elemental transition times.

Dr. Sarita Cox: It does, it helps us understand those. And it also leads us toward being able to understand who we are uniquely yet collectively and do self care. When we try to give of ourself, and we are not caring for ourself that becomes incredibly exhausting or not very effective for much more than a few minutes. The elemental five element actually is just traditional Chinese medicine structure. In the traditional Chinese system, basically there is source.

Then we start dividing away from the source. So we would go from the one, we can call it, God, the great spirit, Rama, whatever our relationship is to the super structure that most of us feel guides us. And from that, we basically break down until it looks like the familiar, your Tai Chi symbol, the yin and the yang, the black and the white of it. Our polarities, the left and the right of it, the he and the she of it. Beyond that in Chinese medicine, the structure through TCM is that we then look at the next separation in five elements.

In those five elements is a generative cycle, that cycle around year after year, year after year. Even beyond that, it goes into six year cycles with all the permutations of that. Generally people start with the spring season, which is represented by wood in Chinese medicine. And the lesson there for our times, I would say right now is thinking of yourself as a sapling that can sway a bamboo stalk that sways in the winds of change.

So we are able to be flexible and we are able to bend and change with the times instead of being rigid and fracturing ourselves and breaking. So after the spring, the energy is rising. The spring is a seed that is breaking through the cold earth of winter. And in the system that I relate to the most, every one of these seasons are elements, we come back to the earth element. Some people in Chinese medicine would say, we go from wood to fire, to earth, to metal, to water.

However, I believe the most resonating system for me is every time we transition through seasons, we come back to our earth. So as a Naturopath it has a strong resonance because we know that so much happens in our gut health. And so during transitional times, like we are in now around the summer solstice between the wood and the coming up fire, we come back to the earth to nourish our earth.

So these are practices that we do to ground ourselves, as we were saying, to reconnect physically with the earth, by going out and walking on the trails or observing what nature looks like right now. And given this model, we have that opportunity four times a year in transitions of the earth season to come back to care for the earth and do self care there. The moment of wisdom for this time would sound something like, there is more than enough.

Everything we need is already here. We just connect inside and ground ourselves. And that wisdom is available to us. It is not buying into worry, but strengthening our faith. So that is kind of the direction that we start and we rise. And then the next season will be into summer, which is the more full blossom of things. So in Chinese medicine, it is a generative cycle.

And then the modification that some practitioners and I choose to use is, this four seasons that we are familiar with, but then revisiting our earth every season, because we can’t get enough probiotics and healing our leaky guts and connecting our gut brain access. That is really why I emphasize the transition times four times a year.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Then you created these cards and I love these cards that you create. I am a big fan of cards, like angel cards, I like wisdom cards, all these kinds of things. You created these elemental wisdom cards. I think these are so great. You sent me the earth ones because that is where we are right now. Like what you are talking about. I love this idea that you have created to help people have ideas, and understanding this. Why exactly did you create them and how do we use them?

Dr. Sarita Cox: I created them in season. Over the last few years where I am embracing dynamic change and several years ago I moved my office onto a property after a catastrophic tornado. And in response to that, I created a food forest. And that is really when I started really allowing my love of gardening to come connect with my practice of medicine. So I literally moved my private clinic into the food forest office. Out of that, I became more connected to the earth gardening as a style of stress management.

When I was starting to create the cards, I was able to do it in real time. There are a lot of suggestions out there, like write a book in 30 days, hire a coach, do this, do that. But for me, what was natural is each season taking contemplative time, particularly around the transition time and start listening to my own inner wisdom, reviewing some of the classical teachings that I have been gifted from Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine from deconstructive meditation practices like Vipassana.

I will do a strong recollecting myself. Then I create the 73 cards for each season and then send them off to the printer in Mississippi. I live in Alabama, so we are supporting our local communities here. Then once they come back in, I hand stamp the bags. In my exploration last year, I used phytolacca berries. I will return when they are back in season to stamp the bags out with an herb or a pigment from that season.

It has been a real slow authentic and organic process to me that has allowed me to capture those wisdoms and then invite people to have a daily reminder. We can use them just like you are saying, we might use an angel card deck. We might just wake up in the morning every morning and then hold the deck with intention, maybe spread it out and choose one. That is a great way to just channel our day. I have also found that sometimes I may choose a collective card.

