Autumn and the Metal Element: Lungs, Letting Go and the Nervous System✨
Issue: Many women experience unexplained heaviness, chest tightness, or reduced immunity each autumn. They reach for supplements without understanding why.
Problem: Autumn is governed by the metal element in Chinese medicine, which rules the lungs, large intestine, and the emotion of grief. When grief is unprocessed, it creates chronic tension in the respiratory system, weakens immunity, and dysregulates the nervous system’s capacity to fully exhale and release.
Solution: By working with autumn’s natural invitation to refine, release and let go. Do this through breath, food, seasonal ritual and energy medicine. Then you restore the metal element and support your body’s deepest immune and nervous system reset.
Key insight: Your body already knows how to let go. Autumn is simply the season it needs your permission.
The Metal Element
Every autumn, something in us knows it is time. The urge to declutter, to simplify, to sit quietly as the light changes. This is not restlessness. It is your body responding to one of the most profound seasonal shifts in Chinese medicine: the arrival of the metal element.
Metal governs the lungs and the large intestine, the two great organs of release. One expels what the body no longer needs with every breath. The other eliminates what the digestive system has finished with. Together, they govern our capacity to receive what is pure and let go of what is spent.
The three months of autumn are, in the language of Chinese medicine, in charge of withering and decelerating the momentum of growth. Just as trees draw their energy inward and shed what is no longer needed, so too does your body. This is not decline, it is refinement. The metal element, from rough ore to sparkling gemstone, symbolises exactly this: the process of purification and the luminous result it produces.
If you feel heavier in autumn, more melancholic, more prone to colds and respiratory infections, your metal element is calling for attention.
The emotion of Autumn: Grief and the nervous system
The emotion of the metal element is grief. Not always a dramatic loss. Often the quiet grief of unexpressed gifts, of years spent over-giving, of parts of yourself set aside in order to survive. Of ancestral pain carried forward through the bloodline without ever being named.
When this grief is unprocessed, it settles in the body. It contracts the lungs, creates shallow breathing, and keeps the nervous system in a state of low-grade vigilance. Over time, it weakens immunity, disrupts the large intestine’s role in elimination, and depletes the vital force that Chinese medicine calls Qi.
Many of the women I work with arrive in autumn carrying this kind of grief without recognising it as grief at all. They describe it as heaviness, as fatigue that rest does not reach, as a sense that something unfinished is pressing on the chest. This is the metal element speaking.
What autumn asks of the nervous system is perhaps its most challenging task: to release without knowing what comes next. For women whose nervous systems have been trained by years of hypervigilance, over-giving, or carrying others’ emotions, the exhale, physiologically and energetically, requires a felt sense of safety that has rarely been available.
Breathwork that emphasises the exhale is one of the most direct ways to resource the metal element and resource the nervous system simultaneously. Slow, extended exhalations activate the parasympathetic branch, the rest-and-digest state, and literally train the body to let go. Five minutes of breath with a four-count inhale and eight-count exhale, practised daily through autumn, is one of the most powerful seasonal medicines available to you.
The organ network: lungs and large intestine
The organ network associated with autumn are the lungs and the large intestine. A pairing that reflects the dual nature of the metal element’s work: taking in what is pure and releasing what is no longer needed.
The lungs take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide with every breath. But in Chinese medicine, they govern far more than respiration. They also regulate the skin, body fluids, blood circulation, immunity, and our capacity to receive inspiration in both its literal and spiritual senses. When the lungs are depleted, we see dry skin, susceptibility to illness, a contracted chest, and difficulty receiving, whether that is support, nourishment, or acknowledgement.
The large intestine absorbs water and completes nutrient absorption, and then holds and eliminates waste. Its energetic function mirrors its physical one: the capacity to process, integrate, and release. When the large intestine is out of balance, we often see not just digestive irregularity but an emotional difficulty with letting go of relationships, of identities, of old stories about who we are.
Together, these organs are the foundation of your autumn cellular healing work. When you support the metal element, you support your body’s most fundamental cycle of receive, process, and release. The cycle that underlies all genuine transformation.
Nourishing the metal element through food
Food is one of the most accessible ways to honour the season and support the lungs and large intestine through autumn.
The metal element benefits from moistening, gently astringent, and warming foods. Beneficial foods for this season include pears, lily bulbs, white fungus, lotus roots, pumpkins, honey, walnuts, almonds, and soy milk or dairy products. These nourish the lung’s need for moisture and help counteract the dryness that often accompanies the cooling air of autumn.
Sour foods like pineapple, apple, grapefruit and lemon have astringent properties that help prevent the loss of body fluids, particularly important as the environment becomes drier. In contrast, very pungent flavours such as raw onion, mustard, excessive ginger, and hot peppers can induce perspiration and deplete body fluids, so they are best taken in moderation throughout the season.
