How to Find Balance and Start Anew This Fall
Meditations for the Autumn Equinox
Saturday was the autumn equinox and the first day of fall in the northern hemisphere.
Equinox means “equal night,” a time when day and night, light and dark are in balance. Because the earth is tilted on its axis, the sun shines more on the northern or southern hemisphere depending on where the earth is in its annual rotation around the sun. The spring and autumn equinoxes are the two times in the year when they’re illuminated equally, resulting in days and nights of equal length.
It’s a powerful time to meditate on the theme of balance in your life:
What are you grateful for? What do you desire?
How can you acknowledge & integrate your shadow?
How can you listen to and honor the deeper needs of your soul?
It’s a great time to re-focus on your values and goals. Most people set New Year’s resolutions in January, but how many of us maintain those new habits and routines all the way until September? As I wrote in a previous newsletter, the ‘back to school’ season offers us an opportunity to start over.
What work do you still need to do to bring your plans to fruition, this year?
If you’ve fallen off from your habits or projects, what would it take to start over, now?
What’s the smallest step you can take to get back on track?
The fall is also a time of harvest. (The Harvest Moon, which is the full moon that occurs closest to the equinox, is on Friday and will be the last supermoon of the year. Go outside and see it!). Take stock: what results are you harvesting in your life right now?
These questions are just a starting point: if you feel inspired, feel free to use them as prompts for journaling or meditation.
We don’t get much of a fall here in San Diego, but I spotted a few autumn leaves while walking the dog on Saturday. And the mornings and evenings are growing cooler. There’s a subtle crispness to the air that lets me know when fall has truly arrived here.
If you can’t tell by now, fall is my favorite season.
It’s also inspired some wonderful art, literature, and music over the centuries. I recommend pairing your equinox meditations with one of my favorite poems, John Keats’s Ode to Autumn. Here are some autumnal paintings in different styles over the years. And if you’d like some appropriately melancholy music to listen to while your journal or meditate, here’s Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.
Enjoy!
If this week’s journal and meditation prompts inspire any insights for you, please share them in the comments! I look forward to hearing what comes up for you.
Chris Cordry, LMFT
PS: If you feel like you could use some help getting back on track this fall, reply to this email to ask me about 1:1 coaching. Clarifying your values and goals can often help you get unstuck :)
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Lovely article, Chris.✨
Got my creative soul excited!
Great post Chris! I recently wrote a post that hit on a lot of the same things. I love fall and use it as the start of my year. I think it's better suited to that than January plan to share this with my readers on my substack: Think. Read. Write. Repeat. in an upcoming issue. Thanks!