I remember back in 1994, I went to a seminar by Dr Leon Hammer, a famed clinical psychotherapist and Chinese medicine expert, and someone I really admire. I read his books so often they fall apart. Anyway, during his presentation he warned us that spleen function was rapidly declining in people and that this would contribute to an unstable future because spleen is the ‘Mother’ and ‘Earth’. Nurturing, comforting, grounding.

Your spleen and the unstable future
Well, he called it. That’s the thing with Chinese medicine when you live it, and work with chi, and meditate and connect to cosmic chi, you can sense what’s coming because everything is connected. Our little internal organ system is like a microcosm that influences the macrocosm of the external universe. The health of our organs dictates our behaviour and that affects people around us (how we treat them), places around us (how we treat them) and planets around us and on it goes.

What we get when spleen function declines:
Confusion of the self
Loss of intellect and common sense
Lack of boundaries (invade people’s space), loss of freedom
Erratic behaviour and a decline in mental health

Imagine that on a mass scale and you’d get crazy times.
And for anyone who’s seeing the world as crazy these days, this is an underpinning cause. Your spleen transports food and thoughts. The epidemic of obesity comes down to spleen issues (inability to transport food), and general nuttiness is an inability to transport thoughts.

Spleen deficiency is caused by random lifestyles, nutrient poor diets, irregular sleep, excessive stress, bingeing, scrolling through the night, multi-tasking while eating, dieting, lack of movement, busy nights, snooze buttons, inertia and getting your morning wrong.

And that brings me to hurkle-durkle a big self-care trend now. It is when you choose to not get up when you should and instead, after you wake up just lie in bed for a long, long time. Its origins are old, cold northern places and hard seasons, but it’s now responding to what I call ‘hard seasons of the self’. The internal wasteland our lifestyle creates for our organs affects emotions and energy and makes life feel harsh and uncomfortable.

Hurkle-durkle is very doable now with WFH, and is being pitched as good for mental health. But if you just lie there inertia takes over (suppresses the yang, imbalances yin and yang), and it is one of the contributors to organ malfunctions and spleen deficiency, which in turn affects mental health, and not in a good way.

The hurkle-durkle trend responds to a real need.
Everyone I see feels exhausted, stressed-out, it’s too much effort to get up in the morning. or they can’t open their eyes or don’t want to get up and face harsh reality. This could be because having been back ‘home’ in the spirit realm (where your soul goes when you sleep) where everything is effortless, and everything is possible, reality sucks.

But also because living randomly by doing things at nighttime that belong in the day (like working), or doing things in the day that belong in the night (like lying in bed relaxing), screws with the organ clock system and that makes mornings tough and stressful. But the only way to fix that is by getting up in the morning and getting moving to reset your organ system.

So I say do a spleen hurkle-durkle instead.
This would be comfort to it in the hard seasons of contemporary life. Do get up and go-hard and be productive in mornings (especially 9-11am spleen time), and balance that with slow chilled-out evenings.

Slow your meals not your mornings.
Eat warm nourishing meals with no phones, screens or anything, just you and the food. Make breakfast last a luxurious lie-in of 20 minutes instead of getting up and rushing off (if you even sat down). The rushed breakfast / no breakfast is at the core of spleen deficiency weight gain. The inability to sit down and eat in the morning is a big spleen damager.

Make lunch a slow, ceremonial event. This is how you create the yin feel you chase with hurkle-durkle.
Do slow moving chi / yoga type movements around 6pm to wind down and switch to cozy yin. Your spleen will feel all snuggly and comfy and you’ll lose weight, lose the brain fog, gain boundaries, clarity and energy. And, if enough of us get onboard the happy spleen lifestyle train, we can change the world one spleen at a time, and things will start making sense again!

Watch the TRX+Chi  exercise that is the antidote to Hurkle-durkle, bedrot and bedsuck. This is how to build mental strength through shoulder strength. Strong Shoulders, Strong Mind