Incubation Period | Annavaha Srotas & Ambuvaha Srotas
Feeding the beginning of the beginning
Are you ready for a redo of 2025? I am, and so are most of the people I know in real life, on the internet, and just about everywhere else. January was a particularly rough month for reasons affecting many of us at the same time, on top of individual circumstances that seem just as unlikely and unfairly challenging. While I feel lucky that no huge misfortunes have come my way, I rode the struggle bus all month, which was driven by a lack of motivation and general apathy that is very uncharacteristic of me. I’ve always been something of a homebody, but I’ve been surprised by how gleefully I declare “work’s done!” at 3 or 4 pm, and slide onto the couch with my tea for another few episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. When did I become a couch potato—or, in honor of my new favorite root vegetable, a couch rutabaga? “It’s just the winter blues,” friends and family have reassured me, but I am not convinced. And if I am truly on my way to fulfilling my dream of becoming a plant, I’d like to be something other than a Brassicaceae.
As I watched the days tick by last month, it was even hard to garner hope that time would do its thing and shift my mood and energy. The arrival of February would not offer the relief I yearned for—at least, based on my past experience with my least favorite month. Wedged between the holidays and the not-close-enough spring weather, February drags out the worst parts of winter, the only bright spot being Valentine’s Day. I’ve been single for far more time than I’ve been in relationships, and even when I was partnered the holiday did not afford me the exciting, amorous vibes Hallmark promises. With the turn of the calendar, I’d sigh and literally say to myself, “I hate this month.”
Since January was so hard this year, though, I knew I’d have to try a little more to befriend February—if only to support the whole time-heals-all-wounds theory and appease my mind. Thankfully, my studies and communities have guided me toward a deeper appreciation of Imbolc, a Celtic festival that celebrates the midpoint between winter and spring when we can really appreciate the increase in daylight. It’s a moment in the astronomical calendar that is easy to overlook if you’re only paying attention to temperature, and you allow the cold to curve your spine and gaze into itself for protection and warmth. If you look toward the horizon, though, eyes and heart lifted, you’ll be pulled, even if incrementally, toward the growing light.
As I’ve paid more attention to the sky the last week or so, I realized that my disappointment with February was all due to a deep misunderstanding of what this month is for. It’s not about the hot, steamy, exciting love of Valentine’s Day, or the boisterous, curious, song-in-your-heart vitality of spring. Nor is it a dragging out of the fall/winter energy of contraction, depletion, and loss. February isn’t a chance to “redo” the new year, but to do it for the first time.
It’s the beginning before the beginning.
In Ayurveda, spring is associated with the kapha dosha—the combination of earth and water elements that creates a cool, dense, heavy, and moist substance just like those big, wet snowflakes that come in late winter, and the soil as it thaws after that snowfall. In the cycles of life, kapha is the morning and childhood. All things beginning; all things in their infant stages. We associate spring with babies because they are just starting their lives, little seeds chock full of all the dense energy and matter they need to ripen and grow over time. But we often forget that these babies, or eggs or seeds, didn’t come from nowhere. They began in the womb. They began in February.
Rushing ahead to babies in anticipation of spring can spell disaster in all the literal and metaphorical ways we might think of the development, birth, and maturation of something new. You’d never talk about babies on a first date (unless you’re power-dating in your late 30s or 40s, and need to know ASAP if IVF or already-born children from a previous relationship are in your future); you wouldn’t arrange the decor of your house around a painting or sculpture that’s incomplete. Likewise, jumping into “kapha-balancing” Ayurvedic protocols in February can create massive confusion for the body as it manages the significant energy shift between vata and kapha. Though we might feel heaviness in our bodies and hearts now, blasting it with hot, dry, lightening/reducing (langhana), and bitter things (i.e., a lot of “diet” foods) will poke the vata bear, which is pretty robust (and hungry) after all these months, exacerbating restlessness and irritability as it tries to move through less spacious physical and energetic channels. The sun is still waking up, and we need a little more of it before we can expect the doshas to yield to each other in a friendly way.
