I stand facing East
Orienting my body towards hope while holding the tension of opposites
I stand facing East. I can’t actually see the horizon, in fact I’m looking at a small watercolour of a robin on the far kitchen wall - that’s my visual marker for East from the centre of my lounge room floor rug - but in my mind’s eye I see the hills on that distant horizon, the way they appear through the gap in the trees on my neighbour’s property. The eastern sky. I picture in my mind the paling blue-grey of predawn, the way the first hints of birdsong stir the quiet air, slowly building until the whole valley is vibrating with their chirp and chatter, and the sun finally crests those hazy, distant hills. I imagine the feelings and sensations of Spring as it arrives - those first mornings, walking outside and realising with quiet surprise that the air is warm instead of freezing, and that’s jasmine I can smell on the breeze. The joy of seeing the cherry tree explode in a profusion of white blossoms just outside my kitchen door, and its dramatic backdrop of oak suddenly colour changing from spindly winter wood to that bright spring green, seemingly overnight. I feel the familiar urge to climb a tree that always seems to overtake me on the first true day of Spring. The air - and my heart - is filled with the joy of anticipation, of change, of hope, of the sloughing off of winter’s stagnant slumbering. So often it feels as though the changing of seasons is carried on storm winds. I remember how yesterday in the forest, it felt as if the storm was blowing in on a too-warm wind, and somehow I walked through patches of close, warm air into patches of crisp, cold air and then back into warmth again, all along the same walking track along the darkening forest floor. Like a microcosm of the changing of the season. The stirring of the air always feels like an invitation to my body and mind to move, and I invite in that feeling as I stand quietly in my living room. I am all possibility, anticipation, promise, I am new life and new light and new hope and new thoughts and new days, I am the dawning light of consciousness enlivening my own heart.
I stand facing East. Behind me, I imagine the sun falling low towards the Western horizon. I feel the fading warmth of it on my back, imagine the lengthening shadows stretching in front of me, the last sprays of neon pink and coral on the clouds deepening as the light slowly dies. I bring to mind the feelings and sensations of Autumn, that initial restless feeling in the air, as though Summer is being swept up and ushered out in a fanfare of red and gold whipped about by storm winds, then a great settling as heavy rains wash away the last dusts of Summer and the brilliant leaves drop to blanket the streets and gardens in my little town. Autumn smells of wood smoke from a dozen local gardeners burning off their garden waste and dozens more chimneys as the fireplaces and woodburners around the hills begin to glow again, and of the mud and leaf mould that fills the forest as the damp settles in before the Winter. Even here, where the native trees aren’t deciduous, there’s a settling feeling in the forest, like a bedding down. Maybe that’s just my imagination. In my garden, the great Oak shakes off its Summer garb and leaves it carelessly on the garden floor. I breathe in the damp air, the smell of leafy decay, feel the gritty mud of the forest trail beneath my imaginary boots, the watery flow of rain down my windows, down my cheeks, down the street gutters, and welcome in all that Autumn is. I am release, I am death in the service of life, I am grief and loss and nostalgia, I am the ceaseless flow of water, always moving, always cleansing, always intuiting the way forward, I am the shadowy liminal, the surrendered descent into night.
I stand facing East. On my left, I imagine the heat of mid-Summer. Specifically, I feel on my skin the scorching, dry, unforgiving heat of a January day in Adelaide, stepping out of my cool, humid house, into the glare of the day and feeling like all the moisture is being evaporated right out of my cells. I hear the sound of that desert northerly wind, or sometimes the sound of fire, roaring by my left ear, feel the heat and the force of it. Fire. Heat. Bushfire season. Watch and Act warnings, bushfire plans enacted. Red skies and smoke in the air. Forests burning, blackened earth. I imagine days spent at the local pool, too many bodies in awkwardly warm water - human soup, my friend calls it, try not to swallow the water, I urge my kids - always so many familiar faces there, my kids’ unbridled joy and boundless energy and the inevitable begging for more time before we go home, PLEASE Mum… I remember dragonflies droning, kids buzzing, sugar highs from icy poles and giant killer pythons from the pool canteen, camping by rivers, Christmas preparations, wrapping paper mountains and post-lunch food comas. I feel the fury of the fire, the joy and excitement and endless coming and going of school holidays, the quick pack of the essentials and kids and pets and get off the mountain for the day when the bushfire warnings come, and I welcome it all in. I am fire and passion, the cleansing scourge of rage and protective, watchful, clarifying anger, I am guided and protected, I am the full unfiltered light of the sun at its zenith, I am a hive of activity, full hearts and fuller stomachs, I am celebration and family and fierce, undaunted joy.
