FOUND WHILE FALLING

Apprenticeship to Love, September 25, 2025

• Today’s questions: What happens when you “lose your balance” in life? 

• Today's suggested practice: Stand. Breathing in, relax your body while you hold this breath. Now lift your right leg, just enough to almost lose your balance. Feel that tension. As your relax your breath, lower your leg. Breathing in again, holding the breath, feel how stable you are with both feet on the ground. Relax the breath. Breath in a third time. Hold this breath and lift your left leg, just enough to feel your balance tested. Hold that position, feel that tension, for as long as your breath lasts. Relaxing your breath, lower your leg. Breathe in, and out. Repeat at the end of your day. Notice.

Rev. Hans Peter Meyer 
Click on my name and join me in the fairly quiet space that is the Apprenticeship to Love Signal chat group. I’d love to hear about your experiences with this short desire practice.

TODAY’S MEDITATION

We are in the penumbra of the autumnal equinox. A moment of celestial and solar balance. 

Balance is prized. In life. In how I hold my body. 

Let’s get specific: 

• In love, balance is prized. The delicious experience of “falling in love,” while enjoyable, is understood as unsustainable. There is no balance. 
• In marriage, balance is prized. Love is “tamed.” Domesticated. Only balance ensures that “til death do us part” longevity we desire.

But I’m very sure that prizing balance is pretty much the best way to dampen the fire that lies at the heart of love, marriage. These could be the only art most of us will make with our lives. Why risk deadening our souls to this gift we might offer to the world, each other, ourselves?

… 

Let’s look at tango. And yes, again with tango. Here too, balance is prized. 

But in tango I know this: nothing happens in the moment of balance. It is only a moment, a pause in our dance. 

The movement —and the beauty!— happens as we, and especially the follow is guided, allowed to fall “through” that moment of balance, and into another moment of the dance.

…

We are always improvising. In tango. But also in love, in our marriages, in our lives. 

We may choose to pause in the moment of balance. It’s one of the beauties of tango, the attention to pausing. Borrowing from Stephen Jenkinson, as dancers we are “breaking momentum.”In that moment when momentum is held I am not caught up in deciding, thinking ahead, or behind. I breathe and I notice how everything feels “right,” aligned. 

It’s a magical moment, this feeling of alignment and beauty. If I stay here, in the comfort of balance, I am choosing to let my art die here. 

But, I will not lett the dance (or love, or life) die here. Instead —and this is our my gift, what I understand today as my sacred duty, the art of my husbandry, to know the moment to break the balance and to step forward into the unimaginable beauty (and sorrow!) of what the next falling in/out/through balance brings…

…

In the magical moments when light and dark, masculine and feminine, sun and stars are balanced, I pause. I breathe. I feel the magic and my commitment to this art, this dance. I gather strength, and I step forward. I trust myself as I plunge deeper into the unknown of this union, this other, the darkness and light that I cannot imagine.

…

Is it this equinox that makes me think these thoughts?

I'm wondering, more and more: How do I experience the celestial moments? 

What influence do the seasons of the sun, the thirteen moons and their phases, the planets and the stars, the light and the dark —what do they mean to me? There is a coziness that comes to me at this time of year. The smells of autumn. The lightness in my step with the portent of dark days and long evenings ahead, something I relish. How else do I experience these cycles and events that are far beyond me?

…

I plumb my own depths and experiences. I come to experience a joyful awareness. Or, as recent events show  me, a less joyful and anxious awareness. Something deep. Quiet. Something thorough, transforming? It isn’t balance, but the willingness to pass through the moment of balance.

…

The equinox is a solar balance of dark and light. This year the season stretches, from late summer into early fall, and the moment is resplendent! Warm in the days, cool in the mornings and evenings. Colours! Smells! Tastes! Something to enjoy. And, something we are passing through. Perhaps of all the seasons, this is the one I want to enjoy most thoroughly. But it isn't a balance I seek; it’s the pleasure of feeling the changes, the cooling, the colouring, and —really—, feeling it and knowing it in my body. 

…

Recently, I'm feeling so far off balance as I reel in wonder: How do some of my writing stir anger and fear and mistrust amongst some readers?  Another experience of imbalance. Another aspect of the flow in my life, showing me something new, something that only imbalance and out-of-alignment can show me. 

…

Every few days or weeks, I wrote to my beloved, I find myself falling in love with you. 

I’ve told you how good it feels to love you. To learn to open my heart against expectations, to just feel how big this heart can be. But I haven’t spoken of the ebb and flow, of vulnerability and sensitivity and confidence and insecurity. What is constant is my commitment, to loving you. Because I know that it is only through the discipline of this commitment that I experience more and more of the man I love, more and more of the woman I love. And always, the falling… it is the falling, not the balance, that reveals this unimaginable treasure.

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀Blessed Equinox, When Darkness & Light meet each other in perfect balance.
When Darkness & Light turn towards each other an realize both need to be seen, honoured & respected. When the Light realized it can not exist without Darkness and vice versa. When they realize they are Whole, Beautiful, & Complete, when they have each other & dance with each other! (Fabiola Perez)

🌀If you want to live your life in balance, you must fall in love with falling. (Kendra Cunov)

🌀I want to be seen. I want to be accepted as I am. And loved for that. (My beloved)

SIGNAL CHAT

If you have thoughts about this meditation on the crooked path of sacred marriage, please join me on the Signal Apprenticeship to Love chat group.