Aligning with the Cycles of Life

Yesterday was Halloween, and even here in Southern California, I can feel a shift in the earth. While the days are still warm, the evenings are cooler. I’ve even needed a sweater a few times. The produce at the grocery store has shifted from summer to fall fruits and vegetables and instead of the happy heads of daisies, I see the yellows and oranges of marigolds and chrysanthemums. Earth is letting go of the fecundity of summer, and getting ready for the cold, quiet rest of winter.

Multiple traditions recognize this time of year as special for honoring and remembering the ancestors — people we have let go of from our lives. Yesterday, in honor of this tradition, I sat for a time and remembered family members who have passed, and I said their names out loud to honor them. It made me feel close to deceased loved ones even though they are gone.

Western society has an uncomfortable relationship with death and letting go. We tend to value youth, beauty, fertility, productivity and accomplishment. We tend to devalue and even ignore age, wisdom, infirmity, rest, and death. I would argue that this emphasis on burgeoning productivity is unhealthy. It makes us value silly things that don’t matter like the size of our waistbands and the amount of hair on our heads instead of valuing the experience of a long life or the need to unplug and let our minds have a break.

A shocking amount of people don’t allow themselves to rest. They feel that if they aren’t producing something at any given time, then they are being lazy. They push themselves to accomplish, to multitask, to show results at all times. Then, if they didn’t get everything on the list completed, they mentally beat themselves up about it. In order to maximize productivity, they start cutting things out of their lives that give them rest and pleasure because they feel those things are a waste of time. As a result their lives feel empty and not worth living. Their bodies are over-taxed and not well cared for. And their relationships die from lack of nurturing.

This is an extremely stressful and unhealthy way to live.

We need to start managing stress in more healthy ways. Instead of admiring people that spend all of their time producing, foregoing rest, and never taking vacations, we need to recognize that people like that are setting themselves up for a heart attack. Literally. Stress changes the way that our bodies distribute and store fat, clogging our arteries and creating heavy bellies. Stress also leads to depression. Our nervous systems aren’t set up for a constant state of go. Eventually they will shut down in order to make us rest — a state we call depression.

We need to get more in sync with the cycles of life in all areas. Instead of pushing Earth to produce even out of season, we need to allow her to rest, just as we need to allow ourselves that same grace. We need to value all of the stages of life, not just youth and beauty, but also the onset of middle and older age, a time when our experiences begin to converge into a wonderful state of wisdom and balance.

We also need to get more comfortable with death and letting go. As painful as it is, we can’t keep all of the people in our lives forever. In a discussion of letting go, I was once asked to imagine if everyone I had ever known or been close to was living in my house. I imagined my exes all living with me — all of my former friends and colleagues, and my stomach churned with the stress of having all of those people around me all of the time. I understood that in order to move forward in my life, I’d had to let those people go, just as they had let me go in order to move forward with their lives.

Just as the Earth has to shed the leaves and fruits of summer in order to rest and regroup for the next season’s rebirth, we have to shed our old selves, our old relationships and our old beliefs in order to move forward. We need times of rest and reflection in order to feel into what needs to change in our lives for our own rebirth. We need times of pleasure, just for the sake of pleasure, in order to feel alive and like all of the hard times are worth it.

I encourage you to ask yourself, what can I let go of today in order to get more aligned with the cycles of life, death and rebirth? Maybe there are material objects that you need to get rid of. Maybe there are people that are holding you back. Maybe there is a way of viewing yourself or the people around you that is out of date. Maybe you need to let go of your belief that productivity is the most important thing in life, and that rest equals laziness.

Change is an important part of being alive. Instead of holding on to the way that things have always been or the way you have always thought, I encourage you allow a time of rest, reflection and letting go in order to move into a brighter and fresher you, just as Earth rests in the winter in order to store up the energy she needs to burst into flower in the spring.