Warm Spiced Pumpkin Drink
October 31, 2024Tea with Patanjali
November 5, 2024
THE CYCLICAL NATURE OF LIFE IN AYURVEDA
Ayurveda recognises the cyclical nature of life.
It recognises that life is not linear but is in fact more akin to the circle.We have births, death and rebirth throughout nature.
This attention to the cyclical nature of life lends Ayurveda it’s respect for and attention to the changing seasons. And Ayurveda invites us to adapt our living accordingly. We are born from nature and so are impacted by it’s changes and required to live in accord with those changes if we are to sustain a sense of biological and psychological equilibrium and resilience.
Just as nature has it’s cycles through the circle of a year, so we in this human form have our cycles within the circle of life. We have the springtime, summer, autumn and winter of our years. We die and perhaps in some way unknown are reborn. And we have springs, summers, autumns and winters throughout our life. Times to plant seeds for new ways and projects: times to celebrate the fruits of our endeavours, to gather in the harvest, to slow down, and to rest.
At each phase of life and at each equivalent phase or season of the year, Ayurveda invites us to nurture an embodied spirituality. That means a remembrance in spirit of who we are: the earth we are born from and sustained by: the rhythms of the earth and how they affect us in any point in the year oe in oue licwa: and what this might point us toward not only for physical and mental wellbeing, but also for our deeper, inner lifer=.
Our Celtic pagan ancestors also practiced this remembrance of the circle of life in their spiritual traditions. They too listented jto the messages of nature through the passage of a year and aligned their spiritual.rituals with it. It means that much of our spiritual inheritance, is in fact not promoting a spirituality founded on denial of the beauty and sacred nature of life but a spirituality that fully embraces it in all its moods and colours.
The legacy of our ancestores can be seen even today as markers on our annual calendar of festivals, including the festival of Halloween.
Samhain – celebrating the ways of the ancients, reclaiming the Essential
What we now know as Halloween is what was once a Celtic pagan festival of our called Samhain.
I love this point in the year. Not for the increasingly commercial Halloween, but in its essence, for all that it encourages us to remember and reclaim: an increasingly forgotten belonging to the earth on the one hand, and an ancestral heritage on the other.
We live in, and are consumed by, a very material existence. It leaves us little time and space to remember the invisible depths and treasures that exist always in the heart of our own being: little time to reflect upon the nature from which we have been borne and are in essence ever a part, and to which we will one day return.
This festival of Samhain has as a central theme, the notion of a thinning of the veil between the visible and invisible worlds or embodiment and spirit, It calls upon us to explore the invisible life of the soul, including the very depths of our own soul.
Traditionally, as the darkest days of the year descended, our ancestors held the belief that as the light dwindled, the invisble world which is usually hidden, becomes less removed from us. In darkness the invisible asserts itself. That invisible world at Samhain is the world of the deceased, of our ancestors.
I read that in Ireland, a fire would be lit in the home, and the door left open to welcome the ancestors in at this time of year.
Our departed were believed to be never very far from us. And at this time, as activities slow down in the darkness, and as the darker days naturally bring with them an inclination towards introspection, enquiry into the invisible, they can move even closer to us.
Nature, Ancestors and Reclaimed Belonging
Ayurveda too places a focus on ancestry, The Vedic tradition has it’s own time of year, in September, when the spirits of the land are called upon to support good agriculture, And the spirits of the departed are honoured during a dark time of year.
Living in algimment with the earth’s rhythms and linking our spiritual life with the same, as in the Vedic and Celtic traditions, can restore us from that lost sense of belonging. It is the Earth that we have come from: and Ayurveda teaches that we are made of the same building blocks as everything else in nature, our body is made of earth, water, fire, air and space. We are moved by a concsiousness at the heart of all in existence. Ayurveda also values honouring and remembering where we have come from in terms of our descent from a line of ancestors extending back infinitly in time. In this way too we heal body, heart and mind, and restore ourselves in spirit.
A Seasonal Enquiry at Samhain Time:
And so this time of year, at the peak of Autumn, when we approach the Winter of nature, Samhain prompts us to enquire not only into where we have come from, but also to where we will return. What will we take with us when we cross the threshold finally from the visible to the invisible liffe? What is it within us that is hidden perhaps from our every day striving and preoccupations and yet will be lasting and enduring when we come to rest in the eternal.
This peak of Autumn, with Winter approaching and with it’s theme of the departed, can serve beautifully as a reminder of our mortality. And that does not need to be morbid, depressing or frightening. It can instead causes us to take care over our activities, our thoughts, our engagements, and to own again, cultivate a conection to and value that which is of our essential nature, of our soul.
One day we will, each one of us, take our last breath. and to contemplate what we will take with us at that moment, by default awakens us to who and what we truly are essentially.
This perhaps not only takes away the sting of death. It also can serve to enrich our current life, As we bring into the light of awareness, a remembrance of our essential being, we will maybe be better able to live our days in a more balanced, whole and fulfilling rhythm.
As the Reverend Alan Jones says in his beautiful contribution to Graceful Passages, “Gift of Life”:
“In my tradition, we try to practice dying every day so that we may be fully alive. What I understand of my prayer life is to place myself on the threshold of death, to participate in my dying, so that i may live each day and each moment as a gift. What I cultivate is a grateful heart”.
At this Samhain time, at any time when you feel that you are in an internal Autumn of your life, take quiet time, enquire into the following and re-member who you are, where you have come frmo, and where you are going:
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Take time to remember that you are born of the Earth, and will one day return to her.
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Can you awaken a remembrance of the cosmic rhythms that move the Earths changing colours and moods, and re-member that you are also a part of those rhtythms and changing in this body of earth.
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Reflect perhaps on that which is enduring in the nature around you, and the memory of the earth, even perhaps of ancestors, ancient ones who have walked the same paths and fields and woods that you might walk.
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Remember your own ancestral line, all the good you have inherited from them, and prayers for the healing and awakening of those ancestors who were maybe not so benign.
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Your own deeper, mosit essential journey – a return of your body to the earth, and your spirit to the world of the invisible and to your ancestors.
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What in you is enduring and will outlast that transtion? What is changeless within you, and so true? What is changelful and so not truly who/what you are?
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How would the enduring, changeless, essential, direct your embodied life herenow, and going forward into the days, weeks and years ahead?
A Samhain Ritual for Honouring the Ancestors:
This practice is really drawing from the Vedic tradition as means to acknowledge the ancestors at this significant time in the Celtic spiritual calendar. You can also do this each morning, before dawn, not only during the dark days of they year.
Make a small alterin a quiet corner of your home, south-facing is apparently ideal. Place upon it a candle, a picture of a guru or deity or saint, a small crystal, maybe a smal vase of flowers, and a picture of one of your departed loved ones. This one will serve as a representation of all in your line who have passed before you. Light the candle as an offering, with a prayer in your heart for the healing of those who have gone before you, and know that those also who are present with you in form in this current earthly life, and those who will come after you in future generations are healed and supported too as your family line is healed through your loving attention and heartfelt prayers.
May the difficult and the challenging tendencies that you have faced in life, and that may have run through generations of your family line, be dissolved in the light of your offering, and of your enquiries and the growing awareness they bring, not only for you personally but for your ancestors and those who will come after you.
May the love and the goodness of your family line grow, flourish and bear the ultimate fruit of awakening to a life of love, light and fulfilment
For a Samhain guided meditation on the ancestors, please visit our YouTube channel.