Take this time of year to rest. Replenish your resources, heal your energies, let your willpower and ambitions slowly recharge. Like the trees around you, everything in you is mainly going on beneath the surface. Go deep, and let it percolate.
Seasonal patterns affect both your body, and your psyche. Work WITH those tendencies to be the happiest, strongest, and most achievement-oriented person around -- even if it's mainly under the hood right now.
Here are tips for a winter’s rest.
Ways To Create Winter's Rest
Re-create ancestral lighting for calm. Prior to recent industrial times, realize that your long, long lineage of ancestors lived the winter months with scarce daylight and long, dark nights. Candles or oil lamps were essential for survival. Because of this, we have a deep lineage association of candles as connected with safety, security, calmness, and hope. Turn off your electric lights and light one or more candles to illuminate part of your morning and evening. Use natural beeswax if possible. If candles aren’t safe for your home (such as an apartment, or if you have curious cats), the little LED candles are a good substitute. The lovely reddish light of the Himalayan salt lamps is good for this as well. De-stress and tune in to the peace of winter's dark time.
Let stories nourish you. During this extended winter darkness, many would tuck up and listen to long bouts of storytelling, which was traditionally reserved for the seasons of the long nights. If you prefer solitude instead, a wonderful way to re-create that experience is to read. Tuck up in the dimness with a good book. Use a low light if candles aren’t enough light for you to read by.
Wear wool for warmth. Warm yourself in a healthier way by switching out your microfleece with real wool. Smartwool is an excellent choice for comfort and warmth, and investment in even a single piece of good Smartwool can last for years. Wool hearkens back to medieval (and earlier) garments that surrounded the body with essential warmth even when wet. It’s also better for your body (and the earth) than microfleece, which sheds tiny synthetic micro-particles that can be inhaled by your lungs as well as end up in the oceans, and also doesn’t wick or breathe as effectively and naturally as good wool.
Enjoy warmth in the sauna. The sauna has a long history of providing warmth in winter. If your gym has a sauna, it feels especially good during this time to spend a little time soaking in that incredible whole-body dry heat feeling.
Appreciate food, kettle, and flame. A kettle or cauldron was an essential possession in ancient days (just like the candle or oil lamp, above), and unlike today when we own whole cadres of cooking utensils, it was a unique and prized possession. As you make a hearty stew, appreciate the value of your “kettle” (saucepan, etc.), the essential survival value of the stovetop flame, and the miracle of the abundant presence of food. All these represented safety, security, and survival in your ancestors’ times.
Why dial in to these things? Because modernism is a mere thin layer on your psyche. Although computers, smartphones and Internet are necessary, you can also activate your lineage energies’ resonances of safety, abundance, and security by treating the dark winter days as special days for reconnecting with the ancient symbols of abundance. No season brings us closer to our ancestral heritage than the rigors — and beauties — of winter.
As you do, feel how the many energies of past lineage, flow forward into you — and how everything you are doing, for yourself, your family, your workplace and community, are part of a long story in which you are just one part, flowing forward into the future.
Let this winter season replenish you in your mission in the world, and draw on it to set your sense for greater achievement and greater enjoyment of all around you.
Most of all, enjoy your Winter’s Rest.
Keep Growing,
