Beat the Heat: What the Fire Element Is Telling You This Summer

We are in the fire element right now — and if you’ve been feeling it, you’re not imagining things.

In the traditional yogic understanding of the seasons, summer is governed by fire. It’s the time of the solar plexus, of digestion and clarity and the capacity to act. At its best, fire gives us direction, vitality, and the energy to meet our lives fully. You can see it everywhere in nature right now — things in their fullest expression, abundance everywhere you look.

But fire needs tending.

When the environment is already generating more heat — longer days, higher temperatures, more light — it becomes easy for our inner fire to tip out of balance. A short fuse. Impatience. A restless mind that won’t settle at night. Difficulty digesting not just food but experiences. These are classic signs that the fire element has become a little too active.

And here’s what I see students do: they keep practicing the same way. Breath of fire, kapalabati, hot yoga, vigorous sun salutations. All beautiful practices — but all heat-generating. When the environment is already producing more fire, these practices can push us further into imbalance rather than toward it.

This summer, I want to invite you to try something different.

Stay low and slow

The coolest air is closest to the ground. In a cooling practice, we stay there — floor-based movement, slow transitions, long exhales. There’s something about literally staying closer to the earth that shifts the energy. Try spending your next practice almost entirely on the floor and notice how different your body feels afterward.

Make your exhales longer than your inhales

This is one of the simplest and most powerful things you can do for the nervous system in summer. An extended exhale activates the parasympathetic — the rest-and-restore branch — and is innately cooling. Try inhaling for four counts and exhaling for six or eight. Even five minutes of this before bed can change the quality of your sleep.

Try Sheetkari pranayama

This is a cooling breath that most people have never tried and immediately love. Close your teeth lightly and inhale through the small gaps, drawing cool air across your tongue. Then exhale through the nose. You’ll feel the cool air entering and the warm air leaving. It’s particularly helpful when you’re feeling agitated, overheated, or emotionally activated.

Left-nostril breathing for the moon channel

In yogic tradition, the left nostril activates the lunar or cooling channel — what’s sometimes called Chandra Bedana. To practice: close your right nostril with your thumb, inhale through the left, then close the left and exhale through the right. Repeat for five to ten rounds. This practice alone can shift a restless, overstimulated state into genuine calm.

A teaching from the trail

I’ve been in Breckenridge this month, mountain biking almost every day. On my very first day, I went straight over the handlebars on a downhill. It was a spectacular fall — and I spent the next two weeks bruised and humbled.

At first I thought: why did that happen? But I sat with it, and I started to see it differently. That fall on the first day set the tone for everything that followed. It made me more careful, more thoughtful, more alert to the lines I was choosing. I think it may have prevented something more serious from happening later.

Life doesn’t always meet us where we want to be met. But I’ve come to believe it’s always moving us toward something — toward more awareness, more capacity, more growth. The question isn’t whether difficulty will come. The question is whether we can hold it lightly enough to hear what it’s offering.

When something hard comes up this summer, I’d invite you to just stay open for a moment to the possibility: what if this is happening for me, not to me? You don’t have to like it. You don’t even have to believe it right away. Just stay open to the question.

That openness is its own kind of cooling.

With love, Sandra