Why Cypress Feels Good Right Now

Grief, fall, and what we're ready to release

If you're feeling overcome with grief, it might be the time of year.

If spring is rebirth and summer exuberance, what is fall if not the letting go?

In Chinese medicine, each season corresponds to an emotion. Fall's emotion is grief. Sometimes it arrives painfully and obviously. Other times it hides. Unaddressed, it wreaks its own havoc.

Subconscious sadness and grieving is something I can pick up on through aromatherapy.

Let me explain.

What aromatherapy actually means

People hear “aromatherapy” and think lavender candles. But aromatherapy is an ancient art of recalibrating the body through the smell of nature: oils of seeds, bark, woods, resins, leaves, flowers, or citrus peels. A basic tenet is that the oil should help bring the body and spirit back into balance.

It looks a little like this.

A nervous, ungrounded person may need the base notes of spikenard or Himalayan cedar. Someone carrying heavy energy might need the effervescence of yuzu or lemon balm. The oil is chosen as a counterbalance to what the person is experiencing.

This is part of why scent can be so personal. One person reaches for something woody and still. Another wants brightness. And sometimes the oil someone chooses tells me something before she has found the words for it herself.

Aromatherapy is generally practiced through inhalation or with essential oils diluted for use on the skin. It is complementary care, and I treat it that way. The scent can be a doorway. It doesn't do the grieving for us.

Why cypress, and why now?

My teacher Jeffrey Yuen, an 88th-generation Daoist priest in the Jade Purity School and one of the great living scholars of Chinese medicine, taught me something I often think about.

Those who are dying are often soothed by the scent of pine. I don't mean Pine-Sol, lol. I'm thinking of an essential oil extracted from pine needles: Eastern white, Scotch, what have you.

But for those left behind, the bereaved, the smell of cypress is a salve to a broken heart.

And sure enough, nearly everyone in my practice this week, as early fall arrived, has gravitated toward cypress.

Let's be honest: cypress is not a typically beautiful smell. You probably won't open the bottle and think, Well, this is delightful. It is green, woody, and a little austere. But for anyone carrying sadness right now, the kind you can name or the kind you can't quite locate, cypress can feel like a balm.

Their choice tells me what feels useful to them right now. Grief needs time and care; an oil can only accompany it.

Chinese medicine gives me a language for what I saw in the treatment room this week. In Five Element theory, fall belongs to Metal. Metal corresponds with the Lung, and the emotion connected with the Lung is grief. This is a traditional system of correspondences, a way of observing the relationships among season, body, and emotion. You can read more about that larger framework in my guide to how Chinese medicine works.

I see the seasonal pattern in practice. Spring brings rising energy, impatience, and the need to move what feels stuck. I wrote about that earlier this year in “Stuck Energy, Spring Body”. Fall feels different. The movement is inward. We notice what we have been carrying and begin asking whether we are ready to put any of it down.

A note on how I use cypress

In my treatment room, essential oils are generally applied to the body at a 1–3% dilution, cypress included, blended into a carrier oil such as almond or jojoba. Even at that low concentration, the scent comes through beautifully.

Essential oils are concentrated and can irritate the skin. I don't recommend applying them undiluted or swallowing them. Pregnancy, medications, allergies, children, and pets can also change what is appropriate, so ask a qualified practitioner if you are unsure.

A little cypress is enough. The scent makes itself known quickly.

What are we ready to release?

In the spirit of fall this week, I've been sitting with sadness and the Lung, because that pairing is baked into the season's configuration in Chinese medicine. I've also been thinking about the points that let us feel something fully enough to release it.

Which, honestly, might be the trickiest thing.

We are very good at carrying on. There is work to do, a family to care for, appointments to keep, and dinner still has to happen. Grief doesn't always get a clean beginning or a respectable ending. Sometimes it sits underneath everything, quiet enough that we can ignore it until we can't.

Grief reaches beyond death. We grieve relationships. A version of our life we thought would work. The person we used to be. The thing we kept trying to fix long after it had shown us what it was.

In the architecture of who we are, we can't keep holding what no longer serves us. As I write this to you, I'm writing it to myself too: let go of what hasn't worked, what hasn't served, what keeps sadly failing.

Maybe that is why cypress feels good right now. Its austere scent meets the season exactly where it is.

Fall is here. We're on this trip together.

If you're carrying something heavy this fall, you're welcome to book a treatment in my Newport studio. Thanks so much for tuning in.