When you're being threshed
A few years ago I was painting my yoga room and fell and broke my wrist, which required surgery. That September, I had an appointment with the surgeon and when we said goodbye, he said, "I always say, Have a good autumn, because I don't want to say, Have a good fall." It's a good wrist-surgeon joke.
Yet, long before the use of the words autumn or fall, the third season of the year was referred to as harvest. It was the time of year when crops were harvested and stored for the coming winter.
As we enter a new season (and a new moon), there is an inbuilt invitation to consider the concepts of thresholds, harvest and transitions. As with any transition or threshold, we are changed as we go through it. There is a “threshing“ where parts are separated. Taking the wheat from the chaff. You get to decide what to bring forward in the threshing… and what to leave behind.
Well, actually sometimes you don’t get to decide.
Sometimes we are threshed by life in ways we didn’t volunteer for -- divorce, loss, diagnosis, death -- and we have to let go of things we don't want to let go of.
The process of threshing, or being changed by going through a threshold, can be uncomfortable, even painful. Ideally, the threshing makes us softer, wiser, more human, yet no one really wants the difficulty of it.
Metaphors often used in yoga practice are the rough edges of a stone smoothed in a rock polisher or dough made pliant by intense kneading.
The trick is to find the appropriate edge of a challenge (which is required for growth)… when it would be so easy to get rigid and forceful, slip into shame, or avoid the path of a needed challenge altogether (like staying in an unhealthy job or relationship).
If you find yourself in an unexpected threshing, sometimes all you can do is exhale.
It can also be useful to sign up for it on purpose.
Someone shared after a recent class of mine, “That was a physically challenging class, graced with wisdom and truth and levity and loving regard for ourselves. I am so grateful for your wise guidance and the accountability of community.”
As we enter this new season, celebrate when you get to choose the rebalancing of qualities like work and rest, structure and play, social and solitude.
And if the threshing is involuntary, seek the people and places that offer grace, levity, compassion and loving regard. (If you are looking for such a place, I know of one...)
Happy equinox, new season, new moon
