Embracing Winter Solstice
Before we move into the podcast episode, a little reminder that the free 12 Days of Reiki Healing, Meditations, and Guidance is available to sign up for. If you would like some support during the Christmas season, if you want to carve out—even if it’s just five little minutes to yourself—time where you can unplug from whatever beautiful chaos may be happening and come back to yourself just to re-center, to feel supported and held, then please do sign up for it. It’s free; there’ll be meditations, there’ll be little soul prompts, and you can pick and choose whatever you want to work with within it. So head over to the website, and you’ll find it there under events.
Anticipation and Reflection
So this is a little last minute because tomorrow is Winter Solstice. December did not go according to plan, which is always, as my mother says, “If you have a plan, you might as well just throw it right out.” I stepped into December, I shared this with a few friends, and they’re killing themselves laughing. I stepped into December going, “I can’t believe it, I’m actually ahead of myself here. I’m going to have, God, a whole maybe clear week or two just to dream, to ponder, to maybe actually plan.”
There’s that word again, and then I got sick for over a week, and then we lost electricity for a couple of days during the storm, and then life happened. So it’s only been the last few days that I feel, ah, let’s exhale. And that could be just because I’ve been hanging out with friends and meeting up with people. That has been really nice to feel nourished in that way.
So if your December has not gone according to plan, know that you are not alone.
But I could continue to let it swirl on and get really angry or frustrated and peeved off about it and complain about how I’m not getting time to ponder. And instead of that, I will create the time that I need during Christmas as I rearrange it in a new year.
There’s always something to be adjusted and to be changed. And it’s always, for me, really interesting to catch those expectations that I might be placing on myself as it comes towards the end of the year—what I think I should have completed—and especially as maybe we start a new year of, ah, if I don’t plan it out, I’ll let it all go to pot.
We’ll be chatting more about that in the New Year episodes and the closing of the year episodes. But yeah, I hope December has been treating you gently. I think the last time I was chatting to you was back in Samhain. So it’s been the full cycle from Samhain to Winter Solstice.
So how are you? Even take a breath and ask yourself, “How are you at this moment?” If you’re rushing into the Christmas time and feeling, “Oh my God, I’ve got to make it perfect. All these things have to be done,” I invite you just to place it all aside and go, “It will just be what it is.” And it does not need to be perfect. I love that you’re feeling nice and relaxed already; fair play to you. Share those secrets.
Your Winter Routine and Seasonal Shifts
Observing Daily Changes
So today is—well, not today, today is the 20th. Yeah. So tomorrow is sort of the true date, but a lot of people will celebrate between the 19th and the 23rd. We’re arriving in Winter Solstice, the threshold point that you may be so glad is finally here. Even though it kind of feels here in Ireland, the real chilly, that real wintry feeling didn’t come in maybe the last three weeks, possibly three or four weeks.
But it’s been really interesting because this is the first year—and I don’t know fully why I have ideas about it—but this is the first year where I’ve really noticed it being really dark early, even though it’s the same every year. I’ve really noticed that darkness coming in about three, half-three.
And I don’t know about others, because the changes to my routine when it becomes wintertime, the autumn, or especially when the clock shifts, really shift up my routine. I like to exercise in the morning; I like to do my weights around 11 o’clock if I’m not with clients, and then I like to go for my walk around six o’clock—and even seven o’clock in the evening when it’s nice and bright.
So when it gets dark, I would not walk on these roads out around my local area for safety because of cars, tractors, and whatnot else you can find in the middle of the night. It shifts up the routine, and it took me ages to find a routine that worked again. But because of that, I found the half-three o’clock darkness really, like I said, “Oh my God, it can’t be dark already.”
It’s interesting that each threshold point in each season is different. I’m always learning something. It may have been the same for you. I also noticed, because I wasn’t away anywhere this year, I didn’t get any of the foreign sunshine. I knew that affects me in different ways as well.
So, even just notice:
- How has the journey been for you from sound to Winter Solstice?
- What one word would you use to describe it?
- What would you like to remember from sound to Winter Solstice of this year that you’d like to carry forward as a wisdom point for next year?
