From Autumn Stress to Qigong Centering
To meet everything and everyone through stillness instead of mental noise is the greatest gift you can offer to the universe. I call it stillness, but it is a jewel with many facets: that stillness is also joy, and it is love. —Eckhart Tolle
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, autumn is a time associated with the metal element, which includes the theme of letting go, grief, and coming back to core in the way of trees losing their leaves. At the same time, for many of us in Western cultures, it is a time when we are ramping up, getting back to work after summer.
Do you find you get overwhelmed with “So much stuff to do!” at the same time, you want to resist, maybe curl up and rest as the days grow shorter, nights longer?
That’s been the main repeating mutter in my brain this last week. While I absolutely love (and choose) everything I’m working on, I’ve had abundant opportunities to work on the stress of overwhelm.
So today, I decided to “practice what I teach” and take some time to remember the first of the Way of Joy Laws, Within Motion, Stillness, Within Stillness, Motion. “To experience stillness in your life does not require shutting down your senses or building a barrier to the chaos of an energetic, alive and unpredictable world. Through the power of your breath and attention, you can sustain an awareness of that inner space of quiet constancy, the peaceful Observer, while the world around you spins and twirls.” (excerpt from The Way of Joy).
This is one of my favorite methods to embed this intention in your body, to live it from the inside out.
What do you experience when you’re in that place of inner calm?
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