The Inner Ascent

Waxing Gibbous in Capricorn
July 11, 2025

The light is building, but we’re not yet at fullness. There’s a tension in the waxing gibbous moon—not quite culmination, not quite beginning. Just the slow, deliberate press toward something that hasn’t yet arrived.

Under this Capricorn moon, that movement feels especially textured. Capricorn doesn't rush. It doesn’t crave drama or flash. It just continues—step by step, breath by breath—toward something that matters. Something earned.

That’s the energy I found myself sitting with during a recent sādhanā. A feeling of climbing—not for achievement, but for refinement. The kind of inner ascent that isn’t seen or measured. The kind that can’t be explained to anyone else. That makes no sound. That leaves no visible trace. And yet, you feel it. Something within reconfiguring. Not instantly. Not all at once. But gradually, with care.

We often think of meditation as a destination—as if the goal is to arrive at stillness, or clarity, or some rarefied state of bliss. But the longer I practice, the more I understand meditation not as a moment of arrival, but as a process of distillation. A slow remembering. A steady release.

There’s a reason the inner limbs of yoga aren’t presented as goals to be accomplished. They unfold like layers of breath. First there is focus. Then attention deepens. Then there is just presence—no longer gripping, no longer reaching. Just resting in awareness.

This isn’t linear. It never has been. The mind loops. The body fidgets. Some days I sit and feel only resistance. But I keep returning. Because I know something is shaping itself inside that stillness.

And sometimes, in those quiet, almost imperceptible moments, I catch a glimpse of it—what the Tantric tradition speaks of as Bhairava. Not a god to be worshipped from a distance, but an energy that lives in the threshold. Bhairava is what holds when everything else falls away. Not the beginning, not the end—but the charged, creative space just beyond collapse.

That’s the space meditation takes me to. Not every time. But often enough to believe in its intelligence. In its timing. In the value of staying.

Because even when I feel like I’m getting nowhere—even when the silence is hard or the mind won't cooperate—something is working itself out. Refining itself. Asking less for effort and more for sincerity.

And when I remember that, I stop trying to reach anything at all. I just keep climbing, inward.

Not to arrive.
But to remember what’s always been there.