The Coming of Early Winter: Reflections, Practices

Autumn is fading in the ayurvedic cycle and we are moving into early winter.  By the time I do my next blog we will have entered yama damastra. Yama (the Lord of Death) damstra, according to my teacher and other readings, represents a time in which death’s presence is quite strong.  It is a time in which those with low life force have an easier chance of slipping out of this world.  Not the most optimistic of times.

There is something else at work, though. The death-life cycle, right?  With death comes the deeper work to generate new life, new possibilities. This juncture is also considered one of the most important junctures of the year.  As my teacher has stated, if there is one juncture to take out time and really do inner work, this is the one.  This year it has felt like the early winter shift has taken place already. The past couple of weeks have been plagued by challenges, exhaustions, anxieties, frustrations. I often haven't quite been able to gauge my own sense of well-being.

Juncture, according to Miriam-Webster, is a point of time made critical by a “concurrence of circumstances.”  For ayurveda, seasonal junctures are critical times of flux. The concurrence of circumstances revolves around the unsettling of the elements that comprise ourselves and the world.  The elements open up and loosen, leading to potential reorientation.  It can be a time of great change, great discomfort, great challenge, great potential….  These can be times when all hell breaks loose, but these times can lead to incredible moments of insight and life.

This shift also means a lot to me, because it takes us into the season that parallels my own doshic make-up:  Vata-Kapha.  It means that both can easily become imbalanced. Both can find excess easily.   And I am often susceptible to their simultaneous disruption, which means I can go from frantic unfocused anxious motion one moment to lethargic depressed dissolved stasis the next.  This is not a welcome season for me most of the time and this year I have to do my due diligence to embrace it and find gratitude amidst the challenges this season provides for me.

I know I need to stay intentional and focused on embracing everything that this season has to offer—the good, the bad, and the ugly.  This juncture, then, must be a time to open to intentionality, joy, and self-compassion through this seasonal journey.  We have nearly a month of juncture, starting with yama damstra and from there moving deeper into the juncture more associated with the winter solstice.   It is a month of deepening myself and facing my fears and anxieties. 

I sit here now deeply thinking about the upcoming juncture, which starts roughly around November 21^st, because I want to be intentional during this time. I also want to be kind, yet focused and determined, in my work.   

Comfort Wisdom

What I need to focus on is the comfort wisdom that I developed in my work with Brene Brown’s reading group for The Gifts of Imperfection.  I want to work on my reliance on these tools (yoga, breathing, meditation, playing, etc.), remember these tools, and pay close attention to when I find myself slipping away into the numbing tools that are so much a part of my attempts to hide out and retreat.  I need to go deep, but I need to stay awake and conscious of my discomfort (and its sources).  What startled me most was the idea that to numb the anxiety and pain means that I numb the possibility of feeling joy and love and happiness. I can’t selectively numb.  I deaden my feelings and I deaden them all. I am tired of not feeling joy and happiness. I want those feelings consistently, so that means I must suck it up and feel the anxiety and moments of embarrassment and failure and anger and isolation.  Those feelings are all real and they all are part of me. 

There are several strategies that I will take this year and I’m writing them on this blog to help keep myself accountable.  In the process of utilizing, really utilizing, the comfort wisdom practices, I will be doing several other things.  First, I will be focusing my diet for part of the juncture and only eating wholesome home cooked food.  I do pretty well sticking to my ayurvedic diet, but I do have a tendency to go out to eat on a consistent basis. For the first 5 days of yama damstra, I will only eat my home cooked food.  After that, I will be on a trip and I cannot make that promise through that period.  I will come back to home cooked food, though, when I return from my trip and finish up this first juncture with a deeper connection to cooking and eating.

My second practice will involve revisiting last year.  I hold a great deal of anxiety around how I compare to last year, so what I plan to do throughout the juncture is use this blog and my other forms of journaling to engage with last year.  I will do that through photographs. I will focus on a photo or set of photos from last year and see where I was last year and speak to what I see now and am experiencing now.  I will also revisit my journals from last year, although I know I was not as consistent with journaling as I have been over the past 8 months.  The goal here is to not compare in a judgmental fashion, but to stay curious and explore how I have developed between last year and this year.  It is with compassion that I will look back and reflect. 

Turmeric & Ginger

The next practice I plan to do throughout all of winter, actually.  This will involve deeper reading and exploring of the rhizomes turmeric and ginger.  I have been thinking about these plants a lot lately.  I can’t help but feel a connection to their rhizomatic structure and their various properties.  I am drawn to them and I do not want to ignore that. I plan to get to know them better and their many facets—from their science to their physical appearance. Thus, my plan is to sit with them throughout the winter, reading and writing about them. 

My last practice was suggested by my teacher and that is engaging in dream work.  I have started to do that, but I will focus on it more intently during this juncture season.  I will focus on the feelings of my dreams, journal on them, meditate on them, and do some visual work with the dreams that I can remember.