What we must do now, instead of beginning new projects, new routines, new lifestyles, is wait. Pregnant with the energy we need to create something new, we must allow ourselves to be pregnant and not jump from conception to delivery—to incubate our spring babies until they’re ready.
So before babies, there are mothers. I’ve never been pregnant, but from what I hear, behind all of the excitement and change there is a whole lot of waiting and uncertainty. A mother’s interoception is turned up to full volume, hyperaware of every little shift in how she feels and how her baby feels. The changes can be big and overwhelming—food cravings, fatigue, emotional typhoons—or so subtle she’s not even sure what she felt was real or just in her head, a projection from her own fear of something going wrong or from external expectations of what she should feel. Her job is to give all of her attention to this growing process—which her prana will follow. It’s a job that requires as much effort as it does stillness and calm. The heat is building inside—of hormones surging, of cells dividing and specializing, of food being digested and transferred and eliminated, of everything expanding well past its logical limits—and she just holds it all in. It’s amazing, but it’s hard—and it hurts. A lot. Why can’t I just get to the other side already, where this love is something I can see, hold, touch, inhale; when I can listen to its every breath, burble, and giggle as if it were the most exquisite music, the very sound of the universe singing (which it is)? The desire grows and grows, but she knows that rushing it even by a few days might ruin it all. So she waits, and watches. She takes on the responsibility of being the vessel for the fragile little being she loves at a tissue-deep level, but she cannot break even when it is on the verge of destroying her, which it does the moment she transitions from ordinary woman to mother. This isn’t a true break, though, because of the inherent strength of the feminine—the energy of the earth element, of Shakti, of Prakriti. The Earth’s stability allows it to undergo constant transformation without total destruction. It is the material manifestation of the supreme consciousness that willed itself into being so it could fall more deeply in love with life, in all of its seasons.
And so even before mothers, there is love. New love requires its own incubation period—a time of vigilance and doubt and awkwardness. What can I say, what can I ask, what can I touch. When to do I text back, what emojis do I use. How much of myself do I reveal, when. What is this, what are we. Being on this precipice of love is much more exciting because of its polarity: like two magnets, there are both repellant and attractive forces between people that seem to shift at any minute. Respect, civility, patience, even fear—not wanting to mess things up—might not be able to withstand the heat and pull of not-love, but lust—desire. Those qualities will return, though, if you make it to the other side of that first spark and land in ordinary, coffee grinds, missing socks love. It’s a question of whether two people are just bodies colliding—that random 60-degree day in February when everyone throws off their coats and hats like Hester Prynne in the forest—or a meeting that allows both people to change individually and together—after the magnolia blooms grow brown and soft when their bright pink petals meet a surprise frost, but come back for a second round.
Other acts of creation follow these patterns, too—like the book I’m writing. I’ve had its name and cover picked out in my head for years, and I think I’ve figured out its character—the structure, the contents, the arc. But I’m still fumbling a bit, copying and pasting paragraphs and jotting down random thoughts on digital and physical Notes that I sure hope I can remember later. I’m excited when I get into the writing, but it’s been sooo long, and I want it to be done already. I’m ready to hold my book, smell it, give it to people like the most precious Valentine’s Day gift. A piece of my mind and my soul. If I were to go to Kinko’s and print out what I have right now, though, that whole dream would be over. It’s just not ready, so I give that spark of light as much space and food as it needs to become itself. Like everyone’s favorite maligned historical villain, Aaron Burr, says: “wait for it.”
Spring, like fall, like love, is not just a season—it’s a verb. It presents us with all of these wild, contradictory qualities and elements so that we can do something with them. Or, rather, so they can do something to us. The incubation period of February reminds us that the process of growth, rebirth, beginning is not one we control. It’s Prana who’s in charge (whom we met, coaxed, and befriended in January). Prana is still running the show when it comes to incubation, since the two dominant elements of February are ether and earth. These “container” elements can overwhelm us with their bigness, and confound us with the juxtaposition of their seemingly opposing qualities—unmanifest and manifest, beginnings and endings. What they share, though, is a most important quality: stillness.
