The Descent: Transitioning From Fall Into Winter

Honoring the season your body is already in

Most folks feel the shift before they understand it.

A sudden craving for quiet.
A heaviness in the bones.
A need to stay home, cancel plans, drink warm things, go to bed early.
A desire to stop performing.

This is not a personal failing.
This is not “losing motivation.”
This is not seasonal weakness.

This is the body remembering what the culture has tried to erase.

Fall: The Season of Harvest and Letting Go

Fall is misunderstood.

We talk about “letting go” like it’s a peaceful spiritual practice, when in truth it is gritty, emotional, and deeply alive. Trees don’t politely release their leaves, they strip themselves bare in full view of the world.

Fall asks us to do the same.

It is the season of:

• harvesting the fruits of the year

• digesting what grows you

• composting what doesn’t

• feeling the grief of endings

• becoming an empty slate again

Fall is the wild in-between: where we both celebrate what has been created and grieve what is dying.

You cannot move into winter without passing through this threshold.

For many of us, this is where resistance begins.

Winter: The Season of Descent, Darkness, and Deepening

We are conditioned to fear the dark.

We’re told to stay busy, stay cheerful, stay forward-moving… as if that’s what nature expects. As if “holding it all together” is an admirable personality trait.

But winter is the opposite of staying together.

Winter is the unravelling.

Winter is the womb-like darkness where new life is formed before it is visible.
Winter is the root system thickening under frozen ground.
Winter is the truthful season: the one where you finally see what’s real.

Darkness is not the absence of life.
Darkness is where life begins.

If you avoid this season, you avoid half of your own nature.

Why Slowing Down Feels Impossible
(And Why That’s Not Your Fault)

Of course slowing down feels impossible.

We live in a culture engineered to make that true.

A culture that profits from your burnout.
A culture that rewards your exhaustion.
A culture that demands you perform summer all year long: radiant, productive, expressive, always “on.”

There is nowhere on this planet that is always summer.

Yet we are expected to be.

So when your body begins its natural descent, toward quiet, rest, darkness, internal truth, it feels wrong, disorienting, even scary.

Not because winter is scary.
But because we’ve been trained to fear our own rhythm.

The Nervous System Needs Seasons

Your nervous system does not thrive on constant output; it thrives on cycles.

It needs:

expansion → contraction
movement → stillness
expression → integration
light → dark
summer → winter

When you override this, your body has no choice but to dysregulate.
Dysregulation becomes the only way the body can ask for help.

When you honor the seasonal shifts, your system settles, metabolizes, and restores itself: naturally, without forcing.

This is how you build resilience.
Not through discipline.
Through alignment.

What Most People Get Wrong About Resetting This Time of Year

Everyone wants a fresh start in December.

A new planner.
A new structure.
A new set of goals.
A new identity.

But none of this belongs to winter.

Resetting is a spring energy.
Planning is a summer energy.
Harvesting is a fall energy.

Winter is for none of these.

Winter is for:

• metabolizing the year

• grieving what didn’t bloom

• honoring what did

• resting without earning it

• allowing the ground to be fallow

• listening for what wants to emerge

Winter is not the season to fix yourself.
It is the season to stop trying.

How to Honor the Transition: Ritual, Somatics, and Earth Connection

Here are practices that guide the body safely from fall into winter:

1. Candle Ritual for Descent

If you do nothing else, do this.

Light a candle.
Sit with its flame.
Let it remind you that darkness is not emptiness. It is gestation.

Ask: What truth is revealing itself now that the noise is quieting?

2. Gather the Jewels of Your Year

Everything that happened: the joys, failures, births, endings, desires, disappointments, becomes compost.

Write them down.
Name them.
Honor them.
Burn them if you feel called.

Let your year become nourishment.

3. Somatic Listening

Every morning ask your body:

What do you want today?
Warmth?
Slowness?
Stillness?
A hot drink?
A soft blanket?
A long exhale?

Winter is not a mental season; it is a body season.

4. Grounding With the Earth

Put your feet on the ground.
Feel the undercurrent beneath the soil.
Let the earth’s quiet become your own.

The earth holds you in her cradle; winter makes that holding unmistakable.

5. Permission to Be Blank

Nature doesn’t rush to reinvent herself on December 1st.
Neither should you.

Let yourself be unformed.
Let yourself not know.
Let yourself rest.

This is holy work.

A Word for the Woman Standing at the Threshold

The grief you feel is natural.
The discomfort of slowing is natural.
The longing for something different is natural.
Your body knows what to do; it always has.

You will not get lost in the dark.
The dark is where roots form.

Winter is here not to take from you, but to deepen you.

Let yourself descend.

If you want to honor this season with support:

Start with unarmor: unhook from urgency and return to the rhythm your body has been craving.
Join my email list: where I share seasonal rituals, winter practices, and truth work for the months ahead.
Explore THE KEY: winter is the season of being held, and THE KEY offers that same deep cradle of truth, slowing, and emergence.

Winter is the season of letting the earth hold you, and inside THE KEY, you don’t do that alone.