Balanced breathing for wiggly times

Midway between Imbolc and the spring equinox

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Today’s post is one of the posts I write in between each festival on the Celtic wheel of the year, a system that helps regulate and ground me, and locate me within a wider set of seasonal systems and teachings. Paid members get access to a beautiful 90 minute circle every 6 weeks, around each festival on the wheel. The next circle is spring equinox/ostara on Tuesday 18 March at 8pm.

At the end of this post there’s an audio recording of a breath practice for my paid subscribers, and a reminder of the journalling questions/your intentions for this cycle. I hope you enjoy!

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February ends in three days, the temperature is slowing creeping up, the green is pushing up from the dark, sundown is getting closer to 6pm here in London, UK (prayer hands emoji).

Thanking the tenacity of things that push upwards towards the light

As the spring equinox approaches - for those of you following along with the Celtic wheel of the year with me, it’s exactly three weeks since our Imbolc circle and three weeks until our spring equinox gathering - I’ve been thinking about the theme of balance.

Just twice a year at the spring and autumn equinoxes, the sunlit and dark hours are equal to each other. That these moments are so ephemeral is useful I think - for short moments these opposites mirror each other, share time equally. Humans often seek more balance but just as frequently, it can feel like the events in our lives, relationships, bodies tip out of equilibrium, despite our best efforts. There’s so much we can’t control, or old patterns or competing desires get in our way.

Should lasting balance - “a situation in which different elements are equal or in the correct proportions” - be our goal? In the moment, elements in our lives can feel wildly untethered but when we look back, our lives often hold more balance than we can detect at the time (like a year with a dark and light half, do our lives sometimes hold similar segments of more and less, push and pull, internal and external, even if those proportions are years long?) I want to set perfectionism aside and know that there is rarely such a thing as “correct proportions”, unless I’m involved in a complex chemistry experiment: that life is often more generous with a margin of error than our own exacting standards.

Sama vritti / even breath

Below, I’ve recorded an audio version of a short breath practice called sama vritti (sama meaning same or equal, vritti meaning fluctuations) for my paid membership. Feeling an idea within me, embodying it always leads me to new a new depth of relationship with something. I hope this practice helps you play with the idea of ever-shifting, imperfect balance as we move towards lighter days.