Balance bollocks
and other Spring Equinox thoughts (plus, do we have to keep changing our clocks?!)
It’s been a week.
Since the Spring Equinox arrived. Schools broke up for Easter, spring is officially here, along with hail storms.
Outdoors, in the real world, I can feel the springtime shift.
The Equinox is a time of balance.
If I hear the radio… it seems that humans are mostly still simply intent on exploding each other and arguing with each other, and that men still hate women. And schools and hospitals are all failing at their essential work with our most precious members of our families (we have to ‘balance the books’ though, how else are we paying for war, if not with money which could be invested in caring for dying elders).
In the world of capitalist wellness, it is a time to pay attention to your wintertime failings and banish them. Summer is coming and you will only have yourself to blame if your 40-something year old body looks like it is 40-something years old when you wear fewer clothes in warmer weather.
In the world of capitalist wellness, now is the time for balance.
Which, I often find, actually means denial. Or punishment. Or both. (I was raised Catholic, I can spot these things).
Balance is not -
I ate some calories so now I need to run them off.
It is not - I slept in so I didn’t do a morning routine of any sort so now I have to get up even earlier tomorrow.
It is not- I said what I wanted, so now I must listen to the rest of the world take what they want from me.
It is not a zero. sum. game.
But that is what we’ve been taught.
Whether by the blonde-tangerine fascist in the west, or the bearded one in the east. Whether by diet culture, body shaming magazines and social media filters, or the latest fitness studio with a wall of mirrors.
In fact, from all angles. From all directions, this is the teaching. That balance means we can’t all win. Balance means one loss is another gain (the no ice cream means more sex because you are hotter type of maths we were sold at 10 years old is a lie in case you haven’t yet realised it. Ice cream and sex are the same soft, gooey energy. They go TOGETHER… although, there is heat which may become an issue…).
I take, you have to give.
You fail, you have to atone.
She makes more money, you will make less.
Her house is tidier, mine is messier.
This ‘balancing act’ is so ingrained, that we are unconsciously making these trade offs all the time.
In my work, in the world of yoga, women’s health, womb work and birth work, these balancing acts are traded off all the time. Literally. A physiological birth prepared for, by buying the right playlist. A baby conceived through correct devotion to supplements. Menopause erased - swapped for estrogen supplementation, and every type of scientific sounding face cream under the spring-time sun.
This ‘balance’ hunting is so deeply embedded in us that we structure our whole lives in devotion to it, even when deep down, we know life doesn’t always work that way.
We quip ‘balance!’ to each other as we drink our beers after a gym workout. One ‘good’, the other ‘bad’. ‘Balance!’ when we buy our children gifts because we haven’t seen enough of them this week. ‘BALANCE!’ as we push ourselves to exhaustion exercising the memory of our last painful bleed and three days immobilised in bed to the back of our minds.
The Equinoxes are a moment of balance. Literally.
The moment when night and day are of equal length.
Our bodies are looking for balance; or homeostasis all of the time, day and night.
Balance is not wrong. What goes up, often does come down (more on Newton in a moment).
But- balance in the way that we use it in capitalist wellness, in government, in our culture, and therefore inside our bargaining inner voices, makes a mockery of that complex dance which is nature hunting for balance.
The cycle teaches us something different.
The cycle says - nourishment overflows.
It teaches us that restriction and denial have an effect the whole year round.
Joy (and grief) will be felt in all states; in all seasons.
There is no such thing as over abundance.
Only abundance, in all it’s forms.
The cycle says - you are a part of a much bigger organism; and this organism will search for homeostasis using you as a part of that plan.
Menstrual pain is a reflection of bigger pains that the planet cannot hold by herself. Not something you did wrong, but a way your womb channels the voice of what is not right in our human behaviour.
Infertility is not correctable with a 6 step plan, but a painful, grief-filled invitation to strip back your exchange-motivated beliefs and behaviour, and start to trust in a more mysterious plan for your life.
