I’m at the footsteps of graduation. A couple more tests and a few more clinic shifts and I will receive my Masters of Traditional Oriental Medicine (MSTOM). Four years rigorous years of study later I prepare to step out into the world to practice medicine on my own. There’s a lot to reflect on and process; so much has happened over the past weeks and months. And it’s the perfect time to be engaged in this process of integration and contemplation.

You see, we just began the lunar month of the late summer. In Chinese Medicine the late summer is the season of the Earth element, which in the body corresponds with our digestive faculties. Our garden is exploding with tomatoes, cucumbers, and kale; we’ve harvested carrots and beets and beans too – so much to eat and digest and absorb. The process of digestion involves taking things from the outside world (food) and breaking it down and then integrating what we need from it into our body.

So too, we digest our experiences. We reflect on different things that happen in our lives and how we respond and interact with them and then we figure out what we need to integrate into ourselves. Of course there is a broad spectrum of thought between healthy contemplation and over-thinking and over-analyzing. In Chinese Medicine, we see over-thinking thing as pathological and as harmful to our health and digestive ability (that said, there’s a “chicken and egg” question: is said overthinking causing problems, or are we overthinking things because we’re already out-of-balance – ever noticed how sometimes after eating certain foods your head gets fuzzy and you have trouble thinking clearly?).

It also happens to be the tradition of my ancestors to integrate and contemplate life and how we’re living during this part of the earth’s cycle around the sun. In Jewish mythology we are in the last month of the year, a time to integrate the experiences of the year, a time when we can go out into the fields to be with the Earth and meditate on why we’re here and what we’re doing right and what we could be doing better. This late-summer month is only just beginning, and as we watch the moon wax and then wane we can take a moment to contemplate where we are in our lives, and where we’re going, and how well we’ve been digesting along the way.