Eating warm, cooked foods becomes important in autumn, as the digestive fire needs support as temperatures drop. Simple vegetable soups, porridge, and warm stews with root vegetables are traditional autumn medicines in many cultures for good reason. Whole grains are particularly valuable for cleansing the large intestine and maintaining the elimination that the metal element governs.
Eating seasonally means following the produce that nature offers: pumpkin, sweet potato, fennel, leek, and the first citrus fruits of Southern Hemisphere autumn. They are the foods that grow precisely when the body needs them most.
The shamanic perspective: ancestors and the thinning veil
From a shamanic perspective, autumn is one of the most potent times of the year for ancestral work. As the days shorten and the veil between worlds begins to thin. Reaching its most transparent at Samhain and the Day of the Dead in late October and early November, we feel the presence of those who came before us more keenly.
This is not a coincidence. The metal element’s invitation to grieve, to release, and to refine is inseparable from ancestral healing. Much of what we carry as chronic tension in the lungs, as unresolved grief in the chest, as patterns of over-giving or self-abandonment, is not only ours. It has been passed through the bloodline, encoded in the cellular memory of those who came before us, who also could not always grieve freely or release what needed releasing.
Autumn is the season to consciously honour this lineage. To light a candle for those who have passed. Name what they carried. Offer gratitude for what they gave. And, through ceremony and energy medicine, to release what was never meant to travel forward into the next generation.
If you are called to deepen this work, you can begin by learning how to communicate with your ancestors. Creating a conscious alliance with your lineage that supports both your own healing and theirs. The release of ancestral trauma is deeply supported by the metal element’s purifying energy. What we could not complete in spring or summer can often move freely in the refinement of autumn.
Practical seasonal practices
Breathwork for the metal element. Practise daily breathwork with an emphasis on the exhale. Four counts in, eight counts out. Do this for five minutes each morning, ideally outside or near an open window. This is both a naturopathic nervous system intervention and a direct message to the metal element that you are ready to release.
Stimulate the lung meridian. The lung meridian runs from the tip of the thumb down along the inner side of the arm, ending just beneath the crease of the wrist. Run your finger along this line slowly. If you find a tender point, hold gentle pressure there for thirty seconds. This simple practice supports respiratory health and can help relieve early cold symptoms, such as chills, sneezing, and a sore throat.
Weight training and movement. Autumn is a good season for weight training, which balances the protein and nourishment the body naturally craves as it prepares for winter. This is also a season to favour late afternoon and evening movement — these hours are associated with the metal element and support its work of consolidation and rest.
Evening stillness. Prioritise quiet in the evenings. Autumn’s energy alchemy is consolidating. It draws inward, gathering what has been cultivated through the active seasons and preparing it for the depth of winter. Resist the pull to fill every evening. Allow the seasonal energy to work.
Seasonal ritual for letting go. Write down what you are ready to release: old stories, identities, patterns, grief that has been sitting in the chest. Read them aloud. Burn the paper safely outside. This is a ceremony, and ceremonies amplify the body’s natural release processes in autumn.
How this connects to your healing work
If you have been working on your health through naturopathy, energy medicine, therapy, or your own dedicated practice? Autumn is the season to ask: what has shifted that I have not yet acknowledged?
What has healed that I am still treating as broken?
This is the question at the heart of your cellular healing journey. The metal element does not only ask us to release what no longer serves. It asks us to fully receive and integrate what we have already transformed. Many of the women I work with have done enormous healing work. But have not yet given themselves permission to inhabit the healed version of themselves.
Autumn is an invitation to refinement and integration. It is the perfect season to witness how far you have come. And to let go of the identity of the person who was still struggling.
Just as spring and the wood element invite bold new growth. Autumn and the metal element ask for a different kind of courage. The courage to simplify, to release the excess, to trust that what remains after refinement is enough. More than enough. It is luminous.
Ready for support
Do you need support working with the seasonal energy of autumn in your body, your nervous system, or your ancestral lineage?
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With radiant love and steady presence,
Rewrite your cellular and soul blueprint, gifts, health & biz
Rise, Remember, Radiate ❤️
Mariangela Parodi BAppSc, ND
Mariangela Parodi BAppSc, ND is a Naturopath & Energy Healer based in Hobart, Tasmania. Specialising in nervous system recovery for women when exhaustion, overwhelm, or depletion no longer responds to rest. With over 30 years of experience in biomedical science, naturopathy, energy medicine, and shamanic healing. She bridges science and spirit to restore the body’s innate intelligence and rewrite the cellular blueprint.
The creator of the Alkymia Method™, a sacred fusion of naturopathy, energy medicine, and shamanic healing. #1 international bestselling author of The Mystic Woman’s Compass. Mariangela guides heart-centred healers and conscious leaders to transmute exhaustion, illness, and spiritual disconnection into sovereignty, vitality, and luminous purpose.
ATMS Fellow | Spiritual Biz Award Recipient | Featured in Aspire Magazine, Canvas Rebel, Hobart Magazine & Spiritual Biz Magazine | The Legends Series Podcast. Hobart & Online | alkymia.com.au
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