We are in such tumultuous times right now. And we are all trying. Many of us are trying to find ways to clarify our consciousness and to see ourselves and to do that self-improvement but also how to help start healing in our community, how to have conversations, how to go beyond conversations into action, to support our brothers and sisters. Sometimes I will choose the card that sets the tone for my day. That is more in a community affiliation.

In your case, Trevor, I think a great way to use the cards would be to set a card out at your family meal. It is a conversation starter and that conversation could be read by the card. What does it mean to you or your kids? It also may be, what did you do today to self care? What are you going to do tomorrow to self care? So I love the idea of sharing these with our family. It might be you pick a card and then suddenly you think of a friend.

I invite you to text that friend, email, the friend. Trevor, our public library opened back up just two days ago. One of the ways I like to use the cards personally has just been a bookmark. If we can now bookmark a resource that we are using from the public library, then when somebody opens it, it is marked to a special passage that is meaningful for you. It helps our connectedness. We actually do have on our website, Ways to Play.

And that is a dynamic and living document. We are starting to get stories from our patients and people that are buying the cards about how they play. It is not a hard, fast rule. We jokingly say that it is ages eight to 108, and we have ways to play for one, ways to play with two and ways to play with the group.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Okay, great. I was just kind of shuffling through the deck and was feeling the cards and this one kind of popped out for me and that says, enjoy the bounty. Tell me about that card.

Dr. Sarita Cox: In Chinese medicine, the earth season is related to the harvest. We have gone through the spring where we planted our gardens, and then we go through the summer where things have blossomed and become fruits of our labor. Then in the traditional sense, in the middle of that cycle is harvesting the bounty and then sharing that with those that are beloved to us. In that particular metaphor or way of being in the world, when we have harvest season, there is so much, and the earth element constitution out of balance, it can be a bit of a hungry ghost.

It can be the center for addictions because we are not connected. Because when we take things in, they don’t satisfy us. And so that particular card really reflects the fullness of gathering and the sharing of the work we have done. And many people are now able in these transitional times to share the wisdom around health and wellness, around race and connectivity. About isolation and community that they have been working on.

Many people are planting new seeds. Some are in the growth process, but earth is really about harvesting what we have been growing and then nourishing ourselves, nourishing our beloveds and then sharing because there is so much.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah. In park city, our growing season is a little late. It is a really short growing season, so we just got our garden in a few days ago. And so I think, now we can grow and enjoy the bounty of the garden. And I think a lot about summer and how it tends to be a balance of full time. Right?

Dr. Sarita Cox: Yes, absolutely.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Can you explain a little bit more about summer solstice and how this ties into earth?

Dr. Sarita Cox: Sure. So the earth in the system that I am very fond of is four times a year at each of the equinoxes and each of the solstice, we come back and we revisit these concepts. Even though it might be as we are moving from spring to summer, it is about reconnecting with the fullness of who we are. The relationship there is, we are moving from spring into summer. We would revisit again from summer going into fall, we would come back and we would refresh our faith.

We would lay down our worries again. And even though it may be a late harvest for us, it may be more of a spiritual harvest or an emotional harvest if we don’t actually have foods coming in.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Very interesting. Let’s talk about how you use this elemental wisdom in your Naturopathic practice and how people use this from a health perspective. You mentioned some about gut health and the importance of that. What other ways do you use this in your practice and encourage your patients to help them with their wellbeing?

Dr. Sarita Cox: It has really been a blessing for patients because it is a cycle that comes around every year. So it’s not a fad that we get tired of, or there is no shame in where we are starting our journey again. So that is to be congratulated. As we are coming out of spring, for example, during spring, the naturopathic philosophy always cleanses your liver. That particular deck has a lot of emphasis on liver and gallbladder health. It might remind us to do a yoga twist.

It may remind us to put on a castor oil pack. It invites us to look around us and see that greenery is coming. So eat greens, sprouts are coming from the earth. Remember to eat sprouts. Our allergies may be setting in from seasonal allergies. So we may invite people to drink nettles tea, or use raw honey or Revere the honeybee to make a relationship with where all that bounty is coming from. The spring season is a detox season in terms of how we rhythm in naturopathic medicine.

And we love detoxing as Naturopathic physicians. We do believe that there is a certain level of accumulation of toxins and stagnation that gets accumulated. Naturopaths also love to do a fall cleanse. In the metal season, we emphasize brushing the skin because that relates to the largest organ the lung and large intestine. We really remind people, year after year, let’s get your skin brushing going. Let’s get your skin healthy.

