Tune into November

October 31st, 2006

This month marks a move into the ‘darker season’. Nature retracts into its core, plants to their roots, to the essential parts of their being. Our connection with the world around us, in spite of ourselves, is undeniable. A planet shifts imperceptibly in its orbit, the weather pressure changes and somewhere someone feels an inexplicable mood shift.

These kinds of links are infinite and incomprehensible but undeniably there (see Cosmic Influences on Human Behaviour by Michel Gauquelin). To see that we are part of an eternal chain of cause and effect is to transcend oneself. We are all familiar, at least vicariously, with experiences where when finds oneself by losing oneself. To put it another way, on ‘seeing’ conditionality, one is freed from the mental chains of “I, me, me, mine”.

Just like nature, we begin a journey in at this time of year, a journey that will take us towards and perhaps into the underworld of our unconscious mind. The external world becomes quite dark and still, meaning that the internal world’s subtle whispers have more chance to come through as we can become less distracted. It is an unwise act to disregard these internal promptings through dreams, art, meditation and symbolism as unimportant or somehow separate from the external self image and opinions that we tend to build up.

“We only believe that we are masters in our own house because we like to flatter ourselves. Actually, however, we are dependant to a startling degree to the proper functioning of the unconscious psyche, and must trust that it does not fail us”.
Modern Man in Search of a Soulby Carl Yung

To do this, we need to be more accepting of the mythical, symbolic, archetypal sides to ourselves. Embracing and opening to ‘messages from the deep’, by allowing space for them in our conscious lives. Practically, this can mean simply reading poetry, allowing time to daydream or experiment with expressing yourself creatively.

In yogic terms, we need to be ‘tuned in’ during practice, whether asana, meditation or other. We need to be open to deeper impulses from within. Joseph Goldstein, author of Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation, says that a part of us always knows whether what we’re doing is right or not, we just need the space and the training to listen and to learn what does and doesn’t feel right – this means being open. In asana practice, we learn to listen to deep impulses from the body/mind. In Vajrasati, we call this intuitive action

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