Speaker 1: 0:37

This is Bronwyn Ila coming to you with the seasonal podcast series. These are talks designed to help us attune more to the cycles of the seasons and what's happening in our earthly existence. And this is often left out of Western thinking, where we're kind of excited to go and do and be working and producing just as hard all year round. And this is an opportunity for us to really be integrated into nature, to be a part of nature and to be impacted and impacting nature in that way. The beginning of autumn begins halfway between summer solstice and autumn equinox. So summer solstice is the height of summer. It's the longest day of the year. In the West you think of that as the beginning of summer, but it's actually the beginning of the end of summer, because after that the days start to get shorter. And autumn equinox is the height of autumn, when the balance between light and dark is equal. So this is the halfway point between summer solstice and autumn equinox, making it the beginning of autumn.

Speaker 1: 1:55

Many of these teachings come from my teacher, lu Ming, and he would say that this time of year is the most important time to pay attention and it's the hardest time to do so. So it's the most important time to pay attention because if we don't, we keep going with this kind of pernicious yang that's doing going outward, up and busyness, which is easy to do once it gets going, because that's the nature of yang. It's not a listening kind of energy, it's a doing, going, running, directing kind of energy. And so the yang that's coming in has this softer, quieter listening. It's like a shouting person. It's difficult to get a shouting person to start to listen. It takes some intention to really drop into allowing the yang to envelope us. So, yeah, yang's dominant energy needs to be subsided, needs to be directed towards something softer and quieter. And because of this doing this, if we have a really busy summer, it's easy to fail to notice the changing of the light, the increase in the wind and the garden that's ready to harvest. This is especially true for people living in more tropical or in California, where it can actually get very hot this time of year. But the heat is not the same as the chi. So the weather report is not the same as the chi report. The chi is what's actually happening rather than the temperature. It doesn't need to be a harsh kind of renunciation of when the autumn, it's simply a quiet directing the chi from outward to inward moment, and a lot of these teachings. It's really vital that we keep these teachings alive for the next generation and it's a way we can take care of each other and take care of our planet. Seasonal wisdom is all but forgotten with the onset of machinery, artificial lights, industrial agriculture, so the energy that's happening right now is that of gathering in, repair, reviewing and conserving. It's not as busy as summer, it's a slowing down and it's what is preparing us for this awesome stillness of winter that's super quiet three months surrounding the winter solstice. So the idea is to start thinking about the work has been completed, and Looming would talk about it. As the mind begins to close and floats in and downward.

Speaker 1: 4:51

As the envelope says, a story Looming would tell us this time of year is about these generals. So generals meaning like elderly young generals in their conference room and they've been at war all summer and they're sitting together talking about the next battle and what they're going to do and their strategy and their going, and out of nowhere, someone's granddaughter runs into the conference room yelling grandpa, grandpa. And all the generals turn to look at her, so that granddaughter is the little yin that was birthed at summer solstice. She's five years old now and she runs in. And if the generals stop, if she manages to interrupt them, if they take the time to stop and turn their focus towards this five year old granddaughter, they remember. Oh, the men we are fighting are fathers. Oh, wouldn't it be nice to spend some time with family, to have some time to be with my granddaughters? Wouldn't it be nice to slow down? And what is it that we've been fighting for? We've been fighting for a time to actually stop and rest. That's what all this doing and busyness of the summer has been about, so that we could actually enjoy our lives.

Speaker 1: 6:15

So even these, this old, eloquent young, can be unseated by little girls. It's like the balance of power, this turning from big warrior, general, manly focus to, oh, the little five year old girl. And generals pay attention and this potentially pernicious young like this, going and going and going. And now the generals actually want to become the emperor and they want to, like, rule over, and that's like the liver wants to become the heart. Right, the heart's the emperor, not the. If they actually surrender to this oncoming small yin, there's health in the body. The emperor gets to reign, not the general emperor is the heart and the quietness starts to seep in.

