Apotheosis of Inward and Downward

Allowing the fallow, honing the will

In the manic midst of this time of rushing, buying, trajectorying, coping, stuffing, bracing, obligating, partying, and, likely, squandering to some extent our precious, hibernally inflected energy, we have moved into and through the apex-depth of darkness. We find ourselves on the other side of the sacred Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, a day when all of our being and doing, from the banal to the numinous, occurred at the most far-tilted distance from the Sun.

We find ourselves here, now, operating within the unsparing, chthonic auspices of deep Winter, the season of the Water element and the Kidneys, the end that is also a beginning. In Taoist medicine, the spirit of this element is called the zhi, which is usually translated as “will”. But this is not the ego-fired control mechanism of “willpower” as we might think of it, especially in the West — it is more like a pilot light glowing and powering processes from a deep and slow but mighty below. It is more like a profound willingness. It is made of the substance of a yielding. In Lorie Eve Dechar’s words, “In the human microcosm, it is related to the power of the life force, the instincts, the will and the driving urgency of ambition. Zhi is the will to live, the unknowable mystery of quickening life.”¹

In the character on the right, we see the open vessel of the xin, the heart, below, with the upper radical indicating a new, sprouting green plant growing and seeking upward from a vessel that is also substrate, ground, and animatrix. The latent potentiality of deep yin is undergirded and blessed by the bright, heaven-tethered yang of the heart and the shen spirit.

In the ancient pictogram on the left, we see an arrow pointing straight down into a terrestrial horizon or perhaps a bird that has tucked its wings, reversed its soaring, and aimed itself down, down, down into the earth. I love the rigorous clarity of the vertical and the horizontal axes in this image — as the energies of life relent to the critical deconstitution, amorphous stillness, and undifferentiated melting into the field of the pre-manifest that is mandated by the Big Yin of winter, the radical dissolution is always in service to rebirth and rematerialization, along the axial midline of our incarnational blueprint.

The seed descends and disappears into the underworld in order to engage the eventual alchemical realization of its overworld unfoldment. These dances and reversals of polarity are happening all of the time in our meridians and bodies and in the natural world. A state of maximum yin will spontaneously become yang and vice-versa.

As Dechar teaches:

“The seed is the vegetative archetype of storage and preserving, which are primary functions of this Element. Now the hard seeds rest, unmoving, in the darkness…Deep in winter, the sap stirs in the unseen roots of the trees. At the heart of the seed, desire stirs. And as the wheel turns from Water [kidney/winter] to Wood [liver/spring] the moment comes when the seed splits, the egg cracks, the water breaks and birth becomes imperative. Then, the stored qi is liberated to fuel new growth as the “I am” of Water turns to the “I become” of Wood.”²

In Chinese medicine, the kidneys govern the bones, the collagen-quartz-crystalline recordkeepers of the pulls, pushes, pains, and vectors of our living, as well as the ears and receptivity to sound. The twin kidneys, the left one being more yin and the right being more yang, sit on either side of the humming battery-hearth of our “Life Gate”, the Ming Men, at the level of the space between the second and third lumbar verterbrae, and are the storers and mobilizers of our jing or essence, our genetic material, and our source energy. The emotion associated with the kidneys and the water element/winter is fear, and therefore the kidneys empower the navigation of the deep and primordial fear to faith spectrum, as well as serving as the origin place of, paradoxically, both our primal survival instincts and our destiny.

As Peter Shea writes, “Fear is the Guardian at the Gate of our vitality. In order to strengthen our Ming Men we have to transcend a certain amount of our autonomic relationship to fear.” And “In order to activate our Destiny, we must reckon with our fear. These fears represent a whole lineage of survival energy that has been expressed violently and also suppressed and repressed. Our relationship to this lineage gives us an opportunity to clean up our lineage’s relationship to fear. As we work through these ancestral issues, we activate the potential of our Destiny.”³

The kidneys and the water element harbor a fascinating and continual interplay of past, present, and future — the future, our destiny and actualization, is clearly influenced by the past - genetics, imprints, curriculums - AND moment by moment, it is our responses and choices that dictate our present-tense alignment with our Tao. It is through the honoring of the motility of our individual will with respect to the will of the cosmos and Great Mystery, the fortification of our integrity, and the agile sincerity of our awareness that we articulate the ever-truing form of our flowering. And it is often only through an encounter with the obliviating tyranny of fear that we receive a holy flash-glimpse of the light of true faith.

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A medicine question for this season: Is my personal will in integrity with my time/place, my heart, my Tao?”

Another one: How might I occupy and engage the backward-stepped fallowness of this season of “I am”, that is also a pre-manifest “I am ?”, in such a way that the “I become” of spring can deploy most fully, faithfully, and life-givingly?

And a few practices:

From my amazing qigong teacher, Jaye Marolla — winter is the season to explore “taking off your face”, i.e., dismantling structures of identity and allowing WHO WE ARE to melt and mystify us even just momentarily. You can enact this physically by making the gesture of repeatedly sweeping your face down and off like a mask with your hands. It’s kind of delicious!

Balsam fir and/or cedarwood essential oils are incredible allies for the winter and the kidney energies. As an evergreen, balsam fir confers an invigorating solar potency, while also calming and grounding the body in the way only trees can. Inhale or diffuse and/or apply to the area of Ming Men (diluted in jojoba or a carrier oil) for the restoration of faith in the depths of the dark.

And cedarwood blesses us by fortifying and rooting the spirit back into the body and into the present, reestablishing contact with possibility and determination. According to one of my teachers, it is especially beneficial to apply to Kidney 25, a point toward the end of the kidney meridian, which moves upward from the bottom of the foot up the front of the body all the way to just beneath the collarbone, called Shen Cang, “spirit storehouse”. It is located on the chest, a few inches from the center, in the second space between ribs (see images below). You can apply a drop of oil to each of your pointer fingers and hold them gently against these bilateral points, annointing this tender, above-heart place to recover power in the face of betrayal or vulnerability, align inner and outer worlds, and enliven a refuge for the sanctity of our being.⁴

I will close with a timely teaching from the Tong Shu (Taoist astrology/divination) practitioner Scott Zook of Zhen Wu Astrology:

“There comes a point in the development of the darkness where the only light we see is the one we generate from within. Approaching the Winter Solstice, our own luminescence becomes more self-evident. At the same time, immersed in stillness, differentiation is a distant memory…Nourished by Yin, meaning is not extracted through an arduous pursuit of purpose. Meaning is found everywhere…Laozi’s wuweidao lets us rest in the confidence that all Life arises, flourishes, and returns to source by itself. Feel at ease knowing no effort is necessary for this flavor of fulfillment!”⁵

Thank you deeply for being here and engaging, in whatever ways you are called, the magic and the mystery of our winter apprenticeship. Please feel free to share with me how this is speaking to you, working through you, mystifying you, etc.

And may we honor the obscuring dark, that we might know true illumination.

1. Dechar, Lorie Eve. Five Spirits. New York, NY: Lantern Books, 2006.

2. Dechar, Lorie Eve. Kigo. London: Singing Dragon, 2021.

3. Shea, Peter. Alchemy of the Extraordinary: A Journey into the Heart of the Meridian Matrix. Asheville, NC: Soul Pivot Press, 2015.

4. Dechar, Lorie Eve. Kigo. London: Singing Dragon, 2021.

5. www.instagram.com/zhenwuastrology