The Subtle Changes in Winter Solstice
By walking the wheel and interacting and engaging and being in relationship with it, we are learning all the time. And if we think that each year is stagnant or the same, we’re often in for a surprise.
The beauty is that we learn to have new perspectives around each of the turning points because we’re different and they’re different. No two seasons are ever the same. No Winter is ever the same, even though it might feel like it is.
So we begin to look for subtle differences. We begin to look for the little subtle changes—the gifts as well as maybe the challenges in them.
Winter Solstice, the shortest and the longest night, is the darkest point on the wheel. It will last a whole season if you think until the next turning point at Imbolc. It is a time of hope as we welcome the return of the sun and eventually the coming of springtime.
Conserving Energy and Setting Intentions at Winter
I always like to say at this time, “Don’t run; do not run toward the sun too fast. Do not try to hop into the full energy of the sun, you know, the real active energy yet. It’s not the time for it.”
As much as sometimes we’re itching to get going, or society is telling us we should be itching to get going—to end strong, start strong, and all that shebang—it’s really about listening to your own inner cycles.
But we’re still in the darkness; we’re still in Winter. It’s still that time of rest, renewal, incubation, reflection, and dreaming. It’s a deep time of drawing our energy in and reflecting on the past. As we draw our energy in, we’re conserving it.
And by conserving our energy, we’re maybe considering or pondering—we don’t have unlimited life force.
And where would I like to eventually place this energy?
What would I like it to contribute toward?
Because as much as we may be told that we can do everything and be anything, we can’t do everything. As much as a lovely dream is sold to us, we can’t do everything. So we have to choose with discernment where we wish to place our energy.
Evaluting where you place your energy
Sometimes, as we’re bringing that energy down even further into the root—and that’s that Winter energy driving down into the root, into our foundations—I’m reflecting on the last year of wondering, “Where have I placed my energy?”
If my energy is like a currency—and it is, to me, because energy is precious—when you don’t have it, believe me, you know that it’s precious. If you have something going on with your energy levels, your physical body, you know that life force energy is deeply precious.
So it’s like, where have I placed it?
Did I place it in the parts of my life or in myself that I said I would?
And it’s okay if you didn’t; there’s no judgment, no blaming, no shaming. It’s just that we’re observing things, standing back, and looking at our foundations, and going, “Yeah, I promised myself I would, but I got distracted, and my energy went elsewhere.”
And maybe it was, “Oh, I thought I wanted this and things changed,” or actually I got caught up in the whirlwind—I got caught up in the little, almost like the, “Oh my God, the spinny thing,” the little treadmill that little animals run on, whatever it’s called. I got caught up in that; I got on the hamster wheel and forgot to get off it because sometimes we do not even know we’re on the hamster wheel until we’ve run six months on it.
So to me, when we’re bringing that energy down, it’s like, “Where has it been placed? Where, now going forward, would I like it to be placed?”
You might not have that information yet, and that’s the beauty of being in the mystery, being in the darkness, being in the unknown.
Winter Solstice is asking us to stand still, to pause before moving forward—to let yourself rest in the depth of the darkness before the returning light grows slowly each day. It’s in that pause, in that darkness, in the mystery of life that we get to dream again; we get to open our imagination to what is possible.
For a lot of people, they stopped using their imagination; they stopped dreaming. It’s like, “Well, this is just it,” and it’s not about pipe dreams, you know—it’s about listening to the dreams that truly want to come through, listening in the darkness to our inner selves, our intuition, or our soul; listening to that part that knows deeply what we want to experience, what we want to become.
This can be about an achievement list and what you want to have, but it can also be purely about how you want to feel, who you want to be—to let yourself dream, to let yourself be dreamed, rather than sometimes just learning to accept the smallest little crumb. I see that a lot with business owners; all just, you know, settling for a little bit , a tooty-tooty bit, which can keep you stuck rather than letting yourself dream a little bit bigger.
What would it be like if you were truly sustained in yourself and in your life, finances, health, and also in being of service?