I stand facing East. From my right, I feel the icy chill of a Winter morning, one that never quite feels like it fully blooms into day before it starts fading again into evening. I hear the drip, drip, of the last rainfall still sliding off the leaves as I walk misty paths. The forest is quiet, subdued. Life is quiet, subdued. But my heart is at its busiest, even as I know the trees are busy underground, growing and strengthening their root systems. I do the same. I bring to mind the early sunsets and long nights, the deepening sense of going within, the tarot reads and rapidly filling journals, the evenings spent playing Uno or watching movies with the kids. Strengthening, building root systems that will sustain us in the busier months to come. I think of my favourite grounding meditation - sending down roots from my feet into the rich earth, anchoring, hearing the rumble and crumble of soil and rock parting as my roots push through, downwards, deeper, to the glowing green centre from where life emanates. Winter is bitter cold morning, noon and night, it’s bare trees and soggy ground, clear nights and misted breath - I welcome it all in. I am the soil and the roots, I draw up my nourishment from the earth, I am solid like the Oak and firm as this mountain, I am nourished in my frozen stillness, steady, quiet, restful and held by the earth, I am the longest night, I am the slumbering death that brings forth Life.
I stand facing East. Pure white sunlight shines down on me from above, and at my feet a gloriously fecund, muddy, messy profusion of life springs forth. And in the centre of it all, embracing the tension of all the opposites I hold in my body, I am Whole.
In June this year, I committed to a daily spiritual practice which includes the above meditation. I’ve come to love this practice, I look forward to it every day. It’s the first time in years that I’ve been able to maintain a regular spiritual practice of any kind, and I’ve found it so deeply nourishing that it’s become a vital part of every day (barring my very sick days).
The beauty of doing something like this every day is that it builds on itself with each repetition - over time, the revelations and understanding that emerge during the practice deepen, offering greater truths and new insights into how something shows up or plays out in my life, sinking further into my psyche layer by layer. The other wonderful thing about a daily practice is that consistency creates space for variation - if some days I can’t show up fully, if my mind won’t settle or I can’t focus on the visualisations as intently as I’d like, it’s okay. I’ll be back tomorrow. I can go through the motions today if that’s all I can muster, and I know tomorrow I’ll be back with as much focus and energy as I have available to me. In this way, I’m fostering grace, patience, and self-compassion - the necessary environment for healing. This has helped me start to recognise some of the scarcity mentality I’ve had in my spirituality - where everything had to be perfect and intense every time because if it wasn’t, I would miss out on…. Something? Honestly, it’s amazing to me how much fear is threaded through every layer of my thinking, now that I’m starting to pay attention.
One of my new oft-repeated mantras is, “it’s okay, I have time.” In other words, I don’t need to have this all figured out right now.
What I’ve found with the above meditation in particular, is that I have a growing awareness of the many ‘opposites’ in my life. I am, at any given time and maybe at all times, grieving and hoping, raging and resting, light and shadow, birthing and decaying - like tomato shoots popping out of the compost heap - it’s all happening at once. As I stand literally in the centre of my living room, casting my mind in the four directions, I symbolically stand in the centre of opposing seasons, opposing energies, all of the elements. Through the act of acknowledging and embodying them each in turn, I hold them all in the cauldron of my body, a union of opposites, a paradox, a whole.
This is, of course, only a parable, a meditative condensation of the greater work I’m doing in my inner life - what Jungian psychology calls the constellation of the Self, the Great Work of alchemy, the process of individuation. In analytic psychology, to constellate means to bring together disparate elements (memories, feelings, narratives, nervous system states) to form a functional, organised pattern, called a complex. And the Self is the totality of your psyche - the ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious - everything that comes together to make you you. So to constellate the Self is to bring together all the conflicting, disharmonious parts of yourself, most of which you are completely and blissfully unaware of, and pull them into harmonious relationship. It’s to develop a more cohesive Whole, so that you are less and less at war with yourself, and more and more of a unified mind. It’s the work of therapy, dream work, projection withdrawal, rewriting internal narratives, shadow integration, self-compassion…
It’s the work of a lifetime.
That work necessarily begins with recognising that indeed there are many conflicting and disharmonious parts to me. And there are many tools and skills that I’m learning to help me meet those parts of myself with curiosity and compassion. (This meditation forms a small part of a broader set of practices, which I plan to share over time.) What started as a devastation and a plunging into the underworld back in May (the end of a relationship in the middle of a family crisis, which precipitated an entire trauma response which… I’ll get to at some point because it’s where the gold is…) has turned out to be an incredible opportunity, a turning point in my walk towards wholeness, towards the more connected life I’ve been pursuing all this time. I didn’t have Jungian language for any of this back when I started The Connected Self, only a deep knowing that there was greater wholeness to be found in becoming more connected to myself and to life, and an unshakable longing to find the way. Turns out that, like water, I was intuiting my path forward.
In the narrative ritual of this four directions meditation, I am intentionally embodying the essence of the greater work I’m engaged in, telling myself the story of who and what I am becoming, grounding myself in that purpose as, for thirty minutes each day, I become a living symbol of the Great Work, the lifelong journey towards Wholeness.
There’s something very powerful about the way we move and orient our bodies. It becomes part of the story we tell even if we aren’t aware of it. When I stand in my lounge room and face my body eastward, I’m making a conscious choice to orient towards hope, towards the promise of new life and the dawning of new understanding and new levels of awareness. It’s the art and power of living symbolism.
