Well now really when we go back into falling in love. And say, it’s crazy. Falling. You see? We don’t say “rising into love”. There is in it, the idea of the fall. And it goes back, as a matter of fact, to extremely fundamental things. That there is always a curious tie at some point between the fall and the creation. Taking this ghastly risk is the condition of there being life.
You see, for all life is an act of faith and an act of gamble. The moment you take a step, you do so on an act of faith because you don’t really know that the floor’s not going to give under your feet. The moment you take a journey, what an act of faith. The moment that you enter into any kind of human undertaking in relationship, what an act of faith. See, you’ve given yourself up.
But this is the most powerful thing that can be done: surrender. See. And love is an act of surrender to another person. Total abandonment. I give myself to you. Take me. Do anything you like with me. See. So, that’s quite mad because you see, it’s letting things get out of control.
—Alan Watts
Sometimes I feel silly saying that I what I do for work is “work.” As an editor, I remind writers to say what they mean to say; as an Ayurvedic practitioner, I remind people to eat food, sleep, and move their bodies; as a yoga teacher, I remind people to breathe.
These might seem like unnecessary services, but I like to think I’m good at my job(s) and am here to remind you that it’s time to exhale. That is, autumn is arriving.
Nature gives us many examples of the cyclical rhythm of life, two of which neatly superimpose on each other. We can align the cycle of the seasons with the cycle of the breath, each consisting of four phases of expansion and contraction. In this model, we’ve just finished the top of the inhalation—summer—the season where we’re full of life and most expansive. When the fall equinox arrives on the 22nd, we’ll begin to release all that life in a long, sighing exhalation. It’s the beginning of the end—and it’s scary.
While there are many individual reasons to feel anxiety and unease in autumn, most (if not all) can be traced back to this fundamental fear of endings—of our mortality. As much as I loved back to school as a kid, the excitement I felt upon receiving new textbooks and syllabi was always accompanied by a chest-constricting, breath-catching mental chorus of “what if this is the year you fail?” Similarly, fall and winter usher in a long and expansive list of holidays, which might center around narratives of loss or remind us of personal losses—empty seats around a family dinner table or memories of how things were before new partners and jobs, deaths and births, beliefs and obligations changed us. We’re reminded of all the breath that has already flowed out of us, and asked to lose even more, to exhale again.
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This month in my yoga classes, we’ll be focusing on backbends as a way to work with and support this vulnerable, hinge-like energy in the macro- and microcosms. Backbends are often feared because they have the potential to strain the lower back, a highly mobile part of the spine (and a prime seat of vata dosha, which is coming into her full glory in fall). In over-correcting backbends to “protect” the low back, however, we miss the whole point of the pose and create confusion in the body. Engaging the belly and elongating the tailbone—common cues in backbends—constricts the breath and creates tension along the whole spine; asking a spine to extend in this position will garner a response of NO. Instead, the legs need to root down and the belly needs to relax—the result of an inhalation—which creates a stable base of support upon which the spine can arc. By sending energy down, spaciousness arises in the upper body, and the spine is free to move. The heart just opens—not because it was forced to, but because it was the only option. In a rooted backbend, we can access all 5 elements and all 7 charkas. The body, mind, and spirit occupy the full spectrum of life—inhale and exhale seemingly at once.
The inhalation we’ve been holding all summer—along with, if you’ve been practicing with me, the support of the gall bladder/side body guiding our decisions to nourish and protect the heart—has brought us into alignment with a backbend. It’s our last flourish before things really slow down, and it’s tempting to try to hold onto it for as long as possible—to keep taking in more projects, more commitments, more breath because it’s been working just fine so why not keep going, right? But if we keep trying to expand in the essence of summer, we’ll eventually run out of fuel. If we keep sending energy outward, we’ll lose ourselves.
Fall teaches us to honor the feeling we all get when we know it’s time to turn around and come home. It sucks at first, but once we remember the richness that has been waiting for us inside all this time, we realize that we might have been longing to exhale more than we realized. This is a kind of heart-opening in and of itself—the quiet, gentle, restorative backbend that creates bigger waves of emotional feelings than physical ones. When we allow summer to yield to fall, the front body to yield to the back body, expansion to yield to contraction, we remember the deepest truth that our hearts hold about the nature of loss: space is required for creation.
In order to make space for the transformations we’re so afraid won’t happen we hold our breath, we need to know when to exhale and come out of a backbend. Just like we can never know the exact day or time when that first chilly autumn morning will arrive, or when the leaves will start to turn, or when death will come into our midst, even the best yoga teacher (certainly not me) can prescribe the exact right number of breaths to hold the pose. It depends. But if sip in that last breath of summer while we connect to our roots—physically and emotionally—we can maintain the heart-opening spirit of the backbend long after the pose is over.
Many of us, myself included, avoid connecting to our roots because it’s uncomfortable or seems “backwards” according to our linear culture. There’s grief and disappointment and regret and nostalgia in the past; we limit our potential when we look or stay back. The five element understanding of what happens when we root down tells another story. Rooting down connects us to earth element—where new things grow under the soil, and decaying things become food for that new life—and space element—from where all potential arises, and into which new growth can move. Without these containers, there is no future. Backbends teach us to experience both, equally. To hinge away from the past and into the future, which is also the past . . . to allow our spines to bend with, not resist, the cycles of nature and breath.
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Being reminded to breathe is no small thing. While it’s true that our bodies remember to breathe on their own all day long, the conscious receiving and releasing of breath—of seasons of life, of versions of ourselves—requires a strong and steadfast anchoring of the mind in the body. The mind will always be afraid that the next breath won’t come, but the body isn’t. The body, which allows itself to be breathed, knows its impermanence is part of the greatest, never-ending love story of all. Backbends, when practiced with a foundation in the body, the legs, the roots, reveal to us a way of opening our hearts that takes us out of fear and into life. The life that expands and contracts, that can blossom and become barren, that inhales and exhales in the rhythm of spirit that dances in the heart.
Besides breathing, something that can help us hinge into autumn in a way that feels like a trust fall more than a collapse is cultivating ceremony. Even if the reasons behind or people with whom we share ceremony have changed, the more important part is simply doing it. Ceremony provides anchors of introspection, community, and joy that make exhaling, the turning of attention down into our roots, meaningful and transformative. I love marking the equinoxes and solstices for this reason, since they’re more consistent than the traditional holidays and festivals I was raised with (or that humans have invented in general). As long as I’m on this earth, my position relative to the sun will change in a predictable manner; honoring my ability to witness another phase of that cycle is reason enough to celebrate.
Although the equinox is a few weeks away, today’s new moon is a great opportunity to start planning how you’re going to mark this upcoming phase of your year/breath cycle. There may be aspects of fall you know will arrive, with delight or dread, but it is always wise to leave room for the unexpected. We might be falling back into a familiar season—and a season defined by familiarities—but we can release into that posture with more grace, control, and support when we remember that we’re not leaving behind the expansion of summer; we’re simply bringing it safely inside, into the chambers of our hearts where faith in and love for ourselves is all the stability we need.