Peri-meonopause is not sickness which needs medication, but a natural unravelling of the fertile version of you. Into a new version. An unknown one.
Balance, says the cycle, is win-win. It is lose-lose.
It is so much larger than you can comprehend, because you are not the only one here.
When we listen to the cycle, we begin to learn it’s language. This takes time. Respect. It takes listening to other cycling women, and their womb stories. We can discover pendulum swings in the story of our womb, and in the collective stories of womb experiences, which can invite us to consider how balance might be lacking in our lives.
Rushing around at ovulation, pursuing only the power of our intellect all cycle, or ignoring our body’s desire for movement, sex, rest and play, might well show up in a sluggish bleed. One that takes days, the blood dark and thick, and cramps heavy.
Ignoring the magic of sleep, rest, and dreaming during our bleed might mean that we struggle to capture the fiery magic of creativity at other times.
Letting our inner critic fester by paying no real attention to her during our prememstruum might well mean that she spills over into irritation, headaches, despondency, or exhaustion during our inner spring.
These balancing acts might all be true.
And - they are all talking to each other, all of the time.
At our latest Circle, for the Spring Equinox last week, we spent some time reconnecting with our inner maiden. The version of us which lived a life from 15-25,or thereabouts.
We shared with each other how she ate, slept, and connected with life. We shared who held us then, and who holds us now. We wrote to her. We received from her.
And we remembered that time is not linear.
Quantum physics proves to us what your reiki master friend has known probably for lifetimes.
What the cycle - and its red thread of ancestry forwards and backwards- holds as a message for us.
Time is not linear, consequences are not always directly related to the action, and what goes up, might well re appear in a different form, still going up, at a different time.
The cycle has a quantum language.
Heavy bleeds appear right at the time you need them, although you couldn’t have necessarily predicted that. Ovulation will skip a month here and there, and you don’t know why at the time.
But eventually, you know exactly why. This is what a wise cone arrives at. Eventually. The learning and reflecting take time. and practice.
The termination you had at 19 will show up again and again, and is always available for more wisdom and healing. The baby who travelled through your womb for a short time before leaving too soon will make you who you are. Your grandmother’s grief will re-birth in you. Or perhaps in your daughter.
Balance is not about tit-for-tat. It cannot be that simple.
Equal light and equal dark. For two, brief moments, each year. in between, a rhythm as predictable as the orbit of the planet around the sun (literally).
Living in Britain, I feel very blessed to not know what the weather might do from one day to the next - although I sometimes say I’d love to live somewhere where I know what clothes to wear each time I leave the house, honestly, I think I’d be bored. And what would be chat about in the post office queue?
But even within the confusion of spring and her 6 seasons in an hour, we do have certainty.
We know that new life returns. We know that it won’t be winter forever. We know that, now we are more than a whole week past the equinox, we are living with more light than dark for a little while.
And the cycle is the same. We can trust her.
Even when symptoms are confusing, and everything seems related to hormones (sorry, but it is), when our bleed is absent for a while, or constant for a while, when ovulation comes slightly earlier, or slightly later, or not at all…
The cycle teaches us that the way we live is not about bargaining:
I’ll go for that nap/walk/dance about my kitchen once I’ve finished this spreadsheet-
but that living is more about balance as an interaction, a call-and-response, a conversation.
We are not in charge. Your womb will look for what she needs, balance will come as the planet rights herself in the face of billion-dollar bombings, and death will visit each family.
We know that we can’t escape darkness, just as we know that we don’t REALLY want to be 21 again. Well I bloody well don’t anyway!
I have taught before that cycle tracking can be your spiritual practice - and this is a concept I’m still working with, still learning from others about.
But it has a lot to do with knowing that the cycle is an expression of the life force energy which enervates all beings.
With knowing that we can tap in to this, even within our very messy, bloody bodies.
That our womb world can be the headpiece to listen to a version of that huge, endless wisdom.
Just as quantum reality teaches us, we don’t know with certainty what will come next, but we do know that we can be in conversation with it.
What does balance mean, this week, in your womb- world?