Wintering Within

By Kirsten Mowrey

As I write this the days are lengthening, the sun riding high in the sky, and the expansiveness of summer stretches before me—though the days seem to be filling fast. So much to cram in here, in Michigan, where summer is the fleetest season: lake time, picnics, parties, peony blooms, and cicada chirps, fireflies and star showers, light until late in the evening and 4 a.m. birdsong. Long, hot, humid-filled days and hopefully, lots of water play. But you will be reading this after all that has passed, and the days shorten. I am always surprised how soon the dark comes in late August, how quickly the dusk rises, how the trees begin their color change, their leaf drop. 

We turn on the lights and leave them on longer but keep rising at the same time—or perhaps even earlier now that school routines are back in place. Though my business is not on the school cycle, in our community of three universities, a community college, and numerous public, private, and charter schools, the academic calendar creates the rhythmic foundation. Its ebb and flow grounds the cycles of traffic, society, culture, and even health access. This river flows greater in the fall and winter than in summer, in stark contrast to the natural world and our bodies natural rhythm. It’s an almost perfect opposition—the warm sun-filled days coincide with the rousing of birds and nature while the arrival of winter coincides with the rising of the window blinds, the glowing flash of artificial light, and pulling ourselves from the cozy nest of blankets and darkness.

But maybe we shouldn’t be so hasty.

We live in a culture that’s all about constant pushing, striving, reaching, accelerating, and growing. Nothing in the natural world does this. Plants leaf out, form flowers, bloom, fruit, and fade with the sunlight. Birds, bees, mammals, and amphibians all have their cycles of activity, fertility, and rest appropriate to their climate: times of slowness, times of busyness.

Why don’t we?

This question tugs my heart, particularly in 2022, as we look back at the past two years. There has been a lot written about the coronavirus pandemic by all types of talking heads: what does it mean, what do we do with it, how do we move beyond it? I’d like to offer a framing of it that comes from my love of mythology and story. Stories can aid us in times of struggle. We make meaning through story, but as Carl Jung pointed out, is that story a healing fiction, or a debilitating one? What story are you telling about the pandemic, about the last two years?  I invite you to think of them as an initiation.

Initiation is a threshold crossing: a ritual and ceremonial process that humanity uses constantly. Our long-ago ancestors initiated youth into adulthood through ceremony. Youth were prepared for months to survive the ritual, to leave their childhood behind, and return with the seeds of their adult self. Graduation, communion, bat/bar mitzvahs, baby and wedding showers all derive from this tradition. 

That nascent adult over time would become an elder to the next generation of youth. Initiation has three psychological and psychic components (I use psychic in the sense of soul, and psychological in the sense of our thoughts). First, it is a break from the world you knew before the initiatory event. Second, it is an alteration of your sense of self, and finally, you can never return to the world you left behind. It is meant to be a contained encounter with death.

While historically initiation is a planned and prepared for event, there are also those that are not. Psychologist Francis Weller calls these “rough initiations; when the bough breaks.” The key difference between planned initiation and unplanned— there is no containment. When the bough breaks the cradle falls and you have no idea how to respond. Your spouse asks for a divorce. You lose your job. You receive a cancer diagnosis. You lose a loved one. You’ve been pushed off a cliff you didn’t know was there, weren’t told about, couldn’t prepare for, nor even had an inkling it existed. Unlike prepared initiations, where there is planning, education, skills, and practices in place, your hands are empty. You find yourself away from the known world and dropped into….what?

Think about these in the context of the coronavirus.  Almost all of us were caught unaware, our lives overturned within weeks. Many of us were desperate for news and guidance to keep ourselves safe. Talk quickly turned to “getting back to normal” without any recognition that “normal” was gone. There is no longer a world where we don’t know what it is like to have a global pandemic, where we don’t know how it feels to have a novel disease upend our lives, where we don’t see how differently we each respond to uncertainty, mystery, and stress. Whether we were ready or not, willing or not, initiation occurred. We broke away from the world “before” and can never return. 

Our culture, particularly our spiritual culture, focuses on ascension. “Rise up!” we hear. Meditate to leave your body and suffering behind, sweat out those difficult emotions, keep running, reach out. Our spirits rise, which is all well and good, but what about our soul? Do we have roots beneath that rising? Soul is earth. It is our bodies, it is the physical world we live in, our loved ones, our pets, all that is tangible and touchable. Soil on our palms, our gliding joints as we plant flowers to smell or vegetables to harvest, the taste of mint on the tongue, the soft brush of rose petals against our lips, the warm weight of a beloved’s hand in ours, the silky fur of our cat, the delicious taste of our favorite food. Soul is interior, it is reaching in rather than out, it is paying attention to what arises from our guts, our passions, our hearts. Ancient Western philosophers placed sensation in the heart. Our aesthetic response, our response to physical beauty feeds our heart. Soul tracks our attention into the cave of ourselves, and if we go deep enough, we find the cave of memory. Soul takes us to places like Lascaux, the darkness where art and beauty were painted on the walls, celebrations and kinship with Others who share our planet. Soul asks us to face our bodies, befriend our physicality, our immanence, our being, and ultimately, our mortality.