Connecting with Inner Wisdom
Embracing the Silence
We’re letting ourselves grow into that darkness, and by letting ourselves pause and sit with the stillness, we can really tune into what wisdom awaits us. We go into the inner world because it’s only in the silence, the emptiness, the spaciousness that we can truly hear what our heart or soul longs to express, to share, to embody. It’s very hard to do that in the noise.
So we have to learn to carve out these moments—even with the world going, “Go faster, go quicker, produce more”—to carve out moments of emptiness, stillness, and silence so we can begin to listen. And when we listen, we learn to follow through on what we’ve received or heard, so it doesn’t just become another thing written down in a journal but never anchored into the land and to the earth.
Another way to honor this time is to welcome the darkness as we await the light. We often think of this as a time when, if you consider the animals or the act of hibernating, everything is a little bit stiller and quieter.
It’s not very often you hear people being praised for not doing; it’s not very often you hear people being praised for going slow or not being productive, or for someone saying, “God, I’m so glad you’re resting today.” We’re rarely praised for that, especially when on Tuesday we’re expected to get as much done as possible—when the energy of summer is most valued and rewarded in our society and families, where we are constantly marketed to look for perpetual growth.
But what if we were to support slowing down—slowing down so I can choose differently, so I can have that pause in my reactions before actually engaging with something? What would it be like to be supported in your slowing down? It doesn’t have to be perfect, but what would that feel like? What would that give you?
Often we’re waiting for other people to give us permission to slow down, to rest, to turn off the outside world for a little bit and go within. We may never receive that externally, so we have to learn to give it to ourselves.
It’s normal to be afraid to slow down, because in that place of stillness, silence, and emptiness we meet ourselves and the unknown. There’s a part of us that’s maybe afraid of what we will find there, or we automatically think, “Oh well, it’s going to bring up something,” and then we say, “Oh, I can’t be bothered with that,” so we’ll just keep busy.
But there’s such beauty in finding ourselves and just sitting with ourselves, without the need to do anything—just to sit. If you’ve ever had somebody just sit with you, there’s nothing like it. There’s no fixing, no adjusting, no plotting and planning—just sitting.
That space of stillness can teach us how to be with uncertainty, how to be with the mystery of life, because no matter how much I think I can plan, control, or execute a ten-step plan, life is a mystery. I will never fully know what is coming up in the year ahead. Even if I have an astrological reading, it will still be a surprise because it will never unfold in the way you think it will, and there’s beauty in that.
The Wisdom of Ancestry and Nature
Embracing the Silence
Our ancestors considered that the day began at sunset and that a year, or the cycle of life, began in the darkness. To them, the darkness was important—it was potent, it was needed.
Now, sometimes when I go to Donegal, my parents’ house has the big fluorescent lights from the ’80s—so it feels like you’re in Piccadilly Circus. Here in our house, we put on red lights at night because we prefer that; we’re winding down, going into darkness, and we do that throughout the year. That allows our systems to settle in toward rest and rejuvenation.
But it’s in the darkness—a needed time—because if you think of seeds, they need that time in the darkness to germinate. The seeds know that winter is not here to help them in their outer growth, so they wait, and they need this period to germinate, to get ready, and to eventually begin to follow the sun—slowly emerging when springtime comes.
Preparing for Renewal
So what if you were to think of this time as a time to get ready? What are you getting ready for? If we’re getting ready for something, we often need to close things out, step back, and see the bigger picture. It gives us an opportunity, if we’re getting ready, to reflect and claim all that we want to take forward from even this past year into the next cycle.
What would it be like to connect with your little animal self and hibernate, just like the earth is asleep—the animals in their little nests, all curled up, fed, watered, and just taking time out? What does that bring up in you? Even just thinking about that—do you get anxious at the thought of, “Well, the whole world will fall apart if I’m not, if I don’t keep going full steam every day?” Or is there a part of you going, “Oh my God, I so crave five or ten months to myself, or a little bit of space just to be?” That time doesn’t even have to be used for anything.
