The Season Of Turning Within, Letting Go & Grief Integration

“Death itself is the seed that blooms a beautiful life” - Andrea Gibson

By Amanda Rosenberg, L.Ac, Staff Acupuncturist

The energetics of autumn are the time of consolidation, reflection, and letting go. Autumn is the preparation for rest, for winter solitude and transitioning to darkness. We slow down to witness the leaves breezily falling to the ground, the lovely bronze tone and light glow, the dry warmth of the air, and the graceful dying off all around us. This is the time of integration and recognition of what needs to be shed. My mind goes to what is too heavy to keep holding up, what I want to release and give space for, and what is most precious to hold onto.

These days, I think about grief, death, and life with all the harshness of the world around us, and on a personal scale in my mother’s health journey. I’m thinking a lot about centering in grief, not pushing it away - the hardness and loneliness of it, softening to the strange quiet of it. I think about anticipatory grief as I have been a witness to her in the death process - something all-encompassing in my life this past year. Sometimes life pulls us into a season longer than we want or feel we can manage to stay in. I have found gems in this grief season that have shifted how I hold grief in my daily life. When a loved one is in the dying process and slowly unraveling but also still holding on, who holds on more - me or her, and where do I find the wisdom of letting go and loving even deeper? I’m constantly re-evaluating what my center is in this grief, what life is like moving forward without someone so intrinsic to who I am.

Can I be in allowance of grief’s presence while not being taken over by it? I think about the need for decay to make way for newness. Letting go of the familiar, transitioning to the darkness, something yet to be, waiting and learning, and practicing patience, a different state of newness to enter into. Death is always the step before life, and the spaciousness and melancholy are intertwined. I ask myself what brings me back to life while dying is all around me? I see it in the softer exchanges with my mom who is in the transitional realm, and I value this time in both our lives so much because of it. I’m grateful for this grief and how much it is changing and teaching me to love so much deeper.

In autumn, I work with the unseen energy, ancestral and inward spirit that keeps me going as we enter the darker months ahead. I stay in the season of grief - not an easy one, and I learn how to choose life within that. I hope that this time opens my soul, planting new and meaningful seeds to inspire life and creative flow again. The living and dying process resides in every existing moment. We breathe in, our literal “inspiration” of life, and we breathe out, our “elimination” of the old. I remind myself that there is so much life reorganizing and renewing under those piles of dead leaves and branches on the ground all around us; we just have to be willing to trust it’s there.

Amanda Rosenberg: “I believe in the power of the inner healer in us all and the positive effects this medicine has to offer for a sustainable and healthy lifestyle. I aim to be a helpful catalyst for my patients to find their body's innate connection to their own healing abilities.”

In addition to acupuncture treatments, Mandy also offers needle-free Sound Healing sessions. Read more.