Autumnal Equinox - approx. September 21st

The autumnal equinox, much like the spring equinox, is a time of shifting balance. The sun rests upon the final edge of his dominance, as the world prepares to dive back into the dark, with the nighttime predominating over the day.

Now is the time to prepare for a fall cleanse – making room for this year’s “harvest” as well as clearing out the old and musty as you prepare to spend considerably more time “indoors” during the winter months.

Now much of this is figurative, as most people are not going to be harvesting a literal crop nor be stuck inside their homes all winter long. But that energy nevertheless remains. It is the energy of Mama Gaia.

Watch the plants and animals and see how they respond to this season. Some birds will molt this time of year, putting on fresh feathers to keep them through the rough winter months. Bears and other mammals prepare for hibernation, stockpiling as much energy as they can to get them through the lean months to come. Your grandmother likely did the same in the form of canning or drying the last of the garden’s bounty.

So how does this relate to “modern” human culture? The trees shed their leaves to conserve their energy. What do you need to shed to prepare you for the coming darkness? The winter months will ask you to dive deep to face your shadow side. The more work you do now to prepare for this the better.

Exercises

Body: cleansing foods

Cleansing the body, especially the digestive tract, takes center stage this time of year. Everyone’s favorite fall spices are perfect for this! Herbs during the fall would naturally have consisted of seeds, bark, and roots as the flowers and leaves have already begun to fade or disappear entirely. 

Fall fruits like apples and pomegranates are beneficial as well as other late summer/early fall harvests such as milk thistle seed, cayenne pepper, pumpkin seeds, and garlic.

Pungent foods and spices not only help clean the digestive tract, they help to warm the body as well which comes in handy as the weather starts to cool.

From the ancient Indian science of health known as Ayurveda, the classic cleansing dish is kitchari, a simple combination of beans, rice, and spices. The following is an adapted recipe to include the immune-supporting herb astragulus as well as nutrient-dense greens.

IMMUNE-SUPPORT KITCHARI RECIPE

Emotions: clearing emotional baggage

It’s time to check in with your emotional expression. Have you given your feelings a voice? Do you keep them bottled up inside? Or do they pop up at unexpected times and at unsuspecting targets?

If you are the “bear it in silence” type, you are probably experiencing some “bleed through” of these emotions into other areas of your life or body. Repressed anger can lead to stomach ulcers, hidden grief to a hunched back, unshared fears to insomnia and tension headaches. Repressing emotions doesn’t make them go away, it forces them to find a new way to get out, much like a clot in a blood vessel can cause new vessels to form around it in order for the blood to continue flowing.

On the other hand, if your emotions are explosive and difficult to control, you have likely dealt with a lot of fallout your entire life. The highs are really high, and the lows are really low. Often, people who experience this are very empathic and highly sensitive. And sometimes, the big emotions they are experiencing aren’t even their own! Other times, it’s lack of emotional intelligence/education that lead to outbursts and unhealthy emotional expression.

Clearing emotional baggage is important work and isn’t something that should only be done once a year. Ideally, as life happens, you move through each emotion, allowing it to play out and pass on. Sometimes life gets too hectic or too traumatizing, though, and the emotion gets pushed back or ignored. This is when one of the two scenarios above begins to play out. The emotion either manifests in the physical body or will find another emotion you are more comfortable through which to express itself.

The following is one of my favorite exercises for getting through difficult emotions. It helps you to understand the source of your emotional imbalance, why you are responding to stimuli the way that you are, and allows you the space to sit with the emotion and let it run its course. This last part may take a while as some emotions and circumstances take longer to process and heal than others (grief over the loss of a loved one vs anger from a fight with your partner)

This exercise is most effective when you are in the middle of intense emotions. It can still be used to recall older emotional responses, but you may find it more difficult to dissect.

ROOTING OUT FEAR EXERCISE:

Find a place where you can sit quietly and undisturbed for as long as is needed. Sit in a chair or on the floor (you can put your back against a wall if needed to provide support). Close your eyes and focus on your feelings and begin to ask yourself one simple question: Why do I really feel this way? Get detailed and don’t stop until you’ve taken the focus from what someone did to you to how you responded to something that happened to you. Even then, don’t stop at the response. Dig in to the WHY.

