How about Wintering instead?
When you read this, what do you notice? How does it make you feel or think about the year ahead? I ask these questions because I rather like the old me of 2022, and I am taking all of that into 2023. Yes, I anticipate some newness, yet right now, I feel more like hibernating than racing forward with resolutions to start ‘this’ and stop ‘that’.
As a ‘doer’, I completely resonate with the surge of positive thinking in January, or making things happen, creating, then moving into action. Yet I noticed that this really wasn’t resonating with how I felt on the inside, so this year I changed my January start. Instead, I started it in reverse. I slowed down. In fact, I completely stopped for the first 10 days. For those of you who know me, will app
reciate this is a seismic shift to my usual approach.
My work as a leadership coach and facilitator perfectly aligns with goal setting, having ideal outcomes and formulating a desired plan on how to achieve them. Yet here I am, promoting hibernation and allowing space and time for ambitions, outcomes and desires to germinate in this winter season. We wake to darkness and shorter days for a reason, to be in the rhythm of our inner winter. If you planted seeds now and their buds started to grow, how likely is it that the sprouting bud would not survive until Spring? How true is this of our New Year resolutions? How about instead, we gently plant the seeds of our wishes, in our mind and let them germinate for a while. We don’t sit and watch our earth hoping the buds grow in late February and early March, we trust that at the right time, they appear. This too is true for our own seeds that we plant for ourselves. Having returned from a retreat where I spent five glorious days focusing on my feminine energy and being outdoors on the beautiful Cornish coast, I have come back revivified and more deeply connected to myself. My biggest shift being the acceptance that as
with the seasons, we too are cyclical and we are in winter! I’m wintering this January, giving space for the glorious new buds I’m growing, to awaken and sprout in early Spring.
Our mind is like a garden, we have to tend to the weeds and make the soil ripe for our seeds to grow. So rather than being active, if you are like me and feel like hunkering down in the dark evenings, then know that it is o
k to do that. Listen to what your body is telling you and let it be nourished. Trust that starting the year at a slower pace may mean you are creating the perfect environment for growth, personally or professionally. Spring is just around the corner and when I think of it, I can feel new work ideas simmering beneath the surface. That excitement for longer evenings and the newness of Spring and all it brings. I ask you, what can you do for yourself that honours your own winter season, in readiness for the sprouting of Spring? It will arrive.
I leave you with this quote
‘Let us love Winter, for it is the Spring of genius’