Speaker 1: 7:07

However, you know, the granddaughter runs in, grandpa, grandpa, and the grandpa apologizes. Oh, I'm so sorry for this interruption of my granddaughter. He treats her as an embarrassment. He kind of pushes her out the door so they can get on to their very important strategizing. That is the malignant young. That is what we see in the leadership of the country, of the US and many other countries, where there is just simply a pushing, a going, a doing. Little girls are an embarrassment. They're not important. They're really important things or what's happening with the men. This is, you get the idea.

Speaker 1: 7:45

So we need to calm down the ambition and the pernicious heat and that intense, direct focus with this blossoming yin wisdom of the granddaughters, with this mindfulness that comes in with the autumn. There is the possibility of regret embedded in this kind of yin sensibility. The generals can really wonder, like what have I been doing? Killing all of these men? What have I been doing? Running around I've missed? Wow, she had a birthday. I forgot about this birthday while I was off, warring, oh, I didn't show up for family dinners or whatever the thing is, and this is the same for us. We have the opportunity now to notice how we may have lost innocence or a sweet openness, an undefended heart. How have we armored ourselves to keep going with this ambitious summertime doingness and how can we stop back and find a more humble, open, undefended heart as the center place of our lives?

Speaker 1: 9:04

The nijing, which was written to maybe 200 BC, maybe older, says the three months of autumn are called the period of maturation and harvest. The growth of the summer has completed all shapes, what has ripened is gathered in. People, like all phenomena, should follow the seasonal chi to preserve vitality. The wind pervades autumn and clears away all dullness. One should retire early, avoiding the night winds, and rise early in the morning to enjoy the crisp autumn air. We should keep the shen or the heart calm, remind the breath regular, just the lung, and practice nidhan. The energy should be turned inward and one should avoid anxiety and impulsiveness. In this way, no harm comes to the lungs, which is the metal element, if our progress has been really successful since the spring, if we've been like oh, I did all these things and I got the book, and it's easy to forget that there is a need to stop and rest.

Speaker 1: 10:14

It's actually wonderful to have this reminder in our midst of our busy doingness, to remember to slow down this river of ambition and take some time to harvest the fruits of your spring ideas and summer labour and actually enjoy the sweetness of them. This is a wonderful time to actually stop and enjoy and slow down. And the idea is, when we cut down these fruits or harvest in the cucumbers or the pumpkins, what we harvest is cut off from the vine or the tree so it no longer has availability of nourishment. It can't keep expanding and growing and doing, and now it's time for it to be ingested and nourish our bodies, not keep growing and expanding and doing. This is the nourishment time. It's the time to stop, not totally stop. We'll stop when we get to November 9th-ish, when it's actually the beginning of winter. But this is the time to harvest and complete all the projects, not the time to plant new seeds or have new ideas or start new things. So any projects that you started in the spring, complete them now. Take the time now to finish all of the things and begin to simplify your life in preparation for the winter months ahead.

Speaker 1: 11:41

So storing resources, harvesting and storing the resources, and this is the traditionally when we do all the canning of the vegetables, we start to dry the apricots, you find ways to take this beautiful bounty of the summer and the autumn and keep it for us for the winter. This is also a wonderful time to take any abundant financial resources and freeze them in an account, a retirement account, for example, to save them for our winter months or our winter years of our life, the later years of our life. Store it, freeze it, save it so it can nourish us when it gets to be a quieter time, when there's less abundance. And beginning to edit down to essentials means okay. So when we harvest a crop of peaches, for example, we don't want to bring in the rotten peaches and pickle them or jam them in the same jar as the unwrought, as the ripe ones that are beautiful and squishy and ready to eat. It's important to sort out the rot from the gut. We don't want to harvest in the bugs or the weeds or the sticks or the leaves, only the fruit.

