Kala—Everything in Right Time: September 2026
Surrendering to Divine Timing at Moonflower Yoga & Ayurveda Studio in Brookfield
I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately.
Maybe that isn’t surprising. I am, after all, very patiently—or perhaps sometimes patiently—waiting for the time when my baby decides to enter this world.
But I’ve also been thinking about time because of everything this year has held.
This year has brought me the beautiful gift of pregnancy. It has also been a year of grief. Grief over loved ones who have passed. Grief over relationships that have changed or ended. Grief over versions of life that I thought might look different than they do now.
More times than I’d like to admit, I’ve found myself asking:
Why? Why this? Why now?
The funny thing is that I deeply believe in divine timing–that there is a time for everything. I even have this sentiment tattooed on my right foot as a reminder. (Nineteen-year-old me was very proud of this first tattoo.)
And yet, no matter how many times I see my tattoo or listen to Turn! Turn! Turn! By the Byrds, believing that there is a time for everything doesn’t mean I always understand—or like—the timing.
Wanting Time to Be Different
In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, one of yoga’s prominent philosophical texts, the kleshas are often described as obstacles or causes of suffering.
One of them is raga, attachment: our tendency to cling to what we like, what feels good, or what we want to continue. Its counterpart, dvesha, is aversion: our desire to push away what we dislike or don’t want to experience.
Both attachment and aversion shape our relationship with time:
We want something to happen sooner.
We wish something had lasted longer.
We think we should be further along by now.
We want to return to a version of life that has already passed.
We wonder why something difficult had to happen now instead of at some imagined future time when perhaps we would have been better prepared to process it.
Underneath all of these thoughts is a subtle resistance, or aversion, to the time we are actually in: the present moment
Everything in Right Time
One of my Ayurveda teachers often says:
Everything in right time.
I return to those words often because the natural world reminds us of this:
The trees do not hold tightly to their leaves because summer felt too short.
Leaves emerge in spring. They grow and deepen through summer. They change color and fall in autumn. Branches become bare through winter. And eventually, life begins emerging again.
Nature doesn’t ask autumn to behave like spring.
There is nothing wrong with the bare branch in January because it isn’t blooming. There is nothing wrong with the falling leaf because it is no longer green.
Each belongs to its time.
And we do, too.
It’s not just Ayurveda that believes in right time; different cultures around the world share the view of right time, too. For example, a popular reading from the Christian Old Testament (and the inspiration for my aforementioned tattoo), shares this sentiment:
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance…
[God] has made everything beautiful in its time.
(Ecclesiastes 3:1 - 4, 11)
This doesn’t mean that everything that happens feels as though it’s happening in right time. And it certainly doesn’t mean that grief isn’t painful or that endings don’t hurt.
Trusting in, or surrendering, to divine timing asks us to loosen our grip, or our attachment, to how we want things to be and to accept reality.
Can we allow ourselves to be with reality without believing something should be different?
Can we trust that each experience we encounter is happening in right time, even if we don’t understand the why?
Kala: Time in Ayurveda
In Sanskrit, kala means time or season. And the term kala parinama means the passing, or transformation, of time. In Ayurveda, the passing of time is considered one of the fundamental factors influencing our health and state of balance.
Time moves through everything: the hours of the day, the seasons of the year, the seasons of our lives.
Ayurveda asks us to live in rhythm with the natural passing of time, noticing when we are living out of rhythm with the time we are actually in.
One of the clearest examples is seasonal living, or ritucharya.
The Charaka Samhita, the oldest of the classical Ayurveda texts, shares:
Strength and lusture is enhanced by following suitable diet and [lifestyle] regimen for every season. (Cha. Sa. Sutra Sthana 6/3)
This is basically to say: we aren’t meant to eat, move, work, rest, and live exactly the same way all year round. The environment around us changes, and Ayurveda encourages us to change with it to maintain our overall health.
When we resist the rhythms of nature—when we continually ask our bodies to operate as though the season hasn’t changed—we may begin to notice imbalance, discomfort, or even disease.
And this applies to more than just the weather outside our windows.
The Season of Your Life
There are seasons within our lives, too.
Our bodies change with time. Our needs change with time. What supported us five years ago may not support us today.
As we age, for example, the qualities of the body naturally change. Ayurveda doesn’t necessarily view every change associated with aging as something that needs to be eliminated. There is an understanding that time itself creates expected change, and that change is simply the natural progression of time.
Ayurveda describes different stages of life through the qualities of the doshas. Childhood carries more of the building, nourishing qualities associated with Kapha. The middle years of life tend to carry the intensity, ambition, responsibility, and action associated with Pitta. Later life gradually takes on more of Vata’s qualities of movement, change, lightness, and transition.
When we resist divine timing, we are ultimately living out of season with our reality. And that’s the real rub: expecting ourselves to live as though we are in a different season of our life.
We may expect our bodies to move the way they did ten years ago. We may expect ourselves to maintain the same pace while caring for children or aging parents. We may expect productivity while grieving. We may compare a season of inward focus to someone else’s season of expansion.
Or we may simply keep doing what we have always done because slowing down enough to acknowledge that the season has changed can feel uncomfortable.
This pregnancy has made that particularly tangible for me.
My body has repeatedly reminded me that this is not a season for doing everything exactly as I did before. It is a season for slowing down. Listening. Preparing. Letting other people help. Creating space.
And, perhaps most challenging for me, waiting.
There is very little control in waiting for a baby to arrive. There is an estimated date on the calendar and the obvious physical changes–and that’s about it. Ultimately, the only thing I can control is how humbly I surrender to the divine timing of it all.
What Time Is It?
September offers us a natural moment to notice time. The sun sets earlier. Schedules shift. Leaves begin changing. The energy that carried us through summer begins shifting toward fall. As the season begins to change, this is a perfect time to ask ourselves:
What time is it in my life right now?
Not according to the calendar, or what someone else is doing, or where you thought you would be right now.
What season are you actually in?
Maybe it is a time to build, work, care for others, create, wait, grieve, rest. Maybe you aren’t quite sure what season you’re in. And that’s okay, too.
Oftentimes the practice is not figuring out why a particular moment has arrived. The practice is noticing how humbly we can meet the moment and trust:
Everything in right time.
Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu ~ May all beings everywhere be happy and free.
In loving kindness,
Katie