Fall Equinox

As babies, if we are lucky, someone looks into our eyes and mirrors our experience back to us…our smiles, our hurts, our engagement with the world. And when someone looks back at us and mirrors our smiling, this teaches us that our experience, our feeling is valid and real. 

As adults, we are having daily interactions that elicit emotional responses from us - laughter, smiles, tears, heartache. And your experience is real and valid.

In our culture we rarely make space to listen to another’s experience without going straight to analysis and judgement. I dream of a world where there is enough space to hear and validate each person’s pain (and joy). 

When I look out my window and see the trees, the squirrels, the sky, and clouds, I never think which one experience is right and more valid? Which one experience will I validate at the expense of everything else?

Each squirrel, tree, cloud, expanse of sky deserves my acknowledgment of its unique experience.

To me this is one of the messages of this season - the equinox is a time of equanimity. Where there is spacious room for night time and daylight, where each squirrel, tree, walnut, herb plant has the space and opportunity to have its OWN experience without me judging it or analyzing it. 

When we give this space to other humans - being witnessed in experience - healing and change can happen. If this cycle is thwarted, we keep telling our experience again and again, searching for the completed feeling of “I see you,” “I hear you,” “I believe you.” We are like a person with a wound who keeps going house to house requesting bandaging and being told there is no wound to tend. 

What relief when you find the person that says “come in, (no questions ask, no reasoning needed) I have bandages and soap and water for you.” 

If this is something you do not experience often, you are not alone. I find myself more and more being discerning about explaining my pain and experience. When someone texts, emails, or asks “how am I?” (Which I take very literally like you really do want to know) I ask myself, will I be welcomed in for a bandage? Or will I be met with judgement and analysis? Sometimes I do not know - so I take the chance - sometimes I am met with disappointment and other times with mirroring. 

But in all of this, my practice over and over again is to turn to myself, and deeply validate my own experience. I give myself vast spaciousness for all that arises. Anger no longer gets dismissed or needs a justification to feel it, sadness gets welcomed whether there is a “valid” reason or not, panic comes in and I try not to resist it, grief no longer gets minimized. With it all I turn to myself and say “I see your wound, let me tend to you.”

The more I do this for myself - the greater capacity I have to offer it to my loved ones and friends. I see you, I hear you, yes it is real, no there doesn’t have to be a reason or meaning. Yes, yes, yes.  

This is my prayer for each one of us. May we be witnessed and validated in our life. May we have people we can turn to who look into our hearts and mirror what is there. And may we be our own best wound tender-er - no longer abandoning ourselves, but welcoming each experience in - without qualifier, without judgement, and give respite to ourselves. 

Equinox Blessings, 

Valerie ​