Befriending winter's darkness

Free full length class is included to accompany the post's theme

Hello! To accompany today’s post, I’m giving you free access to the final Embodied Yoga class of 2024. Recorded yesterday, the class is focussed on embodying the winter solstice and welcoming the darkness. Simply follow this link for 7 days access (from today) to the class, and feel free to share the link with anyone who you think will benefit from the class.

Before we move into the Meander, I just want to let you know that there are a few spaces left on the Illuminating Intention workshop on Saturday 4th January 2025 - this is aimed at anyone who practices Yoga and wants to cultivate a meaningful intention and learn how to nourish this in their Yoga practice.

Photo by Mariia Gladysh on Unsplash

Meander

Yesterday was the winter solstice and the first day of winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and I’d like to share some meanderings from an embodied perspective. How we relate to the cycles of the Earth holds a mirror to how we relate to the cycles and workings of our own bodily reality, so I’d like to explore here how we can be with the darkness of winter and the unknown of lives.

The return of light is celebrated in the winter solstice, yet we cannot truly recognise the light in a fresh way without encountering the darkness. To chase the light is to be fixated with what we know, like, and expect. To shun the darkness is to turn away from the fallow field of becoming, the place where the seeds of our creativity, humanity, and vulnerability lie.

The light illuminates and brings our wants and desires in to focus. The darkness is the depths from which these arise. If we rarely allow for dream-like wandering in our undefinedness, then we cannot give rise to the novel impulses that propel us to consciously shape ourselves to live with more fulfilment.

From a nervous system perspective, this darkness is the parasympathetic, and the light is sympathetic. Most of us have experienced at some point the chronic sympathetic drive to achieve, act, and accomplish until one day we’re frazzled by the energetic overload of the light this emits. The parasympathetic can become a fearful place, where to give-in to its workings is in some sense to admit that we’re finite in this body, that we have limits; the tension of knowing this uncontrollable, undeniable fact can feel too much to bear and so we constantly switch on the light to achieve, act and accomplish on repeat because at least this can be controlled.

And yet we lose so much. In our parasympathetic we let go enough to feel limitless within our limited lives. Just bring to mind how when you sleep you enter a place that doesn’t experience body as a boundary confined to space. Or when your captivated by something, a flow state, you lose touch with time. It’s paradoxical almost that we embrace our bodily limits to experience our limitlessness.

We digest, turning food into life giving fuel to be and do. We rest, diving into the unknown to discover treasures to bring back to the surface. We exhale, releasing what is no longer needed to make space for the new. A dance between parasympathetic and sympathetic, being and doing, darkness and light, unknown and known.

This time of year can be filled with meaning, experiences, and memories; my invitation is to honour the darkness with patience and curiosity to not need the answers.

May the close of 2024 be peaceful and 2025 be all that you need.

Wonder

Notice now how the light entering your eyes is so pervasive that your attention is constantly being drawn outside to what you can see. Now, read the following invitation before doing it. Close your eyes and notice how you stay with the brightness, how the light enters you. Rub your hands together with your eyes closed until warm, then place the palms of your hands over your closed eyes. How does this feel? Do you notice more or less space? Keep your hands here for as long as you like, becoming aware of the sensations of your body. When ready, keep your eyes closed and slowly take your hands away from your eyes. How do you experience the light now? Does the light stand out more or less than before?

Reflect

I love Mary Oliver’s poems and there’s a reason she is so loved in the somatic field: her writing rests in her embodiment and simplicity of language captures the child-like wonderment that can be obscured in over-complication. In Snowy Night, Mary Oliver invites us to bask in the not knowing, how this feeds something that is far richer than rushing to shine a light on the answers.

Snowy Night by Mary Oliver

Last night, an owl
in the blue dark
tossed
an indeterminate number
of carefully shaped sounds into
the world, in which,
a quarter of a mile away, I happened
to be standing.
I couldn’t tell
which one it was –
the barred or the great-horned
ship of the air –
it was that distant. But, anyway,
aren’t there moments
that are better than knowing something,
and sweeter? Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness. I suppose
if this were someone else’s story
they would have insisted on knowing
whatever is knowable – would have hurried
over the fields
to name it – the owl, I mean.
But it’s mine, this poem of the night,
and I just stood there, listening and holding out
my hands to the soft glitter
falling through the air. I love this world,
but not for its answers.
And I wish good luck to the owl,
whatever its name –
and I wish great welcome to the snow,
whatever its severe and comfortless
and beautiful meaning.