Fascia, Rhythm and Repetition: Exploring Cycle at the Equinox

This morning we arrived at the turning point of Spring Equinox.

The sun is shining and my eyes are not used to being flooded with this much light after the winter days. It has been a wet and grey winter in England, and the blueness of this cloudless sky feels intensely healing. 

I am out in the garden with my coffee, looking up in awe, when my phone notification pings. A dark sky fills the screen, a dark sky scattered with tiny white dots.
“I am standing in the sea right now, looking up… so many stars” 

My son Evan is in Tasmania, exploring alone on Bruny Island.  Life has brought him some big challenges over the last couple of years. I won’t share these – his own story to tell – but as a parent I am learning in so many ways. Learning how to guide through witnessing. How to hold without crushing. Without taking away the space to breathe.

Parenting an adult feels like a continual adjustment of a holding that began at conception. From the moment my womb provided the conditions for him to form and grow, to learning to hold him as a newborn, to trusting the ground as a place of safety from which he could explore his relationship to gravity, to movement, to expression. I continue to learn through adjusting the grip. A constant modulation of the hold, how much to support, how much to step back. A path of offering enough containment while allowing space for breath, for living, for expanding, for returning. 

I am filled with a deep sense of joy knowing he has chosen to give himself this time to be in nature, and to feel part of something wider. And I am immediately moved knowing that at this point, we are both looking up.
Me into the blueness of the bright equinox morning.
Him into the depth of the dark equinox sky.
 

A solar turning point.

Wherever we are on the planet, we meet here – north and south – held in equal measure as the seasons begin to turn in different directions.

This is a moment to pause, to recognise the threshold and give equal value.

Here in the UK we are saying goodbye to the darker half of the year. The ground has been quietly holding, now we begin to see proof of the life that has been hiding all along. Spring is unfurling, asking us to follow its movement. 

There is something meaningful in bringing attention to this threshold. To recognise the cycle.

I live with a condition shaped by hormonal rhythm, one that at times takes my breath away with with a pneumothorax at the point of my menses. As a human, I have often brought my attention to the question why? Why does this happen? But this is a fracturing question, one that looks for cause-effect and only leads to fragmentation of reality, there are in fact a complex multitude of answers.

The why does not serve me as much, it is when I shift my focus towards how that something changes.
How does this bring me into direct relationship with my own physiological cycles, again and again? 
How does it ask me to listen, to recognise the rhythm that is here, now?

It is in this how that the enquiry of holding becomes alive.
How to stay in relationship, with what is here now.
How much to hold, how much to grip.
How to meet the changing change without resisting, without forcing.
How to contain without crushing.
How to trust that there is life is hiding beneath the quiet ground. 
How to follow the unfurling when it comes.

Movement practice is an opportunity to explore this directly through repetition. 

On returning to the folding and unfolding of the spine, again and again, not as means to get it right, but as an opportunity to notice relationship.  Undulating as we breathe in an out. 

How far, how much, how often…
How does the head lead and the tail follows?
How does the tail lead and the sacrum follows?
How does the ripple feel through each segment?
How does the ripple feel through the whole? 

And through repetition beginning to meet our own rhythm. Recognising patterns. Noticing the pauses between each iteration. Valuing the phases of expansion and the phases of gathering back. 

This is not abstract.

We meet this through our own tissue, through continuously adapting fascia, responding to load, to rhythm, shaping the tone with which we meet the environment. Listening, reorganising, holding, recalibrating.

Through movement, through breath, through repetition, we are in continuous dialogue, shaping and being shaped by this living network.

Sensing our rhythm as part of a wider cycle, our rhythm not as centre but as part of a collective symphony.

Together, circling the sun.

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