Soaking in the Soma of the Dark Season

Soma is a Sanskrit word that encompasses much of the energy of the moon. Soft, cool, slow, reflective, nurturing, nourishing, soothing, slimy, intuitive, deep, moving, flowing, watery, still, meditative, inward and much more…

As we cross the threshold from the agni/solar/light/outward time of the year that is spring and summer into the dark time of year that is fall and winter, we are called within. This can be challenging for our culture that loves, idolizes, glorifies, and celebrates the grind and busy lifestyle! However, nature knows true balance. She is calling us into the depths of our being to reflect, to steep, to shine the nuggets of wisdom that we gathered when the light was bright.

Dare I say, nature wants us TO REST.

REST

is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be.

Rest is the essence of giving and receiving; an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually but also physiologically and physically.

To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals.

To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back literally or figuratively from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner static bull’s eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange.

- David Whyte, poet

Rest is not just the absence of doing. It is the space that we allow ourselves to dream, to bring forth ideas, inspirations and hear the sweet callings of our soul.

When we rest, we create more soma for our body, mind and spirit. Soma is a soft buffer for our hard world. Soma is the gentle, loving embrance of a friend you haven’t seen in a long time. Soma soothes aches, pains and strains of a busy, and often rushed life.

Soma is the dewy glow of rejuvenation.

Soma is the gift you receive from rest.

Sending you soft moments of rest in this season of darkness…. may it replenish you.

XO,

Radha