Fall Back into Seasons, Ancestors, and Sorrow

We’ve turned our clocks back, the temperature is dropping (depending on where you live), and our evenings are filled with more darkness. How is your body adjusting?

One of the important pieces of my healing journey has been tuning into the lessons from nature (I know I write a lot about nature!).

Being a recovering perfectionist and, dare I say, workaholic, I’ve been known to push myself to exhaustion a number of times. So it was so relieving to discover that my energy, body, system and true nature are actually just like Nature. I don’t have to push myself to produce and be productive all of the time. There is a time for sowing, growing, blooming, dying, and hibernating. There is actual value in slowing down, resting, and the space BEFORE growing happens. I love this term I learned from Kate Northrup : THE FERTILE VOID. It may feel like nothing is happening there. But it’s the space for planting the seeds of what will be.

{Image by @rockinruksi }

So if we are living our lives in spirals, rhythms, and non-linear beingness, what is this particular season asking of you?

Is it asking you to slow down and find more rest? Is it asking you to release some things like the leaves of the trees? Is it asking you for warm foods, warm layers, warm friends? Are you needing more vitamins and minerals, bodywork, quiet time, social time, sauna/sweat sessions? What does your heart need?

This season of autumn is potent time to connect to our ancestors and loved ones who have passed.

Invite them to join you at the dinner table with lighting a candle. Pull out some photographs and devote a space in your home for them to be seen. Connect with your well ancestors and loved ones through meditation, prayer, breathwork, your spiritual practice. Journal about what their struggles where, what they enjoyed, what harm they might’ve caused, what good they did, and what lineage patterns are ready to be healed.

Fall is a season of endings, decay, transitions, and grief.

Which is not the most comfortable things to feel and go through, so make sure you’re giving yourself enormous amounts of self-compassion. We can honor our sorrow and all the feels that come up around endings and transitions by doing similar practices as celebrating our ancestors: light a candle for it, provide a space for it to be seen, meditate, pray, breathe for it, journal about it. Talk to someone about it, create art with it, trust your intuition around how your heart wants to express.

For me, fall is also about GRATITUDE and I am so grateful you are here with me on this journey.

To close, I’d like to share this Blessing for the Center by Starhawk from her book Earth Path:

We give thanks and gratitude for the center, the heart and the hearth, and for the complex and beautiful patterns of life. We give thanks for the flow of sap through branches, water through rivers, blood through our veins. Thanks for the spiral vine and the sunflower, the daisy and the dandelion, the sunburst and the star. We bless the random element that brings freedom into the pattern, and thank the weaver of the web of life for teaching us that all is interconnected. May we be aware of our patterns, able to change those that do not serve us and to cherish and strengthen those that do. May the cycles of the moon's and the sun's journeys through the year help us remember that light arises from dark, rebirth from death. Blessings on the cycles, the patterns, and the center.