Fall Equinox - the Love Making of Opposites
/Can You Feel Fall Stirring Within You?
As the days grow shorter, we tend to acknowledge the changing season without understanding that we, too, are in transition.
This moment, when sunlight and moonlight strike a tenuous balance above the lush beauty of Planet Earth, is called Fall Equinox.
As the midpoint between the longest day of the year at Summer Solstice and shortest day of the year at Winter Solstice, from now on each passing day solidifies the rein of shadow as we dance into the darkest quadrant on the never-ending cyclical wheel of the year.
Fall is the lovemaking of the radiant Fire of Summer, carrying the virility of the masculine polarity within us, and the halcyon yet infinitely generative Earth wisdom of Winter, epitomizing the primordial sensuality of the feminine principle.
As plants are now intelligently pulling their vital energy back towards their roots in preparation for the holiness of the dark, it’s time for us to lighten our load by putting down the heavy basket of Summer obligations.
Celebrating equinox is about cleansing the body and the mind to recover balance as we travel between the temperature and energetic extremes of summer and winter.
Fall Archetype: The Wise Elder
On the Wheel of the Year, Fall represents he ripening of maturity and wisdom that comes through hard lessons. The journey of becoming a true elder means we harvest the experiences of our lives by softening around the hard spaces within, the diehard either/or, the red/blue, the right/wrong that results in internal and external tension and violence.
Do you ever look back at the opinions and preferences you clung to for absolute certain twenty years ago (or one year ago), with disbelief or shock? For example, how judgmental were you of your own parents until you had a child yourself?
In the words of Bob Dylan, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” If we choose to age consciously we learn that the only constant is change and that the values of love and compassion trump all conditioned opinions shaped by the specific unique time bound human experience.
The Lovemaking of Opposites
No sweet without salty, no joy without grief, no day without night, no inhale without exhale, no flow without ebb. The contraction and expansion of our heartbeat, the waning and waxing of the moon - all of life pulsates between polarities. The universal wisdom of this dynamic life current is called spanda in Sanskrit.
Yet, life is not duality. Instead, extremes alchemize, generating magic, something completely new - life. All life is born from this love dance of opposites. Sperm meets egg to create you, sun meets moon to create a planet ripe for life, nothing met something to create the big bang. And here we are.
Instead of either/or can we elevate our consciousness by reframing our experience as both/and to transcend the harsh judgments of our ego mind and allow for the multiplicity of truths that might exist for others and ourselves at any given moment.
The realm of either/or thinking is a disempowering kingdom - a place where there are few possibilities and minimal space for open-minded dialogue. This is often a lonely land or a land that feels like an echo chamber as it’s challenging to have harmonious relationships when we are always playing the judge
The kingdom of both/and thinking is a land of multiple possibilities and harmonious, mind expanding, eye opening dialouge, a land of compassion and patience.
The journey of life isn’t to negate or disavow one extreme or the other but to acknowledge their complexity and the way we are shaped by the limitations of our experience by learning to gracefully surf opposites, to skillfully balance within the intense flow of life’s pulsation.
To connect with the spanda of nature - to honor the sunrise and sunset, to acknowledge the movement of the moon from new to full and back to new again - opens our minds to the inevitability of spanda in our own lives.
We will be sad but we can trust that we will be happy again. We can feel grief and if we surrender to it, the tide of joy will return. To experience our emotional tides as spanda is to cultivate balance and harmony.
And there is no better place to explore spanda than by calming the mind to the rhythm of our own breath.
Joy Work Journal Reflections
Where in your life do you feel out of balance? How might the situation change if you softened your judgment around it? What small adjustment might you make to your schedule this week to allow more space for balance?
Share below to be supported in your intentions…
*Thanks to Kristen Dessange at Sacred Life Circle for her inspiration for this article