The Equinox as a guide for the Spiritual Life

We’ve just come through the equinox time of balance. It gives a great sense of reassurance from the natural world that everything will balance out in the end. Yet, as soon as the earth and the sun reach that perfect point of alignment, the earth doesn’t stop to rest. She quietly continues her steady circling of the sun and will soon be as far away from the sun as she can possibly get in the northern hemisphere, and as close as she can get in the south. Despite this, we mostly think of balance as the holy grail. We keep imagining that we’ll come to a peaceful even keel in our searching, our practices, and in our lives. We let ourselves fantasise about getting to a point in life when everything will be beautifully settled – that our daily sit will be non-negotiable, that we’ll journal daily for 20 minutes, and our life somehow will roll peacefully like the earth around the sun. That’s never going to happen! Instead, we live in the whirlwind our ever changing days and lives and face all the unexpected twists and turns that life serves up. 

If the equinox teaches us anything it’s that balance doesn’t last – the pendulum just swings right on through as it journeys to the other extreme. But what can and does last is the inner steadiness that comes from committed spiritual practice balanced with a clear knowing of where we are headed with our spiritual life. What does last is the inner sense that, despite the whirlwind, the upheavals, the disasters, we have an inner North Star that is keeping us steady. And that North Star is our chosen spiritual path married to committed spiritual practice. What lasts is the knowing that, despite our lives moving ever further away from the sun and our longed for balance, we are following a clear trajectory modelled on the earth’s peaceful circling of the sun.  

So, even as the equinox is fleeting in nature, there is an inner balance that’s not dependent upon everything aligning perfectly in the outer world and in our outer lives but is dependent upon an inner balance between our spiritual practices and the path of awakening that we have chosen to walk. These are the two sides of the spiritual life — the path and the practice, and they need be in balance. This inner balance is the holy grail of the spiritual life. 
The ‘path’ loosely refers to the formal spiritual or religious frame you have chosen to orient your inner life, and the practices are what you do as your ongoing practical commitment to walking that path. 

Historically, the two sides have been wildly out of balance. The designated path, often a religion or a religious doctrine, cut people off from the living, experiential reality of inner transformation. The path reified into dead-ish theory rather than offering a vivifying frame for our awakening and deification. Spiritual practices, on the other hand, that engage the embodied, living, inner experience of awakening were often ignored as irrelevant so that most of us didn’t realise the critical role that spiritual experiences play in our awakening. Such was the dominance, historically, of the doctrine, dogma, or path that practices beyond formal rites and silent prayer were regarded by the ‘authorities’ as irrelevant, suspicious, and even dangerous. We need to redress the balance. 

My sense is that full-bodied spiritual awakening is wholly dependent on our initial and initiating experiences of the Divine. On the life-giving, awe-inspiring, wondrous moments of encounter with the Sacred. The flash of the numinous and the sometimes breath-taking beauty of life are living experiences of divinity blazing forth into the humdrum of our lives and revealing to us our own divinity. Experience alone however, is not enough. We do need a frame to hold and orient it, and this is where  balance is needed. A spiritual or religious frame –  without experience, is unlikely to awaken us to the living reality of our deified-self living out of the awakened consciousness of love. And equally, experience alone will leave us spinning our wheels if we don’t have a container or frame to orient us along the given trajectory of our chosen path. The bridge between the two is made up of our daily committed spiritual practices. 

This equinoctial balance gives us agency and sovereignty over our spiritual lives. It’s what allows us to be at peace even when all around is in turmoil. It’s what helps us re-orient to the North Star of our chosen path when the planets of our life are chaotically off course. It helps us to come back to the bigger questions of ‘Why am I here? What is the meaning and purpose of life? What is the meaning and purpose of my life? What is my calling? Etc… The familiar aphorisms of life: As above, so below; As within so without, all speak to the need for inner balance even as chaos swirls around us. Nature is our teacher and if we learn anything from this recent equinox it’s the need for balance.