When Summer Begins to Fade: An Ayurvedic Perspective on Transition
I’m feeling unmotivated, irritable, and quite simply just “over it” these days. It happens every year about this time. The last stretch of summer can feel exceptionally depleting, as the body and mind become ready to turn more inward, but the environment is still asking us to contend with the heat, humidity, and intensity of pitta season.
And I know it’s not just me. When I observe the natural world around me, I see that Mother Nature is beginning to wind down, but the heat just hasn’t gotten the message.
Just take a look in your own backyard. The quality of the light is changing. The flowers are beginning to fade and turn to seed. The vibrant, lush green of the trees is fading to yellow. The garden is becoming less productive. The insects and birds are becoming quieter and changing their routines, as the humming, buzzing, chirping, and frantic activity of early and mid-summer begin to die down, and give way to conservation.
Late summer is a transition, and āyurveda views transitional periods as important opportunities to pay attention and listen. As the season reaches its threshold, we are reminded to pause and notice where we, too, have reached a threshold.
If you, too, are feeling exhausted after a long season of creating, producing, and doing more this is your invitation to begin your shift inward. To assess; Where have you spent your energy this summer? What deserves your energy moving forward? What can release to make room for what’s next? And how you can move into this next season with greater ease?
Nature doesn’t respond to the end of summer by trying harder to remain in summer. It begins, gradually and intelligently, to move toward what is next. We instinctually change our diet as the seasons change, and we box up the shorts and tank tops replacing them with sweaters and scarves, but we rarely change anything else about our routine and lifestyle as one season fades into the next.
If you’d like to make the transition from pitta season to vata season a little easier this year consider the following:
Protect your sleep and start making your evenings quieter. Summer has a very extroverted quality and with the lingering sunlight late into the evening, it can be easy to fill our evenings with socialization and activity. We are moving into a season that encourages us to take more rest, and turn our awareness more inward. Start that shift now. Opt for less stimulation in the evening time, begin winding down little earlier, and consider moving your bedtime a little earlier as well.
Start establishing more regular routines. Summer feels like freedom. Even when you’re no longer a student on summer break, there’s a carefree quality to summer. We tend to fall out of our regular routines during the summer months, and now is the time to start re-establishing them. Begin to implement a consistent bedtime and wake time, regular mealtimes, and a consistent time for exercise each day. This doesn’t have to mean creating a rigid schedule. Think of it instead as creating a little more rhythm and predictability in your day, a quality that will become increasingly supportive as we move toward Vata season.
Start practicing “enough”. Instead of asking yourself “how much can I do today?'“ reframe the question and ask yourself “what is enough for today?” This might be the most important practice of all. The end of Pitta season is a natural invitation to begin shifting from intensity toward sustainability. You don’t have to wait until you are completely depleted to give yourself permission to do less.
As you are moving through these transitional days of late summer remember, the flower doesn’t consider itself a failure because it stopped blooming. Going to seed is part of the work.