Mark the Autumnal Equinox With This Four-Part Breath

The practice of sama vritti is a perfect way to mark the year’s transitions.

In the midst of life’s chaos, few things provide more certitude than the earth’s fixed points. The autumnal equinox — which this year will occur on September 22 in the Northern Hemisphere—is one such point. Twelve hours of light, twelve hours of dark. No matter what happens in the news that day, that fact will remain. It’s reassuring to think about.

I’ve written before about how the breath is a powerful tool we can use to drop into our bodies in the moment. But it’s also a way we can punctuate the year, manage big transitions in life, and find corollaries between the small, minute cycles of our bodies and the big, meta cycles out in the natural world.

To use your breath to mark the equinox this month, you can first break the breath into four parts — inhale, pause at the top, exhale, pause at the bottom. In yogic tradition, this is a pranayama (breathwork) practice known as sama vritti, which is commonly used to smooth out the breath in order to calm the nervous system and prepare the practitioner for meditation. It’s also commonly referred to as “box breath.”

When you add the seasonal aspect, it goes like this. Each part of the breath becomes a season…