Speaker 1: 12:57

This is the time to go through all of your possessions and get rid of everything that is not essential. It's go through all the kitchen things, get rid of all the random specialty items, all the herbs that have been sitting there for seven years that are dried and no longer beneficial, all of the extras that have somehow made them into your house, let those all go. This is in preparation for a deep, quiet stillness for the winter, a non-doingness in the winter. There's no opportunity like wintertime to nourish the yin. It only comes once a year. So now is the time to prepare for that stillness that it can actually be that stillness. There's actually a really beautiful relaxation in this preparation, this slimming down, this trimming off, this deep house cleaning, to really reflect on what is actually important to us in our lives. This could also be in terms of relationships or anything weird that has come off. To go ahead and resolve that conflict, resolve all the strangeness. It's very beneficial for family relations to be really clearly in harmony right now.

Speaker 1: 14:24

In ancient China, this is the time when executions took place, where they would go into the jails and be like okay, all these prisoners, it's just time to go, and they would kill everybody Similarly, if they haven't been pardoned. Like, either pardon or kill is sort of the idea and our lives like obviously I'm definitely not for capital punishment on any level, but that idea of what do you want to forgive and just be okay with and make peace with. And what do you want to sever ties with Autumn? Is the lung element and the lung element or the metal element, which includes the lungs and large intestines? This is our boundaries. So, if we think about our lungs, if the air comes in, okay, is this air me or is it the outside? Same with bowel movements right as we, as we have a bowel movement, it's like, okay, wait, this is part of me. No, it's not part of me. Like, who am I? Was this me or is that me? Is this not me? And this is the same decision making precision that we need to get rid of the things that aren't valuable to us. It's this discernment, this metal element, healthy discernment, mature, wise, yes, no, ness that comes at this time of the year. It's different than a young at the early time of the year where it's just going and doing and more. This is mature, deciding time.

Speaker 1: 16:58

And you know, like, if we don't do, how autumn progresses for us depends on how we behaved over the last six months. It can be difficult to slow down, it's like trying to slow down a speeding train, but failure to do this is how the illnesses arise, the pernicious young that can come from. A failure for us to start to complete and slow down can manifest as a worsening, conflicts with family members and overusing of their resources. It can look physically in the body like a lung ailment in late autumn. It can look like febrile diseases in the winter. If we remain in this aggressive young state for a long time, it becomes increasingly harder to stop each year.

Speaker 1: 17:44

It's not that this is some kind of punishment from a distant guide about our misconduct. This is simply a resultant. How we behave directly impacts our health, which is completely left out of allopathic medicine. It's like they don't ask you what you're eating when you go to sleep. No, just take this pill. It's always just. You know, a lot of people are getting that now. It's like nothing to do with our behavior. So this is this is a direct result. Our conduct is a direct result of our health. Of course, there's exceptions to that and not meaning it in any kind of anything other than we have the agency to impact our lives by following the seasonal.

Speaker 1: 18:27

Chi Looming would say there's two major causes of death. The first is birth and the second is not aligning ourselves with nature and what's happening in their environment, with our practices. If that's qigong, yoga, dance or kung fu. The chi is best at about three o'clock in the afternoon for the next two weeks, and then five o'clock and then seven o'clock. It's okay to stop and start your practices throughout the day. Come and go with them, it's fine.

Speaker 1: 18:55

Face Southwest for the most optimal energy and don't overexert yourself or sweat. It's wise to use the chi that we have available to us right now to move the blood and transform nutrients and digest all of this food that we're bringing in, rather than overexertion and exercise. Dress lightly but make sure to be well covered from the sun and it's said in the naging to stroll about in the morning to avoid the damp. For food wise, it's best to eat what's seasonally happening, as always. Eat two meals a day and make sure to chew the food properly. It's important to rest after lunch. Snacks of fruit, especially pears, which guides the lungs, are helpful on hot days and you can drink green tea or Prasentamon tea. Vegetarian light savory soup is wonderful for evening meals.

Speaker 1: 19:53

It's important to sleep and go to bed not long after dark. It's a great time right now to rest and relax. There's so much support for that, actually, when we drop in and tune in to the chi of the environment. There's actually a lot of support for rest, and failure to have adequate rest, as we talked about, in the autumn and winter, can have long-term effects. So what I see in my practice is people who are going all year round. They often come in in the autumn and they're like oh, I'm tired and something's wrong with me, and they want me to boost their energy.