Ether and earth represent the beginning before the beginning of kapha season, of the manifest love we might anticipate, but aren’t quite ready for, in February. They are key ingredients in the recipe of spring:
Ether — masculine energy/father, Shiva, contemplation, spirit, destructive
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Earth — feminine energy/mother, Shakti, fuel, body, creation
What brings them out of their inert state is their love-child—fire. As the sun builds and builds after the winter solstice, those containers are animated by a frisson of light and heat—the “stirring” or “quickening” that defines Imbolc. This is a low-and-slow bake, though, not a flash-in-the-pan stir fry. Part of the cooking process requires checking, stirring, adding water and a pinch of this or that. And once it’s done, you won’t want to gobble it down in front of your screen. You’ll want to light the candles, get out the fancy napkins, and savor each bite.
My use of these cooking/eating metaphors isn’t accidental. While it’s not my choice of language/imagery, pregnancy is itself a kind of cooking—every pregnancy is different, but they’re all united by the need to eat for two (or more), by cravings and repulsions, by the need to care for that ”bun in the oven”; likewise, love may be killed by a poor sonnet, but a better route to someone’s heart might be through their stomach. Everything in Ayurveda can be linked back to digestion, so this angle might not be so specific, but it does open a door to the next srotamsi we’ll learn about this year: annavaha srotas (the channel of food) and ambuvaha srotas (the channel of water). While these channels carry different substances and are located in different parts of the body (they’re kind of stacked, actually), they are both concerned with ingestion even more so than actual digestion (we’ll get there). And so, these srotamsi are incubators of sorts—where our nourishment goes and waits for instructions on how to make us more us.
They’re also a natural extension from the work we did in January with prana—the “essence” of nourishment we receive from breath and food/water. Now, we’re talking about the gross material we ingest to deliver that prana into the body, from which our tissues are built.
Digesting food is something that most people have given consideration to at some point (especially if you’re reading this), so we’ll start there. The annavaha srotas invites us to consider not only what we put into our bodies, but the container into which we’re putting the food. Note that, according to the physiology of the srotas, no real digestion is taking place yet—in the stomach, all that’s happening is mechanical breakdown. There’s no real “fire” to discern what’s in there, separate out nutrients from waste, and assimilate and absorb. That’s why the stomach in Ayurveda is called that amashaya—the home of ama (metabolic waste/undigested food).
Annavaha srotas
Functions: Digestion, absorption, assimilation
Mula (root): esophagus, stomach, “food carrying dhamanis (channels)”
Marga (channel): Upper GI tract (mahasrotas) from lips to ileocecal valve
Mukha (exit): Ileocecal valve (opening of the small intestine)
When working with the annavaha srotas, then, the practices to consider aren’t the usual digestion enhancers (dipana/pachana). It’s more about:
Chewing well to take some burden off the stomach and provide clear nutrition (ahara rasa) for the small intestine to analyze and distribute
Leaving space in the stomach for churning (⅓ solid, ⅓ liquid, ⅓ space)—a good practice is to “wait for the burp” after you finish eating, which signals that there’s some space left
Most of us don’t think too much about digesting water, but even liquids are transformed by agni to become more viable and useful. The ambuvaha srotas invites us to think about the best way to irrigate the field for planting—to bring us back to spring/growing. Too much water, and your seeds/saplings will drown; too little, and they’ll wither away before they even have a chance. The same is true for our body, including in how water affects the stability and function of agni. Ever notice that when you drink a lot of water—after a hard workout, in the summer—you’re just not hungry? It’s a tried and true weight loss technique, and while it will indeed suppress your appetite and prevent you from eating (if you’re looking to eat less), that’s not the preferred Ayurvedic method. Because no agni means no digestion when you eventually put something inside the channel. If the marga of ambu (the GI tract) is damp and boggy, then when the food arrives and moves through it won’t get cooked. It’s as if you left some dry rice in a pot of water and didn’t turn on the stove, but expected it to be edible after 20 minutes of sitting there.
