Wintering, Rest, and Remembering the Earth’s True Rhythms

The turning of the calendar to January has been framed as a beginning: new year, new you, fresh starts. Yet nothing in the natural world of the northern hemisphere supports this narrative.

January is not a beginning.

It is the deep middle.

The Gregorian calendar — a relatively modern, patriarchal construct — asks bodies, land, and nervous systems to surge forward at the very moment nature is at her most withdrawn. Fields are fallow. Trees are bare. Animals are still. Seeds are dormant beneath cold soil, gathering information, not momentum.

Ancient civilisations understood this. They did not confuse rest with stagnation.

What we now call “winter” was once recognised as a vital, intelligent phase of life — a season of composting, gestation, and deep listening. The idea that life begins in January is a cultural fiction, one that increasingly clashes with human biology, mental health, and the nervous system.

Winter Is a Process, Not a Pause

Writer Katherine May captures this with striking clarity in her book Wintering:

“Wintering is a fallow period in life when you are cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Wintering is a time of withdrawal, of retreat, of rest.”

Crucially, she reminds us that wintering is not something to “get through” — it is something to enter consciously. A season that demands softness, not strategy.

When modern culture insists on goal-setting, productivity and reinvention in January, it asks people to override their physiology. It rewards sympathetic activation — pushing, striving, proving — at the very moment the nervous system is naturally oriented towards conservation.

Burnout is not a personal failing.

It is a seasonal mismatch.

What Ancient Traditions Knew

Across pagan, Celtic, and earth-based traditions, winter was honoured — not erased.

• Yule marked the return of the light after the winter solstice, not a sudden beginning but a subtle turning.

• Fires were lit not to energise, but to witness — to sit with the darkness and trust the cycle.

• Rituals focused on protection, rest, dreaming, and ancestral connection.

• The underworld descent of goddesses and myths across cultures mirrored winter’s inward pull — a time of shedding before renewal.

Spring — not January — was the true new year.

Life did not begin in the cold. It emerged from it.

The Nervous System Knows This Too

Modern science quietly confirms what ancient cultures lived by.

In winter:

• The parasympathetic nervous system is more easily accessed.

• The body seeks slower rhythms, deeper sleep, and longer recovery.

• Forcing intensity can increase cortisol, inflammation, anxiety, and immune suppression.

Practices that support wintering — such as yoga Nidra, yin yoga, restorative postures, slow breathwork and meditation — directly stimulate vagal tone, regulate the stress response, and allow the system to repair.

Yoga therapy recognises rest not as absence, but as intervention.

• Yoga Nidra works at the level of subconscious integration, supporting deep nervous system reset.

• Yin and restorative practices hydrate connective tissue, down-regulate the stress response, and create psychological safety.

• Meditation, when approached gently, builds interoception and resilience without forcing insight.

In winter, healing happens sideways — not through effort, but through allowing.

January Is Not for Reinvention

It Is for Remembering

This season asks quieter questions:

• What is being composted beneath the surface?

• What exhaustion is asking to be honoured?

• What seeds are forming, unseen, without instruction?

Nothing in nature blooms on command.

Winter teaches trust — not in goals, but in cycles.

Those who allow themselves to winter often discover that clarity arrives later, effortlessly, as days lengthen and energy returns. Spring does not need to be manufactured. It emerges when the ground is ready.

An Invitation Into Rest

Rather than pushing into the year ahead, I invite you to step sideways — into rest, slowness and nervous-system nourishment.

Across the winter months, my offerings are designed not to fix or force but to support the body’s natural intelligence through:

• Deeply restorative yoga and yoga Nidra

• Yin practices that honour stillness and spaciousness

• Meditation grounded in safety and compassion

• Spaces where rest is not earned, but given

These are not events to prepare for the year ahead.

They are places to land where you are.

Because life does not begin in January.

It begins quietly — when the soil warms, the light returns and something ancient stirs, ready to rise in its own time.