Portal to Wholeness at Autumn Equinox

The Invitation to Rest through the Celtic Wheel is to trust what resonates with you and find your own way as you honour your own cycles of transformation through the practice of deep rest. Yoga Nidra is a practice where the EGO is fast asleep and the SOUL is wide awake, as our teacher Tracee Stanley reminds us.  The wisdom we experience as we rest through the cycles of the wheel invite us to live aligned and in rhythm with the natural world. A cyclical journey where wisdom is revealed with each spiral as we connect with the intelligence of the land we live on and embrace the cosmic intelligence above.  The wheel turns with certainty each year, as we now move through the final weeks of Lughnasadh with the Autumn Equinox. This is the final cycle before we start all over again at Samhain.

The archeoastronomical day this year is Monday 22nd September, just after the partial Solar New Moon Eclipse. Eclipses happen when the Moon passes directly between the Sun and Earth, blocking the Sun’s light from our view. What is usually invisible (the New Moon) becomes visible and the Sun that usually outshines the Moon will become invisible. This is a reversal of roles and energies. Eclipses are an opportunity to pause, to recalibrate, and to suspend the normal way of doing things. What is usually seen becomes hidden; what is hidden becomes seen. This is the energy of working with opposites that offer a portal to wholeness. Similar to Autumn Equinox energy where we have equal day and night, balance between masculine and feminine energy, the yin the yang and the light and the shadow. Can we shed light on what is in shadow? Can we witness what has been invisible and make it visible? This is an invitation to embrace both and energies of opposites as we journey through the last few weeks of Samos (the masculine half of the year). This is the wisdom we can embody as we enter the portal to wholeness and slow down and pause at the threshold. This is an opportunity to have reverence for everything in our life as we find graceful ways to move back and forth between masculine and feminine qualities, ways that allow the opposites to co-exist and complement each other. A reminder that we cannot know the light without the dark. We cannot exist by just going, doing, thriving. We need to bring balance to going by stopping, to doing by being and to thriving by resting.

A word to describe this Autumn Equinox energy is Solustrance - the moment when the world is bathed in a soft, amber glow, the leaves on the trees, the surface of the water even the air itself appears to be touched by this magical radiance.

A reminder that Trees become their strongest in the Autumn this is because they have finished bearing fruit and producing leaves now all of their energy is being pushed down into the roots. Can you embrace this wisdom for the Autumn Equinox? Preserve the energy from Samos to resource you through Giamos. Connect with the earth and ground into her endless wisdom with each turning of the wheel as we complete this cycle and the portal to wholeness with the Autumn Equinox.

Autumnal Glow

How Yoga Nidra can help with Trauma

Yoga Nidra is a safe and gentle way of allowing unresolved energy from an overwhelming event slowly begin to unwind and be released. You do not need to dig into the past and relive the event while practicing Yoga Nidra. This prevents the practitioner from becoming traumatised again and therefore allows healing to take place. The body will naturally dissolve what it is ready to release in a relaxed state.

Old fragments of trauma are often released outside of conscious awareness. People often feel lighter as if a weight has been lifted after practicing Yoga Nidra for a while. This happens in deep states of relaxation where the body can let go completely. In the meditative state the practitioner is resting in a safe place. Yoga Nidra re-teaches the body how to turn the light switch off so that it can return to a balanced state. The nervous system can reset itself so that it can operate normally rather than in a hyper-tense or dissociated state. The body can enter a state of homeostasis which allows the body to heal itself naturally. During a practice of Yoga Nidra the practitioner deliberately slows and deepens the breath to induce a state of deep relaxation. A deep breathing practice alone helps regulate the nervous system and bring the body back into a state of balance.

The practitioner becomes more ‘stress-resistant’ amidst the pressures, insecurities and difficulties of everyday life, and learns to thrive on the same difficulties which would lead others to the brink of mental anguish, emotional self-destruction and physical breakdown. This is the great secret of Yoga Nidra. It is not only a way of coping with stress; it also provides a means of transforming and positively utilizing tension as a steppingstone to greater awareness, efficiency and achievement in life. At the basic level the practice of Yoga Nidra helps us to process, integrate and release the experience of existing day to day.

For more information we recommend Yoga Nidra: The Art of Transformational Sleep by Kamini Desai.