Celebrating the Autumn Equinox

One of the biggest dilemmas in our relationship with ourselves and with other people is consistency.

You could say that the dilemma for us as artists and actors is also the consistency of our relationship to showing up for the art form, because that’s what builds the craft.

And, of course, you’re not a robot. You have times when you feel highly creative, and then you need to restore. So coming into a practice like this is a time to restore, to rebalance, and to remember why you love this and who you are as a creator.

So that when you go out into the intensity of the career and the workspace, you have enough bandwidth and capacity to still enjoy yourself when you’re out there.

These 10 weeks are a time for you to rebalance, restore, and remember what it is you enjoy about creating; what it is you enjoy about your own humanity and the humanity of others; and, in particular, the humanity of the collective and how nature reflects our nature.

Through this process, I’m going to encourage you to really pay attention to the natural world as your deepest resource. Because it has no judgment of you. And it is the greatest example we have of a work of art that is what it is.

It changes and shifts all the time, and it doesn’t have a “what’s wrong” attention around it. If the sea is stormy or calm, the water doesn’t comment. It just accepts: yeah, that’s the weather pattern for today, or tomorrow, or for this week.

So, somehow, we’re going to pay attention to the natural world, particularly during these first three weeks around rebalancing.

Here in Ireland, we’ve just celebrated the Autumn Equinox, which is a time of bringing balance back into your life: half the day is dark and half the day is light. Around 12 hours of darkness, 12 hours of light.

So we’re in that time. What does it mean to come into balance?

To come into balance means welcoming the darkness and that liminal space between sunset and dark, the shadowy space, as well as the light.

So how can you bring light, shadow, and dark in as parts of you and your creative process? Parts that are welcome, that can bring balance into your system?

Because for some of us, we can only experience discomfort. And that’s going to be overwhelming for the system.

Actually, what we need to practise are the lighter qualities of our being, the unbearable lightness of being, yeah? The pleasure, the ease, the comfort, the beauty.

When you have enough of that, then the shadow and the dark can be integrated and make sense in your creative process and in yourself.