Get that glow from the inside. Let go of things through the large intestine things have accumulated. So we might do a colon cleanse and we might do dry brushing and focus on that aspect of that, which is naturopathic in our training. We just invite people to remember it year after year. It is a great way of picking up your healthcare anywhere you want to during the year. We are our own worst critics. If we fall off a program, it is hard to pick it back up.

I try to remind people that every year we are on this path and we are learning more. We may forget for a moment, but then when we get that tiny reminder, suddenly every cell in the body remembers how useful nettles tea is. Oh, yes, that helped me so much last year. Then we find year after year people’s seasonal allergies, once they start realizing that maybe it was the corn they were eating, maybe it was a food sensitivity that we might explore during gut health.

But year after year, when we improve our health, a lot of the symptoms that have nagged us, start minimizing, and then they may have a flare of those, but then they can just remember in season and start again.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah. I think that is so important. I think it is important to remember that there are certain foods that are better to eat at certain times and teas to drink at different times. And like you talked about with doing a spring cleanse versus a fall cleanse and the difference in those. I think a lot of times we forget that and I think a lot of functional medicine, and Naturopathic physicians, have started to get away from that.

I think it is a great reminder to people that there might be a better time, depending upon where you are in your life and also where we are in the seasons, as far as starting something, new, eating certain things. I think it is so important for us to get back to this so that we can set ourselves up for success.

Dr. Sarita Cox: Absolutely.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah. I want to talk about teas for a moment because I think that is so fascinating. I love herbal teas. I love drinking tea, but there are certain teas to drink at certain times. Can you explain a little bit more about that?

Dr. Sarita Cox: When I found Chinese medicines, categorization of foods and herbs, it opened up a package of wonder for me. An easy example with teas is peppermint tea. This is one they taught us in naturopathic school actually, peppermint tea versus cinnamon tea. So if we think about drinking chai tea, that has things like black pepper and ginger, cinnamon, these types of herbs in it versus something like mint tea.

When we actually sip that tea, if we are paying attention, one is warming us and one is cooling us, and I will go into greater detail within even the mint family. We know that peppermint is actually more cooling than spearmint. Even within that family, there are going to be derivations of the temperatures that we are imbibing. When people are having a lot of hot flashes, for example, in menopause, it’s going to aggravate them to do a lot of hot spicy foods, or it’s going to aggravate them to drink their chai tea.

You can go the opposite sometimes like Indian culture drinks, spicy teas all the time, so that their perspiration is functioning well, which is our inherent air conditioning. But beyond that, there are the constitutions of temperature. There are qualities like certain teas make us more moist and certain teas dry us out more, certain teas go more to the upper body, some to the lower body, all the teas, all the herbs have affinities with one or of our organ systems.

So we can really dial in, exquisite individuation, which I will remind us all is dynamic. I only give a prescription for my patients for three months, for one season. Now it may be, they need that prescription again. But so many times I have seen people overuse a prescription that was given to them, and then it actually starts causing symptoms because they have taken too much of it. They rectified their constitution and then they took it the other direction.

That kind of reevaluation, and then now I will mix patients formulations based, not just on the season, but also their constitution. I am mostly working on their constitution, but I know if they have seasonal flares of this related to the heat, I will put more cooling herbs into their formulations. So it is a really exquisite way of noticing who we are. What is our relationship with the external world and how do we capture the dynamic nature of both us and the changing world to optimize?

Dr. Trevor Cates: Absolutely. Okay. A lot of my listeners have skin concerns because of my focus on skin. If you look at certain skin conditions, one that I just thought about was rosacea. For people who have taken my skin quiz, it is probably the heat skin type. When you think about something like rosacea, there tends to be like you what you were talking about with that internal heat, right there probably is more of an issue like that. Can you talk some about what that would mean as far as foods to eat, herbs and things like that.

Dr. Sarita Cox: What I see with rosacea in my practice is very often, it is an intricate process where people often have taken a lot of antibiotics. Antibiotics, actually, all medicines have an energy. And what happens in that particular manifestation of rosacea, the antibiotics have actually made the earth too cold. And then what we get is a deficiency flaring. It is almost in the same category in Chinese medicine that we would use the herbs for auto-immune flaring.