Ambuvaha srotas
Functions; Body temperature, lubrication, electrolyte balance, selection of wastes, appropriate use and transformation of water in the body
Mula (root): pancreas, soft palate
Marga (channel): GI mucous membrane
Mukha (exit): Kidneys, tongue, sweat glands
For the health of both these srotamsi of nourishment, we practice the activities of incubation: patience, waiting, watching. In other words, eat when you’re hungry, and drink when you’re thirsty. Not because it’s time for lunch or because the your partner bought you Valentine’s Day chocolates and you’d hurt their feelings for not eating one (or seven); not because the giant Yeti you got for Christmas is sitting at your desk, or the free coffee from the Keurig in the break room is one of the “perks” of your job. Developing the skills to know what hunger and thirst truly feel like, and the discipline to feed them when they arrive with the right things and in the right quantity, is hard. Like, the work of a lifetime. Like, the work of growing a baby. Like, the work of falling in love.
I invite you to practice paying attention to your hunger and thirst daily—maybe do some experiments with different time intervals for your meals, noticing your cravings and what satisfies you, and whether you’re drowning agni with water/tea/coffee. Together on the mat, we’ll also address these srotamsi through movement and awareness of a part of our anatomy that I explored in January’s practices: the psoas. Intimately related to breath, digestion, elimination, and reproduction, the psoas needs to be supple in order to maintain the health of the overall system—whether it’s contracted in response to stress or relaxed in the absence of stress. The psoas is both a first-responder for external threats to our survival, and a first-responder to a sense of connection and intimacy that is necessary for our ongoing survival (aka reproduction).
Energetically, the psoas draws us into the second and third chakras, the centers of water and fire that govern digestion on all fronts. The attachment points of the psoas at the inner thigh bone and bottom ribs (where the diaphragm attaches to the spine) also align it with the kidney and liver meridians—two significant yin energy channels in TCM that run close to each other, from the inner foot through the inner leg and up the center of the trunk, and that play roles in body-mind digestion.
In a western sense, the kidneys are the organs most associated with the ambuvaha srotas, governing the retention and release of water and all that it carries—minerals, electrolytes, and other nutrients we need for overall health. Similar fluids, like digestive enzymes produced in the mouth and insulin in the pancreas, correlate with this srotas. In an eastern sense, though, the kidneys are the organ of fear (along with their partner, the bladder, which we’ll explore in a few months when we get to the channels of elimination of water). While fear may seem connected to the safety and stability of the earth element, most of our human fear stems from being alone—a lack of cohesion and connection, which water (not earth, which is inherently dry), provides. We are grown in an incubator of water—our mother’s womb—so this element is our first experience of nourishment, safety, and relationship. When water is absent or out of balance, fear is the natural response: we constrict, first and primarily in the areas around the psoas/pelvis, which further creates dryness and limits movement through all of the channels, including blood and breath. In yoga philosophy, one of the kleshas (obstacles to enlightenment) is fear of death (abhinivesha)—a process that we must go through alone, no matter how strong our connections are in life. Winter is the season of the kidney, the season when water is frozen and not flowing, when we are made most aware of death and dying as nature contracts and we stare mortality in the face. In a western sense, this state of sympathetic nervous system activation (fight or flight) will tax our systems of homeostasis. Digestion suffers during the stress response, since the body cannot prioritize digestion while trying to survive; energy that normally flows inward toward agni is shunted to the periphery for the muscles. Likewise, reproduction is pushed to the far back seat (maybe even the trunk). Indeed, the kidneys are also the source of our jing, or vital essence (similar to ojas in Ayurveda, but not quite). Depletion of the kidney energy is often associated with some lack of reproductive function (kidney yang=virility, kidney yin=fertility). So strained kidneys hit us with death on many sides—we cannot eat to survive in the moment, and we cannot ensure our future survival through our genes.
