Rain and the Status of Your Life Force
Intro:
If you find yourself especially tired on cloudy days, your body may be trying to tell you something.
Most of us notice we have more energy on sunny days and less on rainy ones — that’s not just mood. That’s the power of yang qi at work.
Understanding Yang Qi
You’ve probably heard of yin and yang — two complementary forces in Chinese medicine. When they’re balanced, we feel well (an oversimplification, but good enough for our purposes here). When they’re not, the body starts showing signs that it needs support or a gentle course correction.
I often talk about how our energy shifts with the seasons — summer and winter feel different in our bodies because of yin and yang.
In summer, we can get away with less sleep. The long days and intense sunlight give us an extra boost — that’s the yang qi of summer lifting us up.
For example, that’s why I tell patients that summer isn’t the time to fix chronic insomnia. The season’s energy is too active. We’d be working against the flow.
Instead, when autumn arrives and nature starts turning inward, we can ride that downward, grounding seasonal energy to make inroads in chronic sleep disturbance.
What Rain Reveals
Now, let’s come back to rainy days.
How you respond to cloudy weather can tell you a lot about the state of your own internal yang qi.
Why do we care?
Because yang qi is life — our spark, our warmth, our fire.
A living body is warm; a lifeless one is cold. That’s yang qi.
It’s normal to feel a little low after a week of rain — we’re missing that very real and palpable external source of vitality and yang - the sun.
But if one or two cloudy days really affect you, that might point to something more.
A Story from Maine
Here in Maine, we’ve been in the worst drought in over twenty years. The land, trees, and waterways have all been desperate for rain.
Then finally, we had a rainy day — and instead of hearing the relief in people’s voice I started hearing complaints about the clouds.
Meanwhile, everything in nature was celebrating.
So why the human resistance?
I have several theories, but one of them is insufficient yang qi.
If your internal fire is low, you depend more on the sun’s warmth to feel energized. When the sun disappears, you’re suddenly running on your own reserves — and that can feel like you’re not running on much.
Signs of Yang Qi Deficiency
A strong reaction or aversion to cloudy or rainy days or a fear of the long days of winter may be more than just a preference — it might be diagnostic of insufficient yang.
Symptoms associated with yang deficiency include:
Chronic fatigue
Feeling cold much of the time, or fear of feeling cold
Digestive sluggishness, undigested food in the stool, or diarrhea
A diagnosis of hypothyroidism
Menstrual or fertility issues
Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), depression, or generally feeling down
Rebuilding Yang Qi
The good news is, yang qi can be rebuilt.
We have many ways to nourish and restore yang qi. These include:
Acupuncture and moxibustion (a warming therapy that directs focused heat to specific points in the body).
Herbal medicine: we have many formulas that tonify and warm the yang in different ways to address specific conditions
Dietary therapy: emphasizing warming foods and minimizing those that add cold or dampness.
Your Daily Discernment
So here’s your takeaway:
Notice how you react to the weather — physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.
A cloudy day isn’t just a cloudy day.
It’s a mirror, showing you the strength of your own internal fire.
If you can meet the clouds without dimming, your yang qi is strong.
If not, it might be time to tend to your inner flame.
Thanks for being here.
Bye, for now.
✅ Want to go deeper? Watch the full video version here.
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