The goddesses I'm leaning on this autumn

Autumn arrives properly this month. The equinox falls on Wednesday 23rd. The moment the light and the dark sit side by side, before we fully step into the darker months. 

I love the celebratory bits that come next; Halloween, Bonfire night, the turning of the leaves. 

But the smell of autumn always takes me back to walks through Regent's Park pre radiotherapy, and my surprise Brca2 diagnosis I can feel completely floored and blue for days on end.

So this year I'm looking to the Goddesses of this season for help.

• Demeter presides over the harvest, and over the grief of letting her daughter go. The abundance and the loss are the same story. She's the reason the earth goes bare.

• Persephone descends. She goes down. She comes back, and she isn't who she was before.

• Hekate stands at the crossroads with a torch in each hand. She doesn't tell you which way to go. She just makes sure you can see. She's the one who goes down with Persephone. walks ahead of her with the light. Hekate has been very present for me this year and this Autumn is a crossroads in our house. I'm prepping my daughter for her 11+ and it's her decision point as much as mine — a road she's walking and I'm walking next to her. Sounds small but small things are big when you're living them every day.

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None of these Goddesses promise you an easy Autumn. And as much as I want it to be, life isn't easy (trivial as 11+ exam stress may seem it's still stress). But they do offer this; sometimes darkness we feel isn't a failure, or something to fix.

Most of the exhaustion you feel is the effort of fighting it. The pushing through, the being fine, the getting on with it.

That's what my sessions are for. An hour where you stop resisting the darkness. And instead just let your body rest in it.