Spring, Seasonality, and the Way We Come Back to Ourselves
- Shannon Le Mintier
- Mar 6
- 7 min read
Updated: Mar 16
A Whole Living Reflection on Food, Movement, and Rhythm
When I first began writing about the seasons, I shared some reflections and practices for Spring Equinox — rituals, recipes, and mindful prompts to support a threshold moment.
Because this, the experience of spring as a felt shift through body and mind, doesn’t happen in a single day. It happens in movement, questions, anticipation, and repeated small choices.
Just like turning a calendar page, spring doesn’t announce itself with a sharp line. It arrives as a slow return, a quiet shifting of vibration, appetite, mood, and rhythm.
As I write this here in Portugal, spring is peaking through after months of torrential rain. Saturated fields. Moss climbing up stone walls. Everything starting to pop alive in that favorite pantone color of spring green (my moms favorite color!). At the same time, friends in the United States are sending photos of snowstorms and frozen roads. Winter everywhere seems reluctant to let go.
Different landscapes. Same embodied experience.
And I have been feeling that same tension in my own body. The readiness to move forward, alongside a lingering heaviness that hasn’t lifted completely.
So I begin to pay attention.
Not with urgency or judgment. But with curiosity.
How am I moving? How am I digesting? How am I connecting? What feels stuck? What feels ready to shift?
And like many of you reading this, I’m not only navigating environmental shifts with the seasons in the world, I’m navigating seasons in my body, in my rhythms, in my life.
March is my birthday month — yes, month — and birthdays always bring this internal check-in. For me, they invite a pause for a gentle evaluation, a time for deep gratitude and always taking note of the trajectory I am on.
Spring does the same.
When Spring Feels Heavy
Some of us feel happier and lighter as the days lengthen. We feel spring pressing forward like an invitation into brightness. Others feel slow, foggy, damp, resistant.
Ayurveda describes this as Kapha season — cool, moist, heavy.
When the environment is wet and dense, those qualities can accumulate in the body as well. In Ayurvedic language, this is often expressed as Ama which is a stagnation or metabolic residue from what has not been fully processed. You feel it as foggy thinking, bloating, slow digestion, low motivation. And no, everything doesn’t always point back to perimenopause and postmenopause but this too can be a part of the puzzle.
It is, however, a great time to reframe if you are in that season of life to take a deeper dive.
It doesn’t mean your body is failing you.
It means your body is responding it its own way.
Environmentally and in your personal season of life.
Greens, Bitterness, and the Biology of Taste
My earliest “healthy” food memories go back a long way (did I mention I just had another birthday?). Green juice cleanses as an impressionable teen with my dad in Santa Barbara, long before I understood energy balance, diet culture or digestive fire. Later, living in the American South, greens weren’t optional or trendy. They were simply nourishment and an available and inexpensive way to get dense nutrition. Collard greens simmered for hours on every menu and most dinner tables.
No “superfood” label needed.
Somewhere in all of this, kale became trendy. Smoothies, chips, raw salads, powders. Something considered traditional became modern.
But here’s the thing: not everyone loves or can tolerate greens in their raw state. Many people struggle with them because these vegetables literally taste too intense or are disastrous to their digestive system.
Through my years as a registered dietitian and developing work in nutrigenomics, I learned why.
Variations in a taste receptor gene called TAS2R38 influence how strongly someone perceives bitterness. For people with certain variants of this gene, compounds in cruciferous greens like kale and collards register as intensely bitter. So bitter that a raw kale salad isn’t refreshing, it’s truly exhausting. This isn’t just a preference. It’s physiology.
Perhaps it’s why so many traditional food cultures never expected bitter greens to be eaten raw. They always softened them:
Simmered greens slowly with fat
Added citrus to balance flavor
Used spices to stimulate digestion
Added gentle sweetness and time
These functional and traditional methods work with the body. Novel concept, right?
Sukuma Wiki and the Wisdom of Peanuts and Spice
Years ago, I tasted a dish called Sukuma Wiki in a small African restaurant. The name loosely translates to “stretch the week.” It was simple with leafy greens simmered slowly with onions, tomatoes, peanuts, and warming spices. This dish felt good in my body and probably why this memory stayed with me to share with you.
The bitterness of the greens were softened, the texture tender. The dish was grounding and deeply satisfying.
Peanuts added healthy fats and protein. Spices warmed the system and heat made the greens digestible. Time brought everything together.
It wasn’t about cleansing or being trendy. It was about nourishment that sustained.
That one dish helped me understand something I now return to often: greens don’t need to be conquered but they do need to be prepared thoughtfully.
