I want to say something that might feel uncomfortable at first…
Taking care of your body right now is resistance.
Not instead of action. Not as a replacement for showing up. But as the very foundation that makes sustained, meaningful action possible.
Because here's what I see. People who care deeply — who feel the weight of the world in their bodies, who show up for their communities, who carry the grief of injustice alongside their own — are running on empty. And an empty vessel cannot pour.
This is not a personal failure. It is what happens when the world demands more than our nervous systems were built to hold.
Your Body Is Not Overreacting
The heaviness you feel when you scroll through the news. The tightness in your chest when you read about displacement, violence, or systemic harm. The 3am wakefulness, the emotional rawness, the exhaustion that sleep doesn't seem to touch.
In Traditional East Asian Medicine, this is not weakness — it is your body accurately reading the world and responding.
The Heart governs our Shen, our spirit and sense of presence. When external chaos overwhelms the Heart's capacity, the Shen scatters. You know this feeling. You’re unable to focus, emotionally flooded, oscillating between hypervigilance and numbness.
And if you are a woman of color, a daughter of the diaspora, someone whose lineage carries the memory of war or displacement or erasure — your body may be responding with a particular intensity that goes beyond the present moment.
Traditional East Asian Medicine teaches that Jing, our inherited constitutional essence, carries imprints from our lineage.
Modern epigenetics mirrors this. Trauma leaves biological traces passed across generations called intergenerational trauma. When you witness others being dehumanized, your body may respond as if it has been here before. Because in some cellular, ancestral way, it has.
This is not just empathy. It is memory living in your tissue.
Why This Moment Feels Especially Relentless
If you’ve been reading my blogs, you already know we are in a Fire Horse year — one of the most Yang-dominant years in the 60-year Chinese zodiac cycle. (You can read more about what that means for your body here.)
The short version: Fire Horse energy is fast, activating, and relentless. It surfaces what has been dormant and pushes it into expression. Collectively and individually, there is enormous pressure to move, react, decide, respond — and that pressure sits on top of whatever you were already carrying.
When this external Fire meets a nervous system that is already depleted, it doesn't ignite you. It overwhelms you. That is why so many people who care the most are also the most exhausted right now. The pace of the world has exceeded the body's capacity to metabolize it.
Where the Body Is Holding It — and What to Do
Traditional East Asian Medicine gives us precise places to intervene.
The Heart and scattered Shen
Signs your Heart Fire is dysregulated
- Palpitations or anxiety, emotional flooding, trouble sleeping, that untethered feeling like you can't land anywhere.
What helps
- Practices that draw energy downward and inward. Slow walks near water. Warm foot soaks before bed. Lying on the floor — literal Earth contact is grounding. Warm, cooked foods rather than cold or raw. You are creating conditions for your Shen to come home.
The Liver and the weight of injustice
When anger has nowhere to go, it lodges.
Signs of Liver imbalance:
- Tension headaches, tight jaw or shoulders, feeling frozen, frustration cycling without release.
The Liver governs smooth flow — it wants to move.
What helps
- Rhythmic movement like walking, dancing, or shaking your limbs for a few minutes.
- Lemon water or apple cider vinegar to gently move Liver Qi.
- And permission — real permission — to feel the anger before trying to make it useful.
The Spleen and the news cycle
Overconsumption of information is a direct assault on Spleen Qi, which governs our capacity to digest — food and input alike.
Signs of Spleen imbalance
- Spinning anxious loops, overthinking, difficulty discerning what to do.
What helps
- Intentional limits on news and social media, regular warm meals without screens, and one small physical action each day that reminds your body it has agency.
Regulation Is Not Retreat
There is a guilt many of us feel when we tend to ourselves while others are suffering. I want to name that — and gently challenge it.
A dysregulated nervous system does not have more to give.
Burnout, hypervigilance, emotional flooding — these are not signs of deep caring. They are signs of depletion. When we act from that place, our responses tend to be reactive rather than resonant, scattered rather than strategic.
When your Heart is steady, your Shen can perceive what is actually needed. When your Liver Qi flows, frustration becomes purposeful movement. When your Spleen is resourced, you can think clearly about where your energy is most potent.
Your regulated body is not a retreat from the world. It is how you stay in it — effectively, sustainably, for the long haul.
This is not new wisdom. Those who have sought to oppress have always understood that a body in survival mode has little capacity left for resistance. Your healing disrupts that calculation. That’s why healing is resistance.
A Practice to Return to
Before you reach for your phone in the morning, place one hand on your heart and one on your belly. Three slow breaths — exhale longer than you inhale. Feel the weight of your body against whatever is beneath you.
You are here. You are rooted. And that rootedness — in a year this fast, a world this loud — is both an act of self-preservation and an act of resistance.
Healing is not the opposite of showing up. It is what makes it possible to keep doing so.