http://www.shen-nong.com/eng/principles/kidneymeridian.html
The liver can similarly be interpreted from these western and eastern perspectives. As the largest internal organ of the body (around 3 pounds in an adult), the liver occupies significant real estate in our rather small abdominal area—and for good reason. It performs over 500 different functions in the body, including filtering and circulating all the blood in your whole body every single day (about 250 gallons per day). The liver works alongside the gallbladder to specifically support fat metabolism, since one of its other jobs is to produce bile (an acidic liquid) that gets stored in the gallbladder until it’s ready to use. TCM pairs these same organs in an energetic sense, and together they orchestrate the digestion of emotions. When healthy and relaxed, the liver allows for the free flow of qi in the body, and the gall bladder can execute decisions in response to (or in spite of) those emotions. Together, they turn mental “food” into action, just the way that the western liver/gallbladder (and other digestive organs) turn edible food into action via the creation of tissues and energy to move. While the kidneys are more often depleted, the liver will experience stagnation or excess in its ability to circulate qi. “Liver qi stagnation” is accompanied by symptoms such as insomnia, emotional lability, and generally uneven moods (one of the prime causes of PMS, when the liver might struggle to filter the surge of hormones in the blood); “liver fire rising” creates similar manifestations of emotions, but more consistently heated such as red eyes/face, rage, emotional outbursts, intense dreaming, and even fever and skin rashes.
http://www.shen-nong.com/eng/principles/livermeridian.html
Spring is the season of the liver (aligned with the wood element in TCM, which doesn’t have a correlation in Ayurveda but is a bit like air, and a bit like fire)—a season of expansion and propulsive growth. Ayurveda describes this same season as kapha, which has heavy and dense qualities and might seem contradictory. However, the two interpretations are simply different sides of the same many-sided coin (so maybe it’s a gem?)—spring is a season of big energy, when the unmanifest becomes manifest, when the fierce yet nurturing energy of the pregnant mother is at its peak. Wood is sturdy yet soft and flexible, like a new life that has been protected for long enough inside and is ready to face the world.
Note that in the western approach of the kidneys and liver, “control” is usually the name of the game (as is the case with most western approaches). Kidney depletion—aka chronic fatigue, adrenal fatigue (the adrenal glands sit on top of the kidneys), burnout, infertility—is addressed by “boosting” energy, immunity, libido through a variety of means. Likewise, a taxed liver will be “cleansed/dredged” with (mostly) disgusting combinations of dark green “superfoods” and a restricted diet—the removal of all the “toxins” we disgusting/sinful/uncontrollable humans are prone to want and indulge in. While these measures might provide temporary relief, they don’t address the root cause of either organ’s imbalance. The kidneys and liver might present in opposite ways—one tired, the other wired—what they both need to stay health is protection. Scared kidneys need to warm and weighted, reminded they’re safe to preserve jing and allow it to flow through the body as needed, and allow for the necessary replenishment of resources through food (digestion) and sleep; an astringed liver needs to take some things off its plate and decompress, so that all that blood and emotional energy can circulate through and out. Ayurveda acknowledges this connection between the health of the body’s vitality and the mind when it offers this prescription for preserving ojas: “Tranquility and wisdom should be followed meticulously” (Caraka Samhita, Su, 30:13-14).
I’m not sure if I’ll be ready to emerge from my couch-rutabaga state in February. Things seem pretty bleak out there, and I’m not in a state of mind to sugar coat reality with the idea that my practice will create meaningful change. What I can do, and what I wish for all of us, is steadiness. A faith in the Prana that saturates and surrounds us to keep doing what it’s been doing forever. To give us enough light to see the bigness of our creative potential and hold onto it for a little bit longer.
