Leaning Into the Season
Leaning Into The Season
a reflection on finding stillness this winter
Lauren Sacks, Whole Mama Yoga Co-Founder & Lead Teacher
There’s finally a holiday album that I like. Never mind that it came out in 2015; I’ve never been the most on trend (see any of the late 80s fashions I wore well into the 90s). By Beta Radio, The Songs the Season Brings evokes all the feels - nostalgia and bleakness, hope and light, joy and heartache. And I’ve been listening to it well into January.
This time of year, most of us are exhausted. It’s been gray and cold outside. Long winter’s naps beckon and we (usually) ignore their siren call. We rush around, with too much to do, most of us more aware of our personal grief at this time than at any other.
And yet, there are lights on trees and menorahs, there are cookies and fireplace fires. Warmth and cold. Light and dark.
The many feelings we feel during the holiday season - difficult and joyful - seem intent on demonstrating life’s contrasts, wrapped up in a condensed and glittery month-long package that has finally…finally…just ended, because it’s a lot, and we come out on the other side discombobulated and spinning, fully ready for hibernation (though we’d *settle* for a month-long trip to the Caribbean).
Enter January and February, entirely void of glitter.
The slog of winter can feel endless and incredibly fallow. If you have young children with developing immune systems, the months can seem even more interminable, and even more challenging to embrace.
And yet. Your body’s cues for rest and retreat, for slowing down and burrowing at home, though seemingly unnatural in this non-stop world, are anything but. Slowing down, “Wintering” (as Katherine May so brilliantly coined) is necessary for all of the natural world. As much as we distance ourselves from the rhythms of this earth with our self- and societally-imposed rhythms, nature finds a way in. Our need for this long stretch of down time is quite in tune with the needs of the rest of life on this planet.
In these dark and cold months, it would serve us well to listen intently to the sometimes quiet (sometimes not) voice of our physical body and, now that the holiday season has passed, stop resisting so much, let go of some things and rest.
In idle time, we often find inspiration. All of the parenting memes I’ve ever seen (apparently derived from parenting books) encourage boredom in children. I can’t imagine adults would be any different. With stillness, we can physically and mentally breathe. There’s great power in embracing that, choosing to ignore a fraction of your to-do list, focusing instead on doing less; on slowing down, and then seeing what comes to the surface as a result.
And of course, just as spring follows winter, your own life’s seasons will follow suit.
Join us on January 30th for our day-long Winter Retreat in Chapel Hill. Learn more & register here.
Light returns and warmth floods back in. Your children will one day be well. You’ll sit on your back porch again. You’ll see neighbors and work in the garden and breathe in proverbial and actual new beginnings. Promise.
In the meantime, smack in the middle of these quiet months, we’ll gather for a Winter Retreat with the intention of allowing you some much deserved rest. We’ll honor where we are and look forward to what will come, recognizing the value in the balance. We’ll visit with each other, but also find time to be alone. We’ll move, we’ll breathe and we’ll find stillness. Together. In community.
And if you cannot, I hope you can find some stillness as the winter months continue.