Qi Gong for Elul: Preparing Your Body for the Yamim Noraim
Most people arrive at Simchat Torah in worse shape than they started Elul. Weeks of broken sleep, long days standing, eating more at every meal than you meant to, a fast dropped in the middle of it, and a month of turning your own life over in your mind. By the end of Tishrei the body has usually had enough.
It doesn't have to run that way. And the interesting part is that Chinese medicine has been describing this exact stretch of the year for a very long time — it just calls it something else.
The question I get asked more than any other at this time of year is how to get through the chagim without overeating. The answer is not willpower, and I will come to it — but it makes far more sense once you know what your body is actually doing through these two months.
Elul lands in the season of the Spleen
In Chinese medicine, late summer is the Earth element: the Spleen and the Stomach. The Spleen's job is transformation — taking what you take in and turning it into something usable. Food into energy. Input into fuel.
But the Spleen doesn't only digest food. It governs thought, and specifically the kind of thought that circles: turning something over, and over, and over, examining it from each side.
The classical texts are blunt about it. Overthinking depletes the Spleen. And Elul is a month that asks you to overthink on purpose.
Cheshbon hanefesh is Spleen work. That is not a metaphor — it is the same faculty, doing the same thing, and it draws on the same reserves. Which is why a month of honest self-examination can leave you feeling physically flattened, and why people so often describe Elul as heavy rather than sad.
The Western translation is unglamorous but matches: sustained rumination is metabolically expensive. It runs your glucose down, keeps cortisol elevated, and interferes with digestion, because the body doesn't prioritise breaking down lunch while it thinks it has a problem to solve. Spleen deficiency and the aftermath of a long week of worrying look almost identical from the outside — heavy limbs, a fuzzy head, tiredness that gets worse after eating, and cravings for something sweet.
Then Tishrei moves you into the season of the Lungs
Autumn is Metal: the Lungs and the Large Intestine. The Lung governs breath and the taking-in of what is clean. Its paired organ governs letting go of what isn't. Emotionally, the Lung holds grief, and the work of the season is release.
Yom Kippur is a day built entirely around putting down what you have been carrying.
So the two calendars are describing the same movement, in the same order. A period of turning inward and examining, which is Earth. Then a turning point where what you have examined is released, which is Metal. Elul asks the Spleen for something. Tishrei asks the Lungs for something. If you support each one when it is being asked, the month costs you far less.
I've written separately about why we practise for the Spleen at the end of summer and about the Lungs and letting go. This is where those two meet.
What Elul actually does to the body
Meals in waves, and then a fast
This year Rosh Hashanah begins on Friday evening and runs straight through Shabbat to Sunday night — close to fifty continuous hours of Yom Tov, with the meals that go with it. A fast follows shortly after. Yom Kippur comes ten days later. Then Sukkot, and more meals, eaten outside as the weather turns.
Asking the Spleen to handle that at the exact point in the year when it is already carrying Elul is the whole problem in one sentence.
This is the question I get asked more than any other at this time of year: how do I get through the chagim without overeating.
The answer is not willpower. Overeating at a Yom Tov meal is usually not greed — it is that the signal telling you that you have had enough arrives too late, or too quietly, to act on. A Spleen that is already overloaded sends that signal more slowly. After a month of Elul, it is slower still.
Practice works on this from two directions. It steadies blood sugar, so you are not arriving at the table already depleted and reaching for something sweet. And it improves how well you absorb nourishment from what you eat.
That second one matters more than it sounds, because the body is seeking nourishment, not calories. When you are absorbing what you need from your food, you are satisfied far sooner. Eating more is only ever an attempt to make up for not getting enough from it.
Most people do not describe it as resisting anything. They describe it as simply stopping when they are full, without having decided to.
Broken sleep
Selichot are the first thing to go wrong. Whether you have been getting up before dawn since Rosh Chodesh or you start the Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah, the pattern is the same: sleep gets cut at the deepest end.
In Chinese medicine the depth of sleep belongs to the Kidneys, and the settledness of it belongs to the Heart. Break the pattern for long enough and you get the classic picture — waking at three or four and lying there awake, tired but wired, a warm restless feeling in the chest. It is not that you need more hours. The hours you are getting have stopped restoring anything.
Standing, for hours
The classics list five taxations, and two of them are relevant this month: prolonged standing injures the bones, prolonged sitting injures the flesh. A long davening is both, in alternation, for most of a day.
Physiologically it is a circulation problem. Standing still — not walking, standing — lets blood pool in the legs. The calves are meant to act as a second pump and they only work when they move. This is why you can finish a day in shul with heavy legs, a tight lower back, and a headache, having done nothing that counts as exertion.
What to do about it, starting now
The aim for the next two weeks is narrow: take some load off the Spleen so it has capacity when Tishrei arrives, and keep the Kidneys from being drained by the sleep you are about to lose.
- Practise in the morning, not the evening. Earth energy is strongest mid-morning. A short practice then does more for the Spleen than a longer one at night, and it won't compete with the sleep you can still get.
- Build the leg work in now, while you can. The days that will ask the most of your legs are the days you will not be practising on. What carries you through them is what you have already put in during Elul.
- Eat warm and simple through Elul. The Spleen dislikes cold and raw. Save its capacity for the meals it will have to deal with later.
- Start the breathing work now. You want the Lungs already awake by the time Tishrei asks them to do the heavy lifting. Long, low breathing — not effortful, just long.
None of this is a way to skip the month. Elul is supposed to ask something of you. The point is to be able to answer it — to reach Rosh Hashanah with enough left to actually be present for it, instead of counting down the hours until you can sit.
Where to start
Four masterclasses cover what this month asks of the body:
- Qi Gong Starter Masterclass — the foundation everything else in Medical Qi Gong is built on.
- Qi Gong for Healthy Digestion — the Spleen work to carry you through Elul.
- Qi Gong for Fall — the Lung work, for when Tishrei arrives.
- The Second Five Elements — for going deeper into how the organs work together through the year.
Twenty minutes a morning between now and Rosh Hashanah is a realistic ask, and it is enough to notice the difference by the time you get there.