DAILY The mind-like the wind- is a hard mistress. She turns every which way; turbulent, twisty, erratic. Finding shelter from the storm becomes imperative, especially in seasons of change when the world is neither hot nor cold, and we are neither fish nor fowl. Part of the underpinnings for fall and spring is the Ayurvedic- Vata Dosha, a spacey, creative, un-grounded imbalance that occurs when we are working to shift gears, have intimate dialogues, and anchor new ground. Vata also increases as we age, adding a steeper incline to its slippery slope of mobility and instability. As we shape-shift only faster, with old anchors giving way, it becomes a creative time to grow more resilient shelters, to encounter touchstones of reality we didn’t envision before, to spend time with our transformative Shamanic-Self. Tranquility and sweetness are no longer assumed to follow us all our days, which adds to the anxiety and emotional upheaval, and Fall has the added intensity of being under the direction of death. It is the last hurrah for the year, a time of accountability. Astrologically, it is the Scorpio field of deep, dark realities, those of sex, death, and taxes. Though blithely put, Scorpio tells us how we manipulate pay-backs, who owes, who doesn’t, who has the power, and who will survive because of controlling those issues. At this time, the ancestors knew whether they would survive the winter. The old harvest was a visible fruit of labor. The new harvest is an invisible fruit. Both bring urgency to see results, to count the year well done. How are we to assess this if we no longer understand our world, if old structures and lines of power have vanished, if our spirit has not grown to hold the larger need? Taking care everything above the radar cannot… Read more »
Read moreInspirations: Ritual & Celebration
Crossroads
The Autumn Equinox is one of the four potent crossroads in the year’s cycle. Many cultures through time have marked these four quadrant turnings with prayer, ceremony, and celebration. They symbolize gateways in the relationship of light and dark, spirit and matter, outer and inner life. These moments when the world stops to shift, offer animal and vegetable-life doorways of change. Death or life? Renewal -or Same-O-Same-O? Ritual and ceremony create not only greater power and recognition of an event, but deeper connection to layers which remain hidden. Most of the modern world has lost its tribal roots as well as its dependence on ritual. We may be more connected with more people, but we depend less upon each other, and we rarely celebrate sacred moments. We cannot change the world, but we can we create a balancing between these polarities of loss and gain, sacred and profane, which in its own small way will contribute to transformation. This is a true and good undertaking at the four quadrants. Each of the portals offers a moment to focus intention, and step into a new demand. They are “energetic gateways” (Stephanie Austin) that support and re-set desire. The Fall Equinox, particularly, asks us to come out of extremes and re-align center. The question for this moment might be, “Which polarities do I want to continue dancing?” It’s important to honor and use what is best of ancestral heritage, as well as leaving its tribal excesses behind. Mining and moving with the earth’s energies gives our efforts greater ease and support. We don’t fight the current so much. As the Sun moves into Libra on the Autumn Equinox, dance with the polarity of your own unique being and that of ‘the other.’ Place your choices on Libra’s ‘scale of justice,’ to tune… Read more »
Read moreWheat From Chaff
Each of the four seasons offers a particular impetus that feels natural to the body, fitting the logos of that season. In the shift to fall, we reach for a fresh start, and may pull back in dismay, feeling overwhelmed. Spring’s bright beginning has an entirely different energy to its new life. The fall ‘new year’ carries weight. Perhaps it is childhood years of beginning a new grade, and adjusting to an unknown teacher? With falling leaves, the psyche is assigned to grow and own itself in new ways, expressing itself in better forms. Ancient memory-bones that gathered in the harvest, preparing for winter, celebrated bounty, or knew death approached. It is a serious time. There is less possibility in this beginning than spring’s exuberant birth. In the Northern Hemisphere, the first stray turning of green to gold announces summer’s somnolence over. Even tropical locations contain signs of a new dance, replacing August’s easier waltz. Astrologically, moving from Leo’s creative enjoyment to Virgo’s perceptions of refinement, and integration, ask we separate wheat from chaff, that we take inventory for the time ahead, and bring talents into alignment. Virgo asks the soul, “What is your sacred work, and what do you need to heal to grow whole?” Along with the Sun’s entry into Virgo, Rosh Hashanah, literally ‘head of the year,’ symbolically gives fall an extra new year oomph. In the Jewish oral traditions, Rosh Hashanah marked the completion of the world’s creation, and perhaps some world-memory feels we now have to go out and do something about it. In Virgo fashion, we’d best do it impeccably, and preferably looking as chic as possible. Whether we love fall, or loathe it, follow the Jewish faith, or none at all, facing these shadow elements gives pause, and can bring anxiousness. The anxiety… Read more »