Usually, it will distil down into a specific fear: “I exploded at my partner when I realized they hadn’t been listening because… I hate to be ignored … being ignored makes me feel like they think I’m stupid … being thought of a “dumb” makes me feel less-than and effects my self-worth … I’m afraid that I am unworthy...” When you find the fear, you will know you’ve found the source of your emotional response.

Sometimes the fear may be hard to discover as it likes to hide behind the ego: “How dare they!” is a common ego-fear response. It’s your job to figure out why the ego felt threatened. More work than that may be required to permanently soothe an inflamed ego or to fully heal the trigger/trauma, but for this exercise, awareness allows for a healthier expression of the emotion.

Mind: tRUTH AND mERCY

It’s time to revisit the concept of Justice. The ideal for Justice is being blind to all but the Truth. However, balance requires something else…mercy – the ability to see the Truth clearly, but to choose forgiveness instead of punishment. It is truly a balancing of the heart and throat chakras, as well as lifting into the higher chakras for the wisdom to know when to show mercy and when to be firm.

Where do you see yourself on this spectrum? Do you fall strongly into the left-brained Truth and Justice realm, or do you find yourself more prone to the right-brained mercy and forgiveness? Or do you feel that you are somewhere in the middle, trying to dance the line of when to be firm and when to be forgiving, sometimes choosing wisely and other times faltering?

Having identified your strength and weakness, it’s now time to investigate the results of your past decisions with regards to Justice and the reasoning behind your choices.

Sometimes, choosing Justice is choosing to be “right”. “It’s the principle of the thing” can cause more arguments than you might realize…maybe most of them! You may not say those words, but they may still be the driving force behind your actions. “It is better to be kind than to be right” may be something you need to begin to embrace in your life. Bringing the feminine energy of mercy back into your mentality to balance the masculine energy of right and wrong.

If you tend to always let things slide, this may be an attempt to avoid confrontation. Fear of confrontation can cause you to allow others to walk all over you as you are unable to set clear boundaries and enforce them. You tell yourself you are being kind and forgiving, but what you are really doing is enabling negative behavior. In this instance, a dose of masculine rules and enforcement is necessary to bring you back into balance.

Sometimes the easiest way to go about balancing masculine and feminine energies is indirectly. It may not be easy to suddenly tell yourself, “Ok, this time I’m going to stand up for myself!” or “I’m going to just let that go and not let it bother me.” We’re talking about rewriting years of behavioral patterns and belief systems as well as changing your energy signature.

Instead, introducing activities to boost the desired energy in your life may be the solution.

• If you need to increase feminine energy, try creative activities like cooking, coloring, and gardening, or gentle physical practices like hatha yoga or tai chi.

• If you are in need of a masculine boost of energy, higher intensity activities or sports that get the blood pumping and heat circulating can do the trick – running, weight lifting, interval training, difficult hikes, etc. Mental activities like word puzzles or critical thinking games can also help increase masculine energy.

Spirit: sTAYING gROUNDED

The fall marks a shift of energy from the physical to the spiritual. When the sun dominates the day, life on Mama Gaia is abundant. It’s an extroverted energy that helps to keep us grounded and in the present moment.

But during the other half of the year, when darkness reigns, the energy shifts to a more introverted expression. We live our lives “indoors” both literally and figuratively. This provides an opportunity to look within and heal internal wounds, our shadows.

However, one of the effects of this shift to the internal landscape is the danger of becoming ungrounded and lost in the spiritual or mental realms. Then, you may disconnect from your everyday life. This can harm your relationships and your health.

While it is natural and necessary to turn in and withdraw, it is still important to remain grounded in this reality. Otherwise, the internal work you do and the dreams you hope to bring into the world won’t be able to manifest – you’re too disconnected.

Keep yourself grounded by literally staying in contact with the earth. Go barefoot as often as you can until it gets too cold. Dig in the dirt. Plant a fall/winter garden to stay connected to the Earth’s rhythms. Lay on the ground. Create garden art to hang in your trees, on your porch, or in your garden to keep color around even in the barren winter months.

<< Harvest Samhain >>