Herbal Constitution and Energetics Part 1

So how do we learn our personal constitution and energetic? We lean into our experience of what our body is communicating to us. 

Are you tense? Are you lax? Are you excessively dry and seeing cracks in your knuckles or lips? What about fluid? Do you have to wash your hair more often because it tends to be oily? 

These are all indications of what our baseline constitution is and they can change throughout our life. 

Now when someone is dealing with illness or their health is suppressed in a certain way, the constitution of a person can shift because of the ailment or illness. 

Think of a person who tends to need a jacket even in summer when they are perfectly healthy. Their constitution is naturally cooler. 

Now think of someone who can wear shorts in the middle of winter, throw on a sweatshirt to go scrape  snow off their driveway. Assuming they are perfectly healthy, this person’s constitution is warm/hot. 

So now that there’s some idea of what baseline constitution is for a person, let’s talk about what that looks like when the immune system is compromised and now an illness shows up. 

Let’s take the person who is wearing shorts to shovel snow. Let’s say they have a run-in with a common illness and they are now running a fever for whatever reason. Their body has 104 temp and all of a sudden, Mr. I-don’t-need-a-jacket is wearing wool socks, has a fleece robe on, and is under 4 blankets. 

The illness has changed his constitution.

We will unpack this concept more in part two of this blog post.