Read moreThresholds of the New Year
In our endings lie our beginnings. The power of graduations is they symbolize the work accomplished that opens the next level. Each birth is the first step towards death. Thresholds, cycles, wheels, call it what you will, 2012 offered multiple time and space opportunity to see the cause and effect of our actions, to comprehend the wisdom, and the shadow in our choices. Consequences have grown more defined, intentions- more visible. ‘What goes around comes around’ is coming around faster and faster. Having survived the turbulence of the past 365 days, we hopefully cross the threshold into 2013 with greater consciousness, greater heart. 2012 ended a number of cycles, and in those endings we can choose to access faster bandwidths, more options, along with a demand for greater potency, and compassionate intuition. As our amplification ascends from the Manipura/third chakra (emotional focus) to the Anahata/fourth chakra (heart wisdom), we breakthrough self-centered impetus into heart-driven awareness, especially around feminine, or receptive, power. Our ideas of creativity are expanding. We have a greater comprehension in our relationship to self, which transforms all other relationships. We are motivated toward partnerships that nurture and foster caring consciousness. We support one another in listening to music from the spheres beyond the physical. We are dancing with difficult truths, requiring subtle, transformational wisdom. This territory is for the truly courageous. It is harder and harder to be someone we are not. We are making fundamental changes relating to our authority, integrity, accountability, and relationships. We are more capable of healing our own shadow material so we may move on, so we might know our ‘true name.’ 2013 may be an extraordinary year in the acceptance of ALL our unique light and shadow-Selves. Again, courage is a password to what lies ahead as we are willing to… Read more »
Read moreTake Back The Night
The numinous has been leeched from our bones by the radioactive society we’ve created. We worship the maudlin and horrific, the mundane and safe. We are frightened by mystery and magic. The ancient mystery of the Winter Solstice has departed, gone in pre-Christmas flounce and flurry. What was most sacred is now scarcely noted, roared past as road kill. Ritual re-sanctifies and empowers because we become the catalysts to bring forth healing and transformation. We do not use an intermediary to ask for absolution, which puts power in their hands, not ours. The solstice, like the equinox, are perfect moments to stand still with the Gaia. Take stock. Participate with nature. Re-connect to earth’s cycles. The on-going unspeakable tragedies, some Nature’s doing, all too many man’s creation, tell us we need to re-connect, to one another, to the earth, to our own spirit. It is time to re-invent ourselves, so that communities care for the disenfranchised, cities re-claim their homeless. Let us be different in this long dark night, let us light the light within. If it’s religion that feeds you, make a new space within its old traditions. “The goal in the etymology of the word ‘religion’ is to re-link us to the Universal.” (Jessica Murray in Mt. Astrologer) This is the same goal Yoga propounds– link our Practice to life, become a bridge, or lynch pin to expanding consciousness. We are bits and pieces of an eco system that we need to nurture, not the other way around. This is particularly true during dark cycles, when much of the animal and plant life are dormant. Our dormancy often carries us toward depression, sickness, SAD, even suicide because we’ve misplaced the light within. The Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh said, “Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible.” We pass through… Read more »
Read moreImpossible to Predict