After over twenty years working with bodies, I know well how our culture of ascension works: it asks us to leave our bodies behind, to forget them, discipline them, or anesthetize them. Yet it is only through turning toward and attending to the body, and therefore the soul, that we can meet our needs, meet ourselves, be present in our lives and express our aliveness. Biologically, we have more receptors within our bodies than without, more nervous system connections below the skin than on top. I interpret this to mean that what happens within might just be as important as what happens without.

Read related article: The Autumn of Our Lives

One of the most difficult parts of turning our attention inward is noticing all the places we have neglected. It’s like waking up from an illness only to find the house in disarray: dirty laundry everywhere, dishes stacked in the sink, and mail piled up. Feelings are often right at the door when we turn within, or exhaustion, pain, or loneliness. If we can stay with our discomfort and befriend what greets us, we return to the ability to choose our response. Take a moment right now to stop reading this and breathe. Sense what is within you from these words. Is your breathing fast or slow? Do you feel the support (chair, floor, bed) that is beneath your body? How much of your weight is resting there? Are you settled or are you lifting, ready to move? Breathe. Notice. Breathe. Notice. Breath. Notice.

As I wrote that, I felt my butt widen on the chair below me. I felt my ribcage expand more with each breath. I felt more weighted, present, and real. 

Bringing safety and connection to ourselves allows us to feel more alive. Being more alive not only enriches our experience of life—it allows us the choice to respond to what happens in our lives. 

Joanna Macy, in her book Active Hope, writes of how we need two essential movement directions. One is to oppose those events in the world that are harmful, that don’t enhance life, to say “no” to violence, pollution, or oppression, for example. But more of our psychic and psychological energy needs to be directed toward what we say “yes” to—to life-nourishing and life-enhancing activities. It takes reflection and choice to actively move toward life. We cannot know the where or the what if we do not take the time for pausing, evaluating, weighing our energy levels and abilities, and then creating our intention. 

This is what winter is for. Autumn is the time of harvest, where we gather all that grew over the past year. Winter was traditionally about rest, repair, and pause. In settler communities you ate the food you had preserved in the autumn. Christian families and communities would gather for the great feast of Advent, while Pagans would celebrate the Winter Solstice, gathering close in the darkness. Indigenous communities would tell the winter stories, told only at the dark time of the year to feed the community in the cold. Life was slower. 

Where is our pause, our rest, our time in the dark now? Where is the time of inhaling, pausing, letting the body be heavy and slow? Where is the psychic soul space of moving into mystery, chaos, and the unknown of darkness to create anew for spring? We have left rest behind in the belief that we are unattached to nature. Rather than turning inward, we seek the anesthesia of constant doing, or the amnesia of distraction and exhaustion. Neither satisfies our craving within, the emptiness we feel in our souls. 

Getting present with winter also gives us a contained experience with a death not our own. We know winter will end, that the days will get longer. Can we allow ourselves to experience the death of the natural world around us as a model to become more comfortable with death itself? We all lost a part of ourselves in this Covid initiation, but death is only a part of the cycle. The tree in the park will lose its leaves and flush with green again in the spring. The riverside will turn brown and decay, and the ducks and geese will return to nest in the grasses.

To show up in these times, in the world beyond the threshold of the coronavirus pandemic, we must be willing to be present with all that we are—leaving no part behind on the trail we walked. Acting from our soul with our spirit, our darkness, and our light, welcoming in the rejected outcasts, we need everyone, and as much of ourselves as we can gather. 

What, when, and where brings you a sense of safety and connection? Is there a place, a person, or a time of day where you feel a safe harbor and ability to rest?

Let the seasons guide our soulful journeys, let us harvest and then slow down, turn inward, and re-introduce us to ourselves.  Who are you now, after these two, ground rumbling, culture tossing years? What surprised you about yourself, your friends, your relationships? What rose to sustain you, anchor you, and nourish you?  I encourage you to winter with these questions and see what seeds arrive, ready for spring’s return. 

Kirsten Mowrey is a trauma-informed somatic practitioner. She uses hands-on, movement, and soul focused practices to assist individuals on their life’s journey. You can find out more about her on her website, kirstenmowrey.com.

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