What You Can See When You Close Your Eyes

I’ve spent the past couple of days thinking a lot about the Autumn Equinox. It’s one of two beginnings we get all year where we feel a shimmering breath of stillness and balance, where light and dark see each other as partners, as equals… for just a tiny moment. At the Spring Equinox we’re moving into new life and then the heat and color of Summer… but here, now, we’re moving into a season of harvesting what’s ready to nourish you through the shadows, moving into longer hours to rest as the days shorten… and then, comes Winter and darkness.

This Autumn Equinox gives you a lovely pause that you can step into, that you can breathe in and make yours. You can stop moving forward. Stop looking back. You can simply be, suspended between one moment and the next… it’s a threshold. It’s rather like that space just as you’re falling asleep (Autumn) and then again, just as you’re waking up (Spring). The whole of Autumn is a threshold for something not quite tangible.

I said one of two beginnings because the energy that surrounds us when something is born is the defining energy for the whole life of the thing… in this case Autumn. Everything has a beginning and with astrology we can both map and interpret any moment’s energetic signature. You have a birth chart, and so does Autumn.

The energy of this year’s Autumn Equinox opens a beautifully unbounded window into things that can feel like sanctuary. The Libra Sun arrives at this exquisite pause between light and dark, and directly opposite is Neptune in Aries, saying: there are ways of knowing that do not happen through effort, or action, or argument, or even accomplishment. There are things you can only encounter when the ordinary solar ego surrenders to something beyond or inside the Self. Or both.

While the Aries Neptune spills toward the other-oriented Libra Sun, you can enter that stream and flow toward the realm of the subliminal… let yourself merge into the threshold that now exists… open to how you’re enriched when you reach into other realms of being besides constant wakefulness… constant on-ness…  that’s Aries… being on fire. Neptune softens that. It becomes more shimmer than heat. If you use this opening creatively, spiritually, you enter an inner environment that’s guided by allowing, by stillness. This is when you learn to trust those liminal tendrils that curl into dreams, into beauty, into love… things that have no body and no fight… but that are openings to another kind of knowing… intuition, inspiration, trust… the Divine. The Divine is an opening that pulls you toward places where you sense what is true and holy.

Every Equinox offers balance. And balance arrives when you can live from your consciousness and will, and also from your interior places, from where beauty and awe, inspiration and intuition rise. They are counters to each other, just as our waking and sleeping lives are. Both are enriched by being nourished by the other.

What happens if you allow yourself to stop being on? To sense instead of do. When you willingly soften consciousness and flow into sleep and dreams. When you deeply experience music and art. When you let beauty move you so profoundly you weep. What happens when you fully love? When you trust your intuition. When you let inspiration work its magic. When you pray knowing you’re tapped into the Divine. When you fully recognize knowing that arrives before you can explain how you know it.

This Autumn invites you into more than the waking mind can apprehend. The gift now, as the light slants, and the leaves take on vibrant hues before their release, is balance between the consciousness that acts upon the world and your interior world filled with dreams, intuition, and awe. Go with the energy of this Equinox Season into sleep. Into the forest. Into that loosening of waking consciousness where another form of perception becomes available. Let yourself go in and under and in-between. Between what you can know by looking directly and what you can only see when you close your eyes.

Forest of Breath:
An Autumn Guided Imagery Meditation for Sleep

For this Equinox, I’ve created Forest of Breath: A Guided Imagery Meditation for Sleep for you, where you’ll walk into an Autumn forest where breath, body, trees, and night can bring you gently back to yourself, and lead you into that space that you can only see by closing your eyes…

Take it with you into the season.

The light is changing.

There is beauty here.

Read the Invitation to Receive the
Autumn Guided Imagery Sleep Meditation →