Seasonal Cleanses
Traditional Chinese Medicine is a practice of seeking alignment between our lives and nature's rhythms. One way that we can accomplish this harmony between what often feels like a seasonless habitat of the Bay Area and a seasonless stream of food options is to create an opportunity for our bodies to purge themselves of toxins that have built up through the winter as the "spring" arrives.
Before the introduction of refrigeration and large scale food production, spring was the time of year when the food that was available was... well, pretty meager. Having run through winter stores of food, people would gather shoots of plants as they eagerly waited for the animals to become active and reproduce and for the plants to start bearing more substantial fruits, veggies, and grains. During this time, bodies naturally shed winter weight.
When we fast forward to our modern era, this lack of rhythm is not only unnatural, but also dangerous to our health. Toxin exposure is unavoidable. Most toxins are fat soluble, meaning that they are sequestered in our fat until we use that fat while giving our livers, kidneys, skin, and lungs the herbal and nutritional support they need to excrete the toxins. Exogenous toxins, or things that come from the outside of our bodies are not the only things that our body holds onto in this lack of seasonality- hormones also build up, wreaking havoc on our body's ability to naturally regulate it's internal messaging systems. Setting aside a time for purifying your body once or twice a year is one of our most powerful tools for preventing chronic and life threatening diseases.
There are some times when a cleanse is called for out of season. We recommend that women considering getting pregnant in the near future cleanse to avoid passing their body's toxic burden on to their infant. We recommend that people who are exposed to chemicals through work cleanse in the fall as well as the spring. People who have undergone and recovered from certain medical treatments also benefit from doing a cleanse out of season.
And, get this- our cleanses allow for you to eat food throughout the entire process! The supplements that we use are all made exclusively from whole foods and herbs. They do not include anything synthetic or foreign to your body.
