Autumnal Equinox: Balance, Descent, and the Wisdom of the Season
Callanish Standing Stones - Isle of Lewis; photo: Dennis Mohr
At the autumnal equinox, balance hangs by a thread of light
Twice each year, the Earth breathes herself into balance. At the Autumnal Equinox, day and night meet as kin—equal for one moment, before the darkness begins its steady return.
This balance is not so much fixed perfection as it is a living edge. A doorway. A threshold where the golden light of late summer gives way to the longer nights that call us inward. Beneath the soil, the roots prepare. In the trees, a hush of grief moves through the leaves. The descent begins.
This year, the Equinox is braided with uncommon currents: a double Virgo New Moon, rare as twin lanterns on the path, and the numerology of a 9-9 portal—September, the ninth month, within a 9 Universal Year. This alignment marks a season of completion, when what is ready to end becomes a doorway into the next turn of the wheel.
In a world bent toward endless striving, the Equinox whispers otherwise. It invites us to pause. To notice. To return again to the quiet center that does not disappear, even as the seasons turn.
How I once turned away from balance, and what brought me back
For much of my early life, balance held no interest for me. In the culture I grew up in, “balance” was a slogan stamped onto women’s exhaustion. In the United States through the ’80s and ’90s, we were told we could “have it all”—a career, children, relationships, beauty, and a perfectly tended life. But “having it all” really meant doing it all, and balance was just the word used to make the impossible sound desirable. Just another story the Overculture whispered to keep us moving faster and carrying more.
It wasn’t until my second initiation—through near fatal accident and radical healing—that something in me shifted forever. I was shattered whole. And in that breaking, I was returned to my center. Life was no longer about chasing an external ideal of balance; I began living from a place I hadn’t known was possible.
Later, with four children, a private practice, workshop schedule, a retreat center to co-run, animals underfoot, people would often ask me, “How do you do it all?” And the truth is, I didn’t juggle it all from the outside in. I lived from the inside out. I was anchored in my center. Yes, I still got pushed and pulled, but by then the pathways home were well-worn. I could find my way back home.
Balance, as I have come to know it, is a living center—embodied, responsive, steady enough to hold me as the world keeps turning.
The overculture’s myth of balance and the hunger it creates
In the Overculture, balance has never been about wholeness. It is another word for performance—a demand to hold everything at once—without faltering, without showing the shadow. For women, especially, it is the currency of worthiness: if you can juggle it all and keep smiling, you are told you are strong.
But beneath that story, something vital has been lost. When balance is defined by productivity, we mistrust our own rhythms. We shame ourselves for the sway, for the stumble, for the exhaustion that is only the body asking for pause.
The earth teaches differently. The body teaches differently. Balance is alive. It shifts like breath, it bends like branches, it carries both light and dark in every season. It is not a perfect equilibrium, but a continual returning—again and again—to the center that waits within us.
The po speaks through breath, bone, and the weight of grief
In the Five Element tradition, autumn belongs to Metal—the season of breath and bone, of grief, completion, and the slow work of distillation. Its wisdom lives in the lungs and the large intestine, those living gates of inspiration and letting go.
Here we meet the Po, the earthbound spirit that lives in the body. The Po carries ancestral memory—the griefs and joys etched into our bones. As our ancestors once carved runes into willow or bone, so too are our bodies inscribed with memory. When honored, the Po teaches us to release what is finished and return it to the earth as nourishment.
But when grief is left unexpressed, when completion is denied, the Po becomes burdened. Instead of flowing back to the earth, it holds on, clutching what longs to be released. In this stuckness, the Po can turn into Gui—the restless ghost, born of ungrieved sorrow and unmet memory. This is not only a Taoist teaching; echoes appear across cultures: the unquiet dead of European lore, the Wendigo of the Algonquian peoples—a spirit of insatiable hunger and broken relationship—and the hungry ghosts of other Indigenous traditions. As Lorie Eve Dechar writes, Gui is not evil but “a ghost of the unnamable wound,” the soul’s unrest when we turn away from what asks to be honored (A New Possibility).
I hear an echo in Tyson Yunkaporta’s teaching of the Emu, named the original narcissist, so consumed with itself that it forgot its place in the web of kinship (Sand Talk). Both speak to what happens when grief is not metabolized or reciprocity is broken: something restless arises, something that feeds on itself instead of feeding the whole.
