Stuck Energy, Spring Body: The Ancient Science of Moving

In Chinese medicine, each season of the year comes with its own joys — and its own troubles.

Spring is supposed to feel like possibility. The crocuses push through. The air softens. You open the windows for the first time in months. And yet, instead of feeling that gorgeous rush of renewal, you feel... stuck. Easily frustrated. Occasionally outright angry, for reasons you can't quite name.

All of this seems incongruous, right? Finally, we have the weather. The light is returning. Flowers are literally growing from the ground with this upward, rising energy — and that energy is echoed within us, too. It wants to move. But the problem is, we are full of blockages. Energetic blockages. And when that rising spring energy hits those internal walls, everything gets gummed up.

Welcome to liver qi stagnation. And if this spring feels particularly intense, you're not imagining it.

What Liver Qi Stagnation Actually Feels Like

In Chinese medicine, the liver is responsible for the smooth flow of qi — your vital energy — throughout the entire body. When that flow is moving freely, you feel flexible, creative, emotionally resilient. When it stagnates, the effects ripple out in ways that can feel deeply physical and deeply personal.

You might notice:

• Irritability that comes out of nowhere — snapping at your partner, your kids, the barista who got your order wrong
• Physical tension and rigidity — tight shoulders, clenched jaw, headaches that settle behind the eyes
• A restlessness you can't shake — you want something but can't identify what
• Digestive issues — bloating, irregular appetite, that heavy feeling after eating
• Emotional volatility — tears one minute, frustration the next

In Chinese medicine, the liver is also connected to the season of spring itself. The liver's energy naturally rises in spring, mirroring the upward growth of nature around us. When that upward movement meets internal stagnation, the friction creates what we experience as anger, rigidity, and that feeling of being stuck in your own body.

This is a major bear of an issue every year, every spring. But particularly, maybe, more this spring — as a populace, we are more agitated than perhaps in the recent past.

So What the Hell Can We Do About This?

I love that question. Because if you find yourself wanting to flick off other drivers, or take a dozen eggs to your backyard and smash them against a tree — basically you being the pitcher, egg in hand, and the tree being said target — then most likely the idea of moving your energy will feel really, really great.

And here's the good news: movement is the single best way to move stuck energy.

What kind of exercise or movement you choose is basically up to you, as long as you're not sitting all the time. This isn't about a prescriptive routine. It's about finding the thing that lets your body release what it's been holding.

Gentle Movement for the Burned-Out Body

Some people find walking to be a profoundly effective way to move their energy — and not even walking fast. Slow, beautiful walks. Appreciating nature. Breathing fresh air. If you've been feeling any level of burnout — and honestly, who hasn't? — this could be exactly what your body is asking for.

Research backs this up. Studies show that even moderate walking improves mood, reduces cortisol, and helps regulate the autonomic nervous system — the very system that governs your stress response. You don't have to run a marathon. Sometimes the medicine is a twenty-minute wander through your neighborhood while the magnolias are blooming.

High Intensity for the Deeply Stuck

If your joints and cardiac fitness are on board, perhaps for you it's sprints or a high-intensity workout that will get your energy unstuck. The kind of session where you walk out feeling relaxed, comfortable in your body, and genuinely better. There's a reason people describe intense exercise as "clearing their head" — that's liver qi moving.

The neurobiological research confirms what Chinese medicine has observed for millennia: vigorous exercise modulates the autonomic nervous system, reduces neuroinflammation, and improves emotional regulation. In other words, it does exactly what we need spring to do — get things flowing again.

The Ancient Movers: Tai Chi and Qi Gong

And then there are the practices that were literally designed for this purpose.

Tai Chi and Qi Gong coordinate breath, rhythmic movement, and meditation to cultivate the flow of energy through the body. Unlike conventional exercise, these practices specifically target the meridian pathways that Chinese medicine identifies as the channels of qi flow.

A 2025 systematic review analyzing traditional Chinese exercises found significant reductions in anxiety and depression, with benefits extending across age groups. Another review on Qigong and Tai Chi for mood regulation confirmed that these practices enhance emotional well-being by anchoring attention to the body's internal sensations — essentially training you to feel what's happening inside before it erupts outward.

Whether it's something joyous — like the dance class I love to take in Cambridge — or something subtle like Tai Chi or Qi Gong, the point is the same: get your energy moving.

The Deeper Question: Why Are We So Stuck?

Here's the thing that twenty years of clinical practice has taught me, even though I don't have ancient Chinese texts to back this up specifically: movement is a temporary fix.

It's a magnificent one. It works. You will feel better. But have you ever noticed that if you exercise regularly, you need to again twenty-four hours later? That the stuckness creeps back?

All of this makes me wonder what's happening at the deeper level — why we are all so gummed up with energetic blockages in the first place.

After two decades of working with patients, I believe our energy gets stuck for two fundamental reasons: deep-seated anger, or grief. Or in many cases, both.

Particularly in cases where these things have not been addressed — where the anger has been swallowed, where the grief has been set aside because there was work to do, children to raise, a life to keep running — the energy stagnates considerably. It doesn't just linger. It hardens.

This is where Chinese medicine's understanding of the liver's relationship to emotions becomes especially relevant. The liver doesn't just process toxins in the Western physiological sense — in Chinese medicine, it processes the emotional residue of our lived experience. When we don't process anger or grief, we ask the liver to hold it. And eventually, it protests.

Spring, with its insistent upward energy, is the season that forces what we've been holding down to rise to the surface. The irritability you feel in April isn't random. It's accumulated.

Movement as Medicine — And as a Beginning

I want to be clear: I'm not suggesting that a walk in the park replaces the deeper work. But I am suggesting that movement is where that work begins.

When you move your body, you create space. Space in your joints, space in your breath, space in your nervous system. And in that space, things that have been compressed start to reveal themselves. You might cry on a run. You might feel a wave of unexpected sadness during yoga. You might finally name the thing you've been carrying while walking along the water.

This is the body doing what it was designed to do — process, release, and restore.

If movement alone isn't enough — and for many of us, it won't be — consider what else might support your liver qi this spring:

• Acupuncture — specifically designed to unblock stagnant qi and restore flow through the meridians
• Chinese herbal formulas — your practitioner can tailor a formula to your specific pattern of stagnation
• Journaling or therapy — naming the anger or grief is itself a form of movement
• Reducing alcohol and processed foods — both create additional work for the liver, compounding stagnation
• Spending time in nature — the liver resonates with the wood element, and being among trees and green growing things is genuinely therapeutic

Your Spring Invitation

In the spirit of movement — whether it's joyous or subtle, vigorous or slow — make sure you're moving your energy this season. You may find it keeps emotional outbursts at bay. You may find it keeps pain in your body from showing up, or from staying long-term.

And if the stuckness runs deeper than a workout can reach, that's not a failure. That's information. That's your body telling you there's something worth listening to.

I'm wishing you a beautiful spring and lots of movement of any kind to soothe the liver qi — so you can feel at home in the most important place there is: inside your body.