Rest, Renewal, and Inner Growth
Embracing the Necessity of Rest
For me, learning to rest was not natural—it’s not in my DNA, basically—but learning to rest, and learning to rest in different ways, to hibernate, to pull back, to know when to pull back, to know when life is asking that of me, is huge. I learned to honor my ancestors; they were not probably resters—they were doers, builders, survivors. Breaking that pattern is huge, and I know it comes in layers and takes time.
Every time I think I’ve got it ticked off, I may catch myself moving very fast and realize, “Oh, is this really needed here?” It’s a follow period when not much is happening externally, and things are progressing at a slower pace, but we need those periods. We have those periods in life; businesses have those periods too, but we try to see them as wrong, as something that needs to be fixed.
There will be something within them that we will learn and adjust, potentially. But to go full tilt when we first experience it may not be the medicine that is needed. Sometimes we find ourselves withdrawing, going in so that we can better understand ourselves without all the influence of everything around us—the unconscious can’t come to the conscious if we’re full all the time, if we’re constantly moving.
Integrating Inner Work with Outer Action
Even for me, that time in darkness—if you think of yourself moving slower through life, like when you’re out in the shops—what would it be like to go against the current of people rushing for the next box of roses, in case they run out?
What would it be like to walk slowly within that space, not being so driven by external ambitions even for just this moment, and instead turning inward to really consider your values and your needs?
The darkness is the most magical space for the creative brain, where ideas and plans can slowly percolate. It’s a time that really feeds the foundations for future growth and soul expression. It’s where insights and revelations can emerge that wouldn’t have had a chance otherwise.
Finding Moments of Stillness and Hope
Connecting with hope
So how can you find moments of stillness amidst the busyness?
For me, I’m really feeling that this year is a time of hope. Can I allow myself to connect to hope? What do I hope for the year ahead or for this moment? Hope, to me, brings light. It’s like, “Oh, things can be different; there are possibilities here that I didn’t see, and even if I can’t see them, I know there are possibilities.
I know things can be different; things can change.” We may not be able to grab hope, but we can sit and rest with it, be with it, and even commune with it to see what it wishes to share with us—like the little tiny seed growing in the darkness, holding hope that it will emerge.
Tending Your Roots For nourishment
Can we learn to appreciate the call to go deeper into ourselves, to tend to our roots, to nourish them?
What truly nourishes you, and do you give yourself time for it?
What renews you?
The light is being renewed at Winter Solstice—what renews you, and do you give yourself time for it?
Often we think the time we have to give should be like six hours a day, which isn’t fun for most people’s lives. Can we find moments—or block out a little half an hour or 10 minutes in our calendars, begin small, and increase it—that allow us to be renewed?
- What within you feels called to be renewed?
- What is being reborn in you as the sun is reborn?
- Can you feel it within you?
- Can you connect to it?
You may not have words for it. What roots and grounds you? What supports you, and what nourishes you?
If you think the roots are really getting fed at this time, if you’re really connecting with them, what keeps you connected to your heart, your soul, and to your true self? What grounds your being, what makes you feel connected to the earth, to your body? What holds you? Who or what supports you, and who can you lean on?
These are the things to invite more of and to take more time with. The roots are as deep as the branches grow—what is the strength, the power, that is deepening within you? What allows you to go deep, yet also stretch out into the world?
Embracing the Beauty of the Darkness
Inner Reflections and Self-Acceptance during winter
And if you think that in the darkness we may go, “Oh, I don’t know what’s there. I don’t even know if I want to go near it,” can we not just think of something nice and happy?
Or, as I said, can we not just paint a nice pink nail polish and say, “Sure, the ground looks all right”?
I think it looks quite powerful, even if it gets a little muddy—because it is perfect. But the inner work that we do in life—in the darkness, the going within—can fuel, feed, and drive forward the outer action that is needed later in the year, later in your personal cycle.
The inner work feeds the outer work; it can even make it easier because maybe the doubt isn’t there, the self-criticism has changed, and there is more self-confidence and belief in what you can do.
Maybe the inner work helps you make the conscious choice of, “This is what I want to really tend to this year—my boundaries, my friendships, my finances, my health.” It helps us connect to our light, and then we can take our light and allow it to begin to grow, to come out again, to connect to our inner being.
