As we move through late August, September, October, November, and December, you’ll notice the qualities of daylight, dark night, and outdoor colours and temperatures shifting. What else do you notice moves and shifts? Things in the external world? Things in your inner landscape? Is now a time in your life when things feel like they are speeding up or slowing down? Is it a particularly painful time for you? An apprehensive kind of time? Or is it energetic, exciting, encouraging, or mixed?
The Autumn Intentions: A Seasonal Reflection Guide is a resource I designed to help you meet yourself with listening and friendship in the season(s) you are in — whatever and all that that may entail — and specifically as you go through the months of late August through to the last day of fall.
I will begin by asking, what internal radio station are you listening to right now? Is it the All Anxious Messaging All The Time Station (W-O-R-Y – where the worry never stops)? The Greatest Hits of All Times from the Bullies and Self-Critics? Or maybe it’s Endless To Do Lists FM, or, potentially, Mentorship at its Finest?
You will have your own particular radio stations and perhaps your own particular names for them. Whatever they are and whatever the particulars, the radio station that you are listening to matters.
Practicing noticing goodness does not mean the invalidation or denial of all that is in contrast (and stark contrast) to goodness (to kindness, beauty, generosity, hope, wonder, awe….). Practicing noticing goodness is simply practicing noticing goodness. It is the cultivation and allowing of noticing, breathing in, savouring, appreciating, even celebrating, of goodness in any given moment—without minimizing or dismissing it and without inserting any other add-ons, at least/even if just for a brief while.
“We have to open ourselves up to receive what wants to shine back.” — Jessica Dore.
I came across this line recently in the book, Tarot for Change, by Jessica Dore (2021, p. 17). It’s a sentence that has lingered.
There are questions and curiosities that might naturally follow from a sentence like this. Among them are curiosities such as: in any given moment, am I opening or closing right now? In what ways? (And is this opening or closing wise, helpful? Is it helpful in some ways and not in others?)
“You expand and then you meet your own resistance. In the human body and experience, as in nature, there is a continuous play between these forces. We reach to expand and are held back by constriction.”
—Betsy Polatin, Humanual, from Chapter One, (c) 2020
Daily Questions—or what I have been tending to refer to as the daily question—is a wonderful resource available on the website, Gratefulness.org, that I wanted to share here in case you or another might sense it to be a nice fit/resource for you at this time and/or it might be something you experience it as beneficial.
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in December, 2017, Pema Chödrön shared that during her life, she has had an instinctual inner sense of what is forward. That really stayed with me, the idea, question, and inner sense for each of us of what is forward.