So when we see heat, heat on the skin, it is coming from either excess or deficiency. The first thing we have to do is tease that apart. I am working with somebody that needs to be nourished and they to be warmed, although it sounds anti intuitive. Sometimes the damage is so deep that even though we would think that herbs like cinnamon or food saw would actually overheat them, they don’t because their constitution or their modified life has dampened them so much They are super cold.

The other end of the spectrum is their constitution is just full on. They have so much energy. It is like people with high blood pressure, they have this red in their face because there is too much pressure in the system. There is too much heat in the system. Those are truly excess syndromes. Most of my patients that I have seen with rosacea, when we start healing the gut and we actually start nourishing them, usually with some B vitamins and some probiotics, I see them start to change.

Now we may not get a hundred percent with that. I have always been taught that we can create about 50% from external regimes and about 50% from internal regimes. I think when we combine those pure ways of caring for ourselves, that we will have pretty dramatic results. What do you see as the cause?

Dr. Trevor Cates: Right. No, I agree. A lot of skin problems go back to the gut. I think this is really interesting to look at it from a Chinese medicine perspective and an elemental wisdom perspective, it adds another layer of it. And it does make sense that it really is dependent upon what else is going on for the person.

It is not just what is showing up on their skin, but what other symptoms do they have? What other things are they experiencing that certainly helps to individualize it rather than just taking a look at someone’s skin and just giving them one thing. It is important to know a lot of different things about what is going on with that person.

Dr. Sarita Cox: One of the things I noticed over time that completely fascinates me about skin in the context of the Meridian systems, in our body, we have these 12 highways of energy. And Trevor, it is uncanny, time after time, somebody will just get a breakout and it might be in an unusual place. When we track it back, it is very often that Meridian system. It will come out exactly on a point, it will come out on a small intestine point on the face or a stomach channel on the face.

It might come out on the chest in our lung points. That is always fascinating to me is to look where on the skin is the blemish showing up on the body of the Meridian systems. And that often guides me like, are you dealing with some grief that is unexpressed? That might be coming out physically on their lung channel right here on their chest. I love seeing how the skin is such an offering to us about how to look deeper and what levels to look deeper, that it is not a coincidence that the blemish comes up in this particular spot.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah, absolutely. That is so fascinating. I love looking at these different perspectives and how we can bring all of these together. Sarita it has been so great having you on and learning more about elemental wisdom and your cards. Can you tell everyone where they can find out more about you and also get these beautiful cards?

Dr. Sarita Cox: They can learn more about me on my website, where of course everything is in transition right now. We are at drsaritaelizabeth.com. I do have a blog that is interesting for getting a little bit deeper in the cards, also on the social media sites, Pinterest, Facebook. We are all exploring new mediums as well, but you can follow us there. And a couple of times a week, we will give a tip on our card. This one, There is more than enough.

I know at times where transitions are happening, a lot of us may feel like there is not enough, but this is a real important time to count the blessings that we do have and take stock of. I have had so many people that come in and say, I realized I don’t even need to do that thing anymore. I don’t need this. So I think these times are opportunities.

We do try to consistently give positive health tips related to whatever is going on in our current season and what is happening around our property. Social media is drsaritaelizabeth.com. We actually have a quiz on there that you can find out more about your constitutional type versus what season we are in.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Okay, great. We will have those links below your interview on The Spa Dr. Website.

Dr. Sarita Cox: Thank you Trevor.

Dr. Trevor Cates: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks again for coming on Sarita.

Dr. Trevor Cates: I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dr. Cox. To learn more about Dr. Sarita Elizabeth Cox, you can go to TheSpaDr.com, go to the podcast page with her interview, and you will find all the information links there, including how to get these amazing cards. I really do love these. This is the earth set that I have. And she has all of the different seasons, the different elements that you can get depending upon the time of year. If you are listening to this podcast during the earth season that we talked about, then this is a perfect time to get these cards.

Dr. Trevor Cates: If you are catching this podcast later on, you might want to consider a different season or get all of them, because I think they are fantastic. Again, you can go to TheSpaDr.com, Go to the podcast page with her interview to find the information on that. And while you are there, I invite you to join The Spa Dr. community, so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows and information. Don’t forget that your skin is an outer reflection of overall health. You can go to theskinquiz.com to find out what is your skin personality type and get messages and information on what your skin is trying to tell you and what you could do about it at theskinquiz.com. Also, I invite you to join The Spa Dr. On social media. We are on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest. So join the conversation there, and I will see you next time on The Spa Dr. Podcast.