Perhaps this is a time of oneness with yourself—not always about shadow work or clearing out, but also about sitting with your light that is growing, finding that inner light, and allowing it to increase and shine as the cycles continue.
Self Reflection for Welcoming the Returning Light at Winter Solstice
So as you sit in Winter Solstice, consider:
How can you embrace the darkness both internally and externally, and how are you resting?
If you’re finding the rest, the stillness, the emptiness, the quiet—all those real archetypal feminine energies—a little hard to embrace, even just begin with, ask yourself, “What was I taught about that? What was I shown by my family?”
Actually, yeah, we don’t rest. Rest is something you do after, you know, you’ve done maybe six months’ work, or you’ve reached the very end of something, as opposed to thinking that rest is something you only get once a great achievement is done.
Rest can be found not just in sitting and doing nothing—it can be found in being active in a way. For me, rest is found in reading, in making my spirit dolls, in embroidery, in knitting—I sound like I’m 500 years old! These are the things that bring me really into myself, not in an over-analytical way, because as I sit here, my brain just switches off naturally.
Rest can be found in doodling, in baking—everyone is different. Sometimes we make it a bigger thing than it needs to be, but I do think rest is so important because I work with so many women who are burnt out and learning to take back their life force, their energy.
Maybe ask yourself:
What support do you need at this time to allow yourself to rest?
What permission do you need to give yourself, and where is your resting place?
Maybe create a little nook, a little nest for yourself, and consider what you hope will be reborn or renewed at this time.
What one thing—think of it as a little seed of potential, of becoming, a little spark—do you hope will be reborn and renewed in you?
Write it down, and maybe even place it in the earth with a little seed, or write it down and place it under a candle that you light each day between now and later. Every time you light it, let the intention be that the light of the candle feeds, nourishes, transforms, and warms that little seed of your potential, of your inspiration, of your way of being.
A little seed is that which wants to be reborn, renewed—the energy of that fire warms it and begins to call it out, and then you begin to listen to what that seed is asking of you. And eventually, as the light grows bigger both internally and externally, you begin to put it into action.
Welcoming the Returning Light
My final little sharing is twofold. A beautiful way is just to welcome the returning light as a mini ritual.
At sunrise—it doesn’t have to be on Winter Solstice itself; tomorrow, I’m saving it for Sunday or Monday—go out at sunrise, raise your arms, and draw the light down into your heart, into your being; go out at midday; go out at sunset.
You’ll see that you’re meeting the light when it’s just first rising at sunrise, when it’s at its fullness at midday, and then once it begins to withdraw again at sunset—each time letting yourself drink and receive in the light.
And the last little one is to go out and connect with the earth, because if you look at the land now, at the trees, they are laid bare. When I look at the trees, there’s a particular tree I see in my walks—it’s out in the field on its own, and it just looks so vulnerable, laying itself bare. It’s as if it says, “Here I am, here I am without all the fullness of summer, without all my little protections, without all my outer distractions.”
And I sometimes forget about what’s really going on in the bare bones. So go out to the land and just listen to the whispers of the earth. Listen to how maybe one tree, in its bareness, is speaking to you about Winter Solstice.
To me, it’s like, “Can I lay bare my true self?
Can I let my true self be seen?
Can I accept myself as I am at this moment—the light and the dark?
Can I be vulnerable?
Can I just be me?”
Go and just lie on the land, sit and listen to it, let yourself be reborn, and celebrate this moment knowing it will never be the same again.
Wrapping up
Thank you for listening. Wishing you many Winter Solstice blessings. May your Christmas—or whatever you may celebrate at this time of year—be filled with peace, joy, and moments of connection to yourself and others. And if this is a period of time that is rocky, lonely, or filled with grief, please do join the 12 Days; there will be support available for you. But please, do take care of yourself during this time too. Many blessings, and I will connect with you before the end of the year.
Where to find Roseleen:
Website: www.thethirstysoul.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thethirstysoul
Email: info@thethirstysoul.com