The Hollow Centre
As the daylight hours begin to shorten, Summer looks to complete what Spring set in motion, bringing everything towards its fullest expression. Bathed though we are in the remaining warmth of the late summer sun, we begin to feel nature turning in on itself. From all this abundant growth comes the harvest. The year turns slowly on its axis from Yang towards Yin and we enter the season Chinese Medicine calls Late Summer, or Earth. The days remain golden, yet trees and plants begin to tilt their burdens of fruit towards the ground, Yin-wards. There is a slight heaviness in the air, an almost imperceptible turning of the year’s tide. Part of us remains facing outward, our face still tilted towards the light, while another movement begins, a subtle pull inward, towards ourselves, towards centre, towards home.
Historically, within the Five Phase imagery, Earth was positioned at the centre, the hub of the wheel, a pivot that holds everything together, connecting all of the other elements which move around it. And so, in some ways, Earth holds something of all these movements in a place of stability, providing a centre through transitions and a stable anchor from which change and growth can take place. Everything that moves outward eventually returns. Like the seasons suggest, like a flower constantly opening and closing, we move in and out of these spaces too. We become open and then closed, clear and confused, connected and disconnected. The practice is not to arrive at some permanent state of being, but to recognise how we move in and out of these spaces and how to return.
invitations
Explore the Valley Spirit Breath. Allow the inhale to spread naturally into the belly and chest. Exhale slowly through the mouth with a soft, almost silent Huuu. At the end of the exhalation, rather than rushing to breathe in again, linger for a few moments in the hollow of the lungs and belly, without strain. Feel the quiet space before the body naturally chooses to receive the next breath.
Notice somewhere in your life that has become overly full. A room, your diary, information, conversation, even your own thinking. Rather than asking what needs to be added, organised or fixed, ask: what might I allow to empty so there is space for movement again?
As Summer begins its quiet turn towards Autumn, consider the harvest of your own experience. What has this season produced? What can now nourish you? You do not need to account for everything that has happened. Simply notice what has ripened enough to be gathered.
This quiet still point, in which we stand on the moving ground beneath our feet, reveals a much quieter pulse of life beneath all the big and obvious ones. And it is here we return to something much more ordinary, the ground of things. Through this body, this breath, we return to what is here now, the beingness of this very moment that was right under our nose all the time.
So how do we stay open, as Summer asked us to? How do we remain vulnerable enough to keep opening, as Spring taught us? How do we stay flexible enough to move with life without losing our way home? Earth does not ask us to become harder or more fixed. It asks us to create enough space to meet what is here. To move upwardly, outwardly, down and in, and then come back, centred and present, taking up residence in the only place life is actually happening. Right here and right now. This truly is all we have. And as with all the movements, there is a paradox. Here we are pointed not towards something solid beneath us, but, as Earth’s Yang organ, the Stomach reveals, towards something hollow, hollow enough to receive and active enough to empty again. Can I become steady enough to remain open?