Is there a better reason for living than to discover who we are? Is there anything more powerful than becoming our true colors, then sending them out to seep into the world, where as wild dyes they/we sustain, transform, and pigment everyone and everything touched? As the forces of change build to a momentous turning point – the ending of a 26,000 year cycle, announced with this year’s winter solstice, it is critical we seed and impart this transformative time with Grace, not fear, with joy, not divisiveness, with wisdom not delusion. Nothing new in that, but the timing is insistent. There is deep need to pay attention to anything that directs us toward knowing and serving true-self, like Yoga, creativity, and poetry, Astrology and ripe friendships. These are constructs that nurture soul so we might bloom as one of Rumi’s roses…. “If you want to know Him and yourself Look at this open rose- From one infinite silent drunken heart So many petals, so many worlds.” One of the reasons I love poetry is that like the horoscope it can reveal essential self, as does a Yoga Practice, only differently. If you re-read last week’s breath, “Why and Because,” the creative process offered another exploration of the same. There is reason humanity has expressed through these archetypal forms for thousands of years. Each is a superb structure to hold the mysteries, and support the devotion required to unlock a DNA, to plumb secrets of the evolutionary heart. Going within is difficult. There is a reason few have explored consciousness. That is changing as we come to embrace the breadth and depth of our spirit and soul. We need prediction less. We trust more. Science acknowledges that everything on earth relates: ecological systems, planetary systems, human societies, the physics of… Read more »
Read moreThe Ground of Heaven
Celebrating the sublime conundrum of deaths’ burnished brilliance on The Day of The Dead, is satisfying. We might be as leaves, flaming out in high-flying colors, lofted into winds for a last dance. Is it not a death many of us would envy? If we but un-clutch, releasing the branch, we will slide into home base, and snuggle in colorful piles with our friends, held at last by Mother Earth….Wow! Sign me up for that one. Reaching the end of any cycle and perceiving ourselves as incandescent beauty, is a major achievement. All rotations, be it the seasons, a life span, a planetary circling bring a time of release and dying, otherwise we cannot begin again. But facing the end of any cycle brings sadness. We recognizing change and aging. It forces the psyche within, just as winter’s bone-life shoos the body inside. Endings are where we hope to face our deepest fears and desires. Yes, we sit by fires, drinking blood red wine, but also consciously, or un-consciously, begin preparations for spring birth. In order to do so we must shed old skins so that what is crying to be born has opportunity for breath. The Day of The Dead is the ground of heaven when we face ‘limits that need respect, and look at the limitations we must transcend.’ (Stephanie Austin) The Universe supports these inner and outer cycles with layers of helpful energies: Fall’s last hurrah is the territory of Scorpio’s frozen waters of death and rebirth, profound passion, and innate desires that take us to the bottom of issues. Though most of us do not celebrate the dead as our ancestors did, we yet have a celebration that holds space, so when we are ready to return to the richer life of spirit, old rituals lie… Read more »
Read moreQuestioning The Harvest
What sort of a ‘farmer’ have I been? Did I grow enough for a long winter? Which dreams died this year? What was born? What nutrients, provided by mistakes, failures, and mis-steps will help grow new seeds? We lie under in a night sky, tiny and supercilious until exposed to Luna’s enormous Light. Her quivering, round, emotional body questions our smallness, begging a larger life of more connection and meaning. The fall’s Harvest Moon provokes ancestor bones to move beyond the flat, daily drone to ask, “What do those of us, who no longer work the land, actually harvest?” What do I cultivate when I do not turn over soil, dig under stalk and chaff? Am I producing anything of substance, or sustenance? Our ancestors howled when standing under a Full Moon, allowing her magic to prepare them for cycles of death and re-birth. When our bodies are infused with that ancient tribal awareness, the light of Luna’a wisdom promotes timeless, archaic, immutable, archetypal memory that requires no word of praise, only inquiry, questing, and howling. Any harvest is an end, and a beginning, provoking cyclical questions from this life, as well as other times and places: Do I honor the courage and steadfastness that brought this crop to harvest? Did I refuse my own gifts along the way? Will I allow this year’s mistakes, and failures, despondency, and carelessness to become the mulch and manure for next year’s seed? What failed to harvest? Why? Do my fears interfere with talents to produce? How? What showered me with abundance? In what new, more powerful ways will I husband spring seed? Am I willing to share the abundance? What does that look like? With whom do I share? Who is my tribe? How have I transformed from this harvest? How, and… Read more »
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