 

St. Augustine

 So there you have it.   The coming of early winter is near and I have a set of intentions that I hope will keep my focused and awake throughout the junctures and the season.

Yirah: Reconsidering Fear through Listening

“…writing is the art of taking dictation, not giving it.  When I listen to what I hear and simply jot that down, the flow of ideas is not mine to generate but to transcribe.” –Julia Cameron

 

I think what I want to focus on this week is the art of listening. Julia Cameron is quite helpful with this idea.  It draws on the idea that we have what we need inside; listening is about opening up to what is present and tapping into that presence.  When I think about this, I do not think it means we should only write when the moment strikes.  It is more about understanding the intention with writing.  It is about the approach.  It is about the inspiration of writing.  And I know I struggle to listen.  I get so caught up in the supposed to’s and the ego seeking comfort of meeting deadlines that I lose sight of the spaces out of which productive writing emerges.

Sometimes the noise is so incredibly loud that I can’t hear what is going on inside.  I get stuck in those moments and all I can hear is everything else.  I can hear the espresso machine churn, the voices of the couple behind me, the wind blowing hard against the windows, the bad jazz circulating through my ears.  Coffee shops.

All of it keeps moving and shifting and I can feel my restless mind unable to settle in and listen—really listen to what is going on inside.

Fear, lately, has been going on inside of me lately.  During my attendance at a conference one of the speakers discussed the Hebrew words: Pachad and Yirah.  Pachad is when the ego is afraid of being wounded. It is the primal fear that comes when we feel our lives and utter well-being under threat. Yirah is the fear we feel when we enter larger spaces and come into growth. This fear can feel like pachad but it is actually an opening, an expansion, an emergence. Yirah is when ego transcends into something larger, rather than experiencing the threat of destruction.  It makes sense that we could confuse the one for the other.  The idea of moving into something new and unfamiliar can be foreign and create panic in our sense of self.

I love this idea of yirah.  It is what helps me think about the ways that fear has had power over me and how I can start to look those feelings straight on and keep moving and experiencing the world.  It is a way to embrace and find joy in the possibility of something else. 

Sara Mohr quotes Rabbi Lew, who “describes yirah as ‘the fear that overcomes us when we suddenly find ourselves in possession of considerably more energy than we are used to, inhabiting a larger space than we are used to inhabiting’” (See more at: http://www.jonathanfields.com/blog/is-it-fear-or-awe/#sthash.ZLhMDiBY.dpuf).  I love this idea.  It is incredibly powerful and enriching to think about the moments in which I have been most frightened and how much those moments were meant to push me further and into new and uncomfortable places that made me feel more and more alive. 

So what does yirah have to do with listening to what needs to be written?  At this moment, I honestly do not know exactly. Listening and fear have been on my mind, though. There is something telling me that I need to really spend time with the idea of yirah. With the idea that my fears are not about a deeper survival issue, it is hard to tell my body to sit still, to stay awake to the feelings.  The practice of sitting with that fear is something I know I need to keep up with.  And I can't help but wonder if sitting with yirah will help me to listen more deeply and engage my writing in new ways? Or maybe writing and listening is part of what I need to do to engage with yirah. Listening to my fear to find yirah. 

That is my work. 

Joshua Tree, Me

I must admit that the day got off to a rocky start, so I'm struggling a bit to find grounding.  I'd like to simply say that vata has taken a hold of me, but I'm not entirely certain that is all that is going on.  It is definitely part of the struggle I'm facing at the moment, but not all of it.  

I am honestly at a loss as to what to write today, but I wanted to stick to my commitment to be present on this blog and speak to the things that are bubbling up to the surface for me in the here and now. I think the best approach is to just open myself to a free flow of thought.  I think I will focus on how I relate to vata.

Joshua Tree, Route 66

I decided to write about this picture, because it represents much of how I feel about my relationship to vata.  The isolated tree. The dryness. The sage bushes.  The large open sky.  All of these things dominate right now in how I'm relating to the world around me.  There is a sense of isolation that I am experiencing. An exposed isolation amidst the dry brush blowing and shifting all the world around me.  The sky so large and limitless, but not in a way that provides a sense of possibility. Rather, it is a limitlessness that is heavy and scary, because it feels out of my control and out of my comfort zone. 

I have an affinity for Joshua trees.  There is something I'm drawn to in the jaggedness, the awkwardness, the bristles, the way it survives in the an extreme climate. All of these qualities are alive in me in ways that, at times, feel amazing and empowering, but then at other times it feels lonely and frightening. It is as though my whole being is getting whipped around and hit by gusts, which takes all I can give just to remain upright. 

Today is a day that feels like the wind is beating me around, flinging me around in a whirlwind of emotions.  I have been able to stay centered and stable and like I can maintain a level of rootedness regardless of the wind, but it is tenuous, hurting and anxiety-ridden.  My goal today is to just keep finding the earth reminding myself of the rootedness that is inside of me.  Rootedness. Joshua trees. Me.  We all have roots that extend and thrive beneath the surface, waiting for attention.