To meet this, we are asked to keep returning to relationship—breath, body, land, ancestors, one another—so the body can be a dwelling of breath and belonging, not of ghosts.
Returning to center when the world turns
Why do I feel so unbalanced right now?
The currents of this season stir everything that is unfinished. September carries the charge of the 9-9 portal, pulling old stories to the surface and loosening what is ready to fall away. If you feel unsteady, it does not mean you are failing. It means the turning is moving through you. What feels like disorientation may be your body showing you what is complete.
How can I root myself as everything shifts?
Come back to your body. The pelvis, the hips, the bones—they are the places that hold you when the winds rise. Simple rituals—placing a hand on your belly, stepping barefoot onto soil, lighting a candle at dusk—can be enough. Let Virgo’s medicine steady you: tend the small things with care, let go of what is no longer yours, and return again to what nourishes.
What does it mean to return to center?
It is less an achievement than a remembering. Each time you notice you’ve been pulled away by the noise of the world and soften back into your own body, you have practiced it. Like a tree in autumn wind—rooted, bending, never fixed—you find your way into the center that is alive, responsive, always becoming.
The Goddess in the season of descent
When the fields were emptied and the light grew thin, the people gathered the last sheaf of grain, braided it into the form of a bride, and placed her on the altar. This Grain Mother was the personification of the grain spirit itself—crowned, honored, and tended through the long dark. In spring she would be returned to the soil, completing the cycle.
This ceremonial act is a mirror of the goddess’s own work. In her face as Hel, she gathers the seeds and souls into her wagon, carrying them into the underworld. In her face as Holle, she tends and prepares them, keeping them through winter’s rest until the time of renewal. What we do with the Grain Mother is a re-enactment of this mystery: aligning ourselves with the descent, honoring the dark as fertile, trusting that what is kept in care will rise again.
In the ancient story of Persephone, she too was carried into the underworld, becoming a seed herself in the hidden places. Above ground, Demeter’s grief halted the harvest and covered the land in winter’s stillness. Their story, as Carmen Spagnola tells it in her work on the Dark Woman archetype, is another telling of this truth: descent is necessary, what is beloved must sometimes be laid down, and the dark is part of the cycle of return (Learning To See In The Dark).
The Grain Mother on the altar, Hel in her underworld, Holle in her storehouses, Persephone with her seeds, Demeter with her grief—all carry the wisdom of descent. Each reminds us that what is tended in the dark is not lost. What rests below is being prepared.
Crossing the 9-9 portal: completion as the first gesture of renewal
The 9-9 portal opens this September, a crossing marked by the ninth month in a 9-year cycle. It is a time when patterns come full circle, when endings gather their weight, and when what has ripened leans toward release.
In the current of this portal, we are called to tend what is finished as our earth-honoring ancestors tended the Grain Mother—laying down the past with care, trusting that descent is the first gesture of renewal.
This is a portal of composting. It asks us to let fall what is no longer alive, to place it gently in the dark, to know it will become nourishment for what is to come.
A simple practice
Set a small altar with one thing that represents completion—maybe a leaf fallen from a tree or a dried seed head.
Sit before it in stillness. Allow your breath to sync with the season’s slow inhale. Place your hands on your body—lungs, belly, or bones—and feel where descent is moving in you.
When ready, lay down your offering with a word of appreciation. Whisper to the earth: “I give this to you. May it feed what is yet to come.”
Allow this simple gesture to be enough. There is no need for fixing or forcing. Know that endings have their place in the great cycle, and that rest is itself a form of tending.
A reflection to carry with you into the darkening season
I invite you to ponder these questions gently, as you would sit beside a fire or watch the slow turning of the sky. Allow them to move through you in their own rhythm:
Where in my body do I feel the weight of what is finished?
When I rest my hands on my belly, what do I notice stirring?
If I listen to my breath, what does it show me about completion?
As the balance shifts and the season turns, may you feel the ground steady beneath you. May the breath of the earth guide your own. May what you lay down be received in love, and what you carry forward be blessed with renewal.
We turn together, with the land, with our ancestors, with all that lives in the great cycle of return.