Autumn…Fall.
Really the perfect word for this season and the many invitations to FALL – to let go, that this time of year naturally brings. It seems to me we are in a major cycle of death and endings. That we are all having our feet held to the fire in some way. Being required to both let go and hold on to what matters.
The words I keep hearing are to: build our capacity to stay present. To stay awake to what is happening in our personal heart, in our communities, country and the global community.
Right now there are fires and power outages, there are riots and death, there are political upheavals in multiple countries and there are plights in the natural world bigger than we can really take in.
This time of year the beauty and reminders of endings just keep coming through the natural world. Leaves turn their brilliant colors then die, darkness grows and light slips away. Crispness in the air invigorates and the coming cold drives us inside.
With all this, I am feeling such deep heart-opening and tenderness within myself and as I sit with clients. I feel a collective grief that is calling us/me deep into the heart. Deep into surrender. Deep into “not knowing”…not knowing the “answer”, not knowing “what do do” to navigate difficult situations, not knowing what will happen next….and so on.
I feel a sorrow that is both personal and transpersonal. I am practicing being deeply with this, bringing kindness rather than “trying to feel better”. I am finding a tender spaciousness here.
Amongst the loss and grief this time of year there is a strange mix of playful celebration with Halloween parties and Dia De Los Muertos to honor the dead and our own eventual death. Celtic Samhain marks our turn towards darkness and the liminal space of the “thinning of the veil” between this world and the next. Hindu Diwali celebrates the spiritual “victory of light over darkness, good over evil and knowledge over ignorance” (1).
The mix of these energies somehow opens the heart even more. Maybe because all this places us smack dab in the middle of the multi faceted paradoxical human experience. The wild, unknowable now. Raw and real. Where we celebrate, grieve, feel loss, let go, breathe into our expanding heart, feel it crack open, surrender and fall into what matters most.
Originally written for The Jung Society of Utah
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