Speaker 1: 20:29

We don't boost chi this time of year. We want to actually allow the yin to envelope. So when we boost chi this time of year by drinking too much coffee, by taking herbs that just help us keep going, what it does is every year we have a little bit more insomnia, or every year a little more neurotic, or just a little harder to calm down a little more low-level anxiety, and it becomes a little more severe every year and slightly more difficult to treat every year that we don't cultivate the yin. Nourishment, rest and deep reflection are what we need. There's an unparalleled opportunity right now to harvest a yin from our environment, to allow this yin to actually take the shape in ourselves, and taking this time to reflect is part of being a human being, if we only like the outward going party and not the quiet middle of the night, contemplative, wondering what we're doing with our lives, moments we're out of balance. It's not human being is not simply to go and do. It's ghostly behavior actually to just be out, not listening to the inner self. So in order to actually be in the fullness of human like behavior, of being a mensch, of being a human being, we need some withdrawal and some quietness and some self-reflection and some sitting in the unknown. This is what actually causes yin to finally secede. It's simply the deep listening of yin. So if you could think of there's a shouting going maniac right At some point they're going to just lose steam and then they'll notice that there's a whole bunch of five-year-old girls sitting quietly watching them. It's a kind of embarrassment actually to be this outward going, doing, when you notice that there's a quiet, calmer, softness that's available to us, that's indicated in the chi, everywhere, this quiet, observant energy.

Speaker 1: 22:45

The investigation of yin in Taoist alchemy is profound. It's unparalleled in India or Tibet, or it's like there's a particular kind of quality of noticing the yin. It's a. We need very little yang to balance yin. Yin yang is very potent and concentrated. It's not a. We don't need equal yin and yang Equal.

Speaker 1: 23:12

Yin and yang is basically yang. Derangement. It's like having if you have white paint and you add a little bit of black. You only need a little bit of black Although usually black isn't sort of yin but in this context you only need just enough warmth so that things don't become overly cold and stagnate, just enough yang to keep moving through our days. You don't need a ton of yang. It looks like mania, it's craziness, it's liver-yang rising. We start running around shouting at people. Just a tiny bit to keep the blood moving, just a little bit to keep the energy of our lives moving forward.

Speaker 1: 23:50

So, even though the yin is only beginning at this time of year, there's a way where we can deeply rest into sensing and feeling their approach of winter. It's like, oh, it's like the finish line, okay, the end is near, like we can start to move towards pacing ourselves, towards completing, finishing, allowing and doing the final touches on all of the things that we began. And it's this amazing thing no matter how much the planet has misconducted itself the entire year, or, in our case, quite a few thousand years, the yin still comes. She still starts rocking up with her quiet wave of stillness. It's like it's still gonna happen, whether we pay attention to it or not and fry our nervous system or actually allowing that that nourishment she's still coming in. So there's something very, very comforting to me about thinking about it in those ways of how we end just kind of quietly envelops.

Speaker 1: 25:02

Thank you for listening, thank you for taking the time in your life to slow down and tune into opportunities to really harmonize with the nature and the environment and just to keep these teachings alive.

Speaker 1: 25:19

It's important as far as a ritual for the autumn I like to do this every six weeks, but especially in the autumn go through your altar, like all the things that have sort of started to accumulate, the random things that someone dropped off or left behind or somehow are still there, and the rock that you know like, clear off the altar completely and, one by one, look at all of your altar items and just decide what is actually no longer needing to be a part of your altar.

Speaker 1: 25:54

What medicine upgrades can you do to just allow in a simplicity in your practice, simplicity in your altar, a quietness, a spaciousness, a tuning in the more spaciousness, less cluttered. There's a way to go with our lives and also let that be reflected in your altar space as well. You can start to pass on things that are no longer part of your altar to people who it would mean a lot to to receive these items. Keep it clear, keep it simple. Thank you for listening and I'll be back in tuning to the autumn equinox. Okay, be well. Blessings on your quiet journey in Word and all your time completing your projects.