Tagine, Tenderness, and the Chemistry of Slow Heat
Years later, dear family friends who had lived in Africa with my husband invited us to dinner. They served tagine, mint tea, and stories from another world and chapter of life. Beyond the stories and laughter, we all still remember how the chicken was impossibly tender.
When I asked what made it so flavorful and soft, they laughed and made us guess.
The secret ingredient was Coca-Cola!
Not something I would recommend because of additives and processing, but the science is straightforward. Sugar and acid, combined with protein and heat over time, create tenderness and complexity. The Maillard Reaction — that golden browning process when proteins and sugars interact under heat — is chemistry in motion. It builds depth of flavor and signals satisfaction to the body.
The American South does the same with root beer in pulled pork.
Different places. Same chemistry.
Sweet.
Acid.
Protein.
Time.
Transformation happens slowly.
And whether we’re talking about greens or tagine, the principle is the same: warmth, moisture, spice, and patience create digestibility and depth. And yes, there are other ways to add this sweetness without sugary soda!
Spices as Physiology in Motion
Walking through the souks of Marrakech while teaching on retreat with Seek Yoga last spring, I was struck by the vision and scent of spices — turmeric, cumin, paprika, cinnamon — not as decoration, but as the foundation of daily nourishment.
Following a hammam experience that left me exceptionally soft and a bit dazed, I wandered into a spice shop and proceeded to purchase almost everything that caught my eye, departing with numerous bags of spices, herbs, and tea blends (all meticulously labeled for travel). Perhaps as I packed these into my suitcase, I was seeking something exotic, but I also understood their importance in providing warmth, flavor fusion, clarity, health benefits and digestive comfort to the body.
In both Ayurveda and modern nutritional science, spices are more than flavor.
They:
Stimulate digestive enzyme production
Support bile flow and detox pathways
Improve nutrient absorption
Modulate blood sugar
Create metabolic heat (Agni)
And in the kitchen, slow browning and layering spices create satisfying depth that reduces the need for quick sugar stimulation.
Sugar spikes give short-term energy.
Spices build steady warmth.
Balanced use of dried fruit, caramelized vegetables, and slow cooking integrates flavor with metabolic steadiness. Satisfaction.
Clay, Portugal, and Bringing It Home
Stopping at roadside markets makes me feel “local” when I travel and in my host country Portugal. Besides typical fruits and veggies, these's a favrorite market en route to a local surf spot that also sells handmade pots and clay tagines. Hard to escape the heavy, grounded, beautiful vessels stacked in their earthy imperfection.
First time I saw the perfect size tagine I had been looking for since our Coco-Cola chicken experience, I knew exactly where it belonged. In my kitchen.
From Southern greens and memories…
To Sukuma Wiki and African resilience…
To Moroccan tagines and spices…
To Portuguese clay and earth...
The thread was clear.
For me, food is not a trend.
It is context.
It is season.
It is physiology.
My culinary lineage continues to build through travel, lived experience and time: In one clay pot.
Greens simmered gently.
Spices warming without overwhelming.
Sweetness coming from real sources and not reactivity.
This is not extreme eating.
It’s adaptive, functional, and informed by season, biology, and rhythm.
Bringing This Into Practice
If this resonates, the idea of cooking with the season, searching out ingredients and cook ware, and methods like softening bitterness with warmth, using spice instead of stimulation, I’ve gathered these reflections into a practical place.
The Spring Seasonal Recipe Guide includes the Sukuma Wiki-inspired greens, tagine variations, warming spice blends, and other seasonal dishes designed to help you transition from damp and heavy toward clear and steady. They are simple, adaptable, and rooted in the same principles I’ve shared here honoring digestion, constitution, and real life.
The recipe collection is included inside my Memberships, where we pair seasonal nourishment with home practice, breath, and rhythm-based movement. Because food and movement are not separate conversations.
And if you’re ready to go deeper, to understand how your unique genetics, digestion, and stage of life shape your response to food, then this is also the bridge into working with me through Genomic Living. There, we translate science into daily living in a way that feels personal, sustainable, and grounded.
Spring is an ideal time to begin that kind of investigation.
Spring, In the End
When I look at life in patterns, I see how every chapter and new season has taught me many of the same things:
Live seasonally.
Cook patiently.
Move gently.
Stay curious.
Trust your body.
Spring doesn’t ask us to become someone new.
It asks us to remember who we are.
And then — slowly — begin again.
Support looks different in every season. If you’re exploring what might be most supportive right now, you can learn more about the ways we can work together to support rhythm, nourishment, and well-being throughout the year.
In health,
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