There comes a time in the cycle when the soft, raw animalistic nature of your body really wakes up. This is the inner autumn (roughly days 18-26), or what I call the fruiting phase.
Your body is incredibly wise and innately intelligent.
When the mind confuses us, we can ask our bodies.
When the mind feels disconnect, we can come home through our bodies.
It’s a rare and radical thing to give space and weight to your animal self.
In the fruiting phase/inner autumn, our bodies grow soft and tender.
Our breasts might swell as our belly expands, the womb weaving her walls with blood. It’s here in the tending phase of the cycle that the needs we may have been neglecting really rear their heads and, sometimes, show their teeth.
It can be impossible to ignore.
And we’re no longer going to ignore it.
In the fruiting phase, our energetic roots are most deeply embedded: our connection to lineage, to ancestral knowledge, to the soul of the earth herself.
Our physical roots – feet, legs, wombroot/vagina – grow heavy as our awareness sinks down into the ground of our being. It’s as if our very bones grow heavy with the wisdom of the cycle that is now coming to a close.
In the fruiting phase, and in autumn in general, the natural pace of my body s l o w s right down.
If I’m not present to honour this shift in pace, my hips and pelvic bones ache as if to lovingly but fiercely draw me down, closer to the ground of my body and the ground of the earth.
The earth herself calls us closer to her, like ripe fruits that bow heavily on their stem, we are filled with a growing inner presence that presses our ears to the ground to listen: what’s hidden beneath the surface?
Slow and steady movement is a medicine for this inner (and outer) season of conservation and inner counselling. Slow and steady movement nourishes our bones and feeds our roots, refueling our inner stores of energy so that they may last us through the coming winter.
This inner & outer autumn, I encourage you to listen to the soft, raw animal of your body. Follow the subtle nudges, feed where you feel depleted and clear space where there is excess,
roar and moan if you need to and
let the wild instinct of your body lead your way inward.
You are not alone to carry yourself through time and space,
the earth is beneath you with every step,
the wisdom of the beings who have gone before you in the very soules of your feet, the entire structure of underground, unseen roots that sustain life itself, beneath you and within you.
Lean into it,
bow down to it,
give space for it,
allow.
o quote from Mary Oliver,
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Love to You,
Jaylyn
Wild Yogini & Wellness Mentor