Seasons of Life

Life flows in seasons… and there are no exceptions to this rule.

Your health, your wealth, your career, your relationships…. everything flows through seasons.  Through cycles of expansion and contraction, activity and rest, light and darkness. 

Humans suffer tremendously because we try to live in a state of constant growth, harvest and abundance, and this defies the laws of the universe.

This simple teaching saved my marriage.  I poured my heart out to one of my yoga teachers about how challenging and bleak my marriage was, and she simply posed the question, what if this is a winter?  What if it’s part of a cycle?  What if beyond these challenges, spring is waiting, ready to explode into color and warmth and renewal? 

When the natural world moves into winter, we do not despair that it’s the end of the world.  We get cozy.  We bundle up.  We rest more.  We reflect.  And if we follow the teaching of the trees we draw inwards, we drop what is not essential trusting that what we release will fertilizer future growth and we divert attention and energy towards our core - we focus on what matters most, on what is essential.

But when our relationship moves into a season of winter - when what once was bright and beautiful has fallen away and starts to decay, we mourn the loss deeply, and often leave the relationship.  We don’t believe in the spring that will follow, so we leave to look for a summer somewhere else.  But that next relationship will also hit winter, and if we can’t weather the season, we leave again and never get to experience the rebirth of spring and the joy and expansiveness of seeing life burst forth from darkness.

Our career will similarly move  between seasons.  When winter hits, and things feel contracted and dark, can we take the invitation to draw inward and get clarity on what matters most?  Can we drop what’s not essential? Can we trust in the process, in the evolution?  Can we lean into the mystery that exists in fertile darkness?  Or do we freak out, panic and start to abandon ship in search of greener grass and sunnier skies?

These winter seasons are a necessary time of rest and reflection.  These are times for deep nourishment, and stillness.  It is a season to deepen your trust… a season to rest for the explosion of creativity, blossoming and rising that will inevitably happen in the spring.

Robert H Schuller says “never cut a tree down in the wintertime.  Never make a negative decision in the low time.  Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods.  Wait.  Be patient.  The storm will pass.  The spring will come."

So Sweet One, if you are in a winter, I am here to remind you that it will not go on forever.  That you can soften your body, soften your belly, and unclench your jaw.  

Feel into the earth beneath you.  And let your body and mind soften into a state of faith.  

The spring will always return.  Spring will always return.  Spring will always return.

Place a hand on your heart, a hand on your belly.  Draw inwards with some deep breaths and ask yourself, what can I do to support myself in this moment? How would i show up, how would i carry myself, how would i speak to myself if for this moment I allowed myself to trust that even in the darkest day I can know wholeheartedly that spring is stirring within me and all around me?  And for just this moment, just this hour, just for today, can I allow myself to move into a state of faith, into a state of trust.  Can I surrender to the rhythms of life, to the pulsing of the cosmos, to the eternal cycling of seasons?