When my world felt as though it was falling apart, when it felt like I was falling apart, I spent a great deal of time oriented towards my grief. It was all I could feel, all I could see. For weeks I lived constantly with ‘eyes set weary on the sinking sun.’ Consumed by everything I’d lost, spiralling around how and why it was lost, wrestling with the desire to get it all back and the deeper, truer desire to let it go.
This was necessary.
This was the point.
I knew as surely as anything that if I resisted my grief or tried to control it and contain it, I would miss this opportunity and the treasures of growth and self-knowledge that it offered me. But it was the daily orientation of my body towards the eastern horizon, the consistent repetitive practice of facing the sunrise and the promise of tomorrow, that reminded me that even as I walked through the lengthening shadows into the dark of night, dawn was always coming. I could soften towards the pain, surrender to the process, knowing I would emerge again into daylight, no matter how long the night.
And so I stood facing East, and found the courage to follow the dying sun into the Underworld.
Something else has begun to unfold as I emerge again on the other side of night, something surprising: holding the tension of opposites has stopped being only about myself, and is gradually expanding out to the people around me, out into the world. As the heaviness of the Underworld has started to fall away from me, and I can see that my capacity for holding my own contradictions is expanding, I’ve noticed that my internal responses to other people are slowly changing as well. Slowly. This is patient work, it doesn’t happen all at once.
When I look around at the world we live in now, what stands out to me the most is how we as a collective have allowed ourselves to become increasingly polarised. Humans have always been pretty good at creating divisions between ourselves, arbitrary delineations that carry life-and-death consequences yet are entirely make believe. Just as we as individuals exist in a state of fragmentation, the many parts of ourselves at war within us, humanity as a collective reflects this same fragmented state of being. The rage and the grief and the helplessness I’ve felt over the past two years watching the constant assault on humanity being broadcast from Gaza and the US, Ukraine and Kurdistan and Sudan and so many other parts of the world have been completely overwhelming. And I get that I’m a victim of the algorithms and I only see what I’m shown. But isn’t that part of it? My sense of justice gets particularly provoked when I see Christians aligning with divisive and hateful worldviews. And here’s where learning to hold the tension of opposites within myself has started to change things for me. Firstly, because I can see that if we don’t learn how to hold the tension of opposites as a collective, we will continue to destroy each other and thus ourselves. And secondly, because every time I get on social media and post some pointed (snarky?) words about, say, some of my Christian friends who loved Charlie Kirk and think he was a hero of the faith, I can now see that I am in fact becoming part of the problem. Deepening the dividing lines, when really what I want to do is soften and erase them.
I don’t yet know what to do with this information. I’m still a fiery ball of rage against the injustice and inhumanity of our world systems and all who exploit and uphold them. But. And. I know there must be another way to seek the justice and the more beautiful world I long for that doesn’t deepen the patterns of division and hate that got us here in the first place. I just don’t know how to get there yet.
I do know that as I’m learning to make space for the contradictions within myself, I’m accidentally also learning to make better space for them in others. And that can only be a good thing.
A few final notes about the meditation, in case you want to try it yourself.
It’s easier than it looks, don’t be intimidated by all the words, I just happen to really like words. Lots of them. When you strip it back, it’s very simple.
You create (bring to mind, bring into your body, to the best of your ability, which will grow with repeated practice) the feelings and sensations of each of the seasons and elements out of your own lived experience, your own memories of the seasons. All you need to know is which season/element matches with which compass direction.
And here they are:
East is associated with the element of Air, and with Spring. Air is associated with consciousness, the mind, communication, change, freedom, creativity, light, newness, and sound. Think about sunrise and the feelings that evokes.
West is associated with the element of Water, and with Autumn. Water is associated with emotions, the unconscious, intuition, dreams, compassion, flow. Think about sunset and the feelings that evokes.
North (for us in the Southern Hemisphere) is associated with the element of Fire, and with Summer. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you’ll swap the North and South associations. Fire is associated with passion, anger, will, sexuality - think all the fiery, strong emotions - also transformation, protection, and new beginnings. Think about midday at the height of Summer, and the feelings that evokes.
South is associated with the element of Earth, and with Winter. Earth is associated with stability, strength, material provision, physical health and healing, death, rebirth, wisdom, nature. Think about the long nights of Winter, and observe the feelings that thought evokes.
Once you get really familiar with these feeling states and visualisations, you can condense this into a breathing meditation. I like the four-fold breath, or square breathing - breathe in for a count of four, hold your breath for a count of four, breathe out for a count of four, hold for a count of four, repeat. To bring in the season/directions/elements, breathe in and imagine sunrise/spring/air, hold at the top and imagine the midday sun/summer/fire, breathe out and embody sundown/autumn/water, hold at the bottom and imagine night/winter/earth.
Your imagination is a powerful creative force, don’t be afraid to set it free.
Beautiful Jess.