How to know if your Liver needs some Love

“Life loves the liver of it.” -Maya Angelou

While Maya is talking about a person who lives life with deep intention and joy, she reveals the connection between a person who lives with passion and the liver as an organ.

Liver is having a hey-day in the wellness world right now. There’s liver cleanses, liver detoxes, suggestions to eat liver, liver massages, and so much more. Luckily, this all points to the fact that we’re becoming more aware of the importance of the liver and what we can do to support him. (I hate using “it” for body parts…I believe there’s Spirit in each and every part of the body… and the liver has very masculine qualities of hot, sharp, and penetrating.)

You can donate a kidney, have your gallbladder and spleen removed, even live with a single lung, but you can’t survive without your liver. A liver of life needs their liver.

Liver is a powerhouse for transformation in the body and plays a crucial role in filtering and cleansing the blood; producing hormones, enzymes, and bile; recycling old blood cells; and regulating glycogen storage. Liver gives color to the blood, and thus, infuses us with Aliveness.

In my newsletter recently, I shared that the first place to start loving up on your liver is to ask the question:

What’s not working anymore?

As in: What's no longer serving you but you keep holding onto because there's a sense of safety?
What's ready to be released or changed so you can invite more Life?
What feels old, outdated, misaligned, or otherwise no longer a true expression of yourself?

Getting clear on what needs to be transformed will be the first step in supporting Liver.

Next, we need to understand the emotions of the Liver.

Just as Liver plays a key role in physical digestion, Liver also plays an integral role in emotional digestion. Physical symptoms often have their roots in psychospiritual / psychoemotional imbalances. Because Liver is hot, sharp, and penetrating (like fire), he tends to go out of balance in these areas and becomes a storehouse for emotions like anger, frustration, resentment, criticism, envy, and excessive ambition. When Liver is loved up and supported, He can also be the site of courage, confidence, aligned ambition, willpower, and enthusiasm. In Medieval times, the liver rivaled the heart as the seat of love and passion (source).

You can discern the health of Liver by how well you move through these emotions and the intensity of the experience. Do one (or all) of these emotions hit you like lightening then linger long after the experience has happened? Have you been harboring resentment towards someone for years? How often are you critical of self and others?

These provide great insight into the health of the Liver. If you find yourself able to move through these emotions easily and feel like the experience is complete, fully digested, then Liver is likely functioning well. If you find yourself bogged down and consumed by these emotions, especially if they provide the background context to many of your relationships and life experiences, then Liver most likely needs some support.

A very simple question to support emotional digestion and love up on your liver:

What am I digesting right now?

List out all the things you’re currently digesting and processing in your life. The things you keep chewing on, that you just can’t let go of. The things that weigh you down. The experiences that don’t feel like there’s been any closure. The changes you’re going through. The transitions you’re in. What are you digesting?

It’s difficult to add in anything new and/or make any changes when you don’t have the capacity to digest what you’ve already been through / are going through. By downplaying the actual digestion process, you’ll be repeating the same lesson over and over just in different contexts. Like different job, same kind of condescending manager. Different relationship, same kind of emotionally unavailable partner.

Liver needs sweetness to balance the intensity.
It needs Love, devotion, curiosity, and space to safely express and process.

What experiences are sweet as honey and help you reconnect with that juicy, playful essence of Life?

In The Garden, I share a digestion ritual that I learned from my teacher Rachael Maddox. It will help you cultivate self compassion and finally ease up on yourself for wondering why life feels so damn hard lately. It’s a deeply nourishing practice that helps you see just how much you’ve been carrying, how to use rest as a way to digest, make space for the integration of who you were and who Life is asking you to be moving forward, and celebrating yourself and all you’ve been through. Because here you are, despite it all. And by fully digesting your experiences, you produce what’s known as ojas in Ayurveda. It’s the sweet sap of life that sustains our creativity, sensuality, sexuality, and creativity. And we’re spending 3 months feeding that sweetness so you can do what lights you up without burning out.