Finally, Summer seems to be giving way to fall.
The heat has dissipated, the humidity is dropping, and I know the leaves will begin turning soon.
It’s funny, as a kid I hated it when Summer surrendered to Autumn, because even though I enjoyed the crisp fall days, they spelled the end of freedom and the beginning of a new school year. I couldn’t enjoy the beauty of the movement of life – over which I had no control – because I was holding on to something I loved whose time had passed.
Today Autumn means something different to me. I welcome fall, with everything it brings. It is my favorite season. Is that progress? I don’t know, because I hate when fall surrenders to winter! It is curious how holding on can just take different disguises.
Just as each season gives birth to the next through a sort of death, our spiritual lives have seasons that must die in order for the new to be born.
We can’t skip these spiritual seasons, and even after letting go, we will return to earlier stages of our journey just as spring returns each year to remind us of the continual cyclical nature of life. That doesn’t mean, however, that we should hold on to what has been glorious for us for a time and has reached completion.
- There is a time for building our ego, and a time for letting it go. If we build our egos forever, they become self-centered and destructive, a caricature of what they were meant to be.
- There is a time for getting in touch with our childhood wounds and repressed feelings, and a time for allowing that child to mature to the point where she can be acknowledged without taking center stage. Exploring the child consciousness is a beautiful, necessary, and yet evolving phase of the journey. To stay too long is to collude with the lower self in enabling the child to stay a child.
- There is a time for facing our negative intention and the extraordinarily deceptive power it has to keep us stuck, and a time to let go of even this, and make the choice to say YES to the Divine in whatever way it is calling us. Staring too long at our negative intention becomes a way of staying in it.
- There is a time for embracing our humanity, and a time for embracing our Divinity. AND, a time to bring our Divinity into our Humanity – to meld these apparent opposites until we no longer see any distinction between the two.
We are each walking on the Medicine Wheel of Life, letting go of one season in order to embrace the next, until we circle around to the beginning and start again. And yet it is important to note that this Medicine Wheel is more accurately experienced as a spiral, because if we keep circling on the same level we are not growing, we are merely spinning in circles.
Fall is the time to turn within. A time to explore the subtle intricacies of this journey: to discern where we are spiritually bypassing areas that need more attention, where we are spinning endlessly in circles, and where we are truly spiraling deeper to the center that embraces it all. The One Life that includes all seasons, that lives in the changes, the transitions, and the big and little deaths that transform into new life.
Where are you on the Medicine Wheel of Life? What is taking center stage in your spirituality these days? Are you spiritual bypassing, spinning in circles, or spiraling inward?
It requires a great deal of honesty, sincerity, and positive intention to be able to tune in to the difference. It requires surrender to the unknown and a trust that Spirit will lead the way. And usually, it is most effective when shared with and supported by a community of souls walking the Medicine Wheel with you.
I’m grateful to be walking this journey alongside you, opening to new insights along the way. I’d love to hear how your journey has evolved over time – and how you have circled around to the same things from a new perspective.
Aho good!it is GOOD!
Yes! Thanks for reading and sharing!