Winter is not Spring

As you may have noticed a new year has started, so a lot of us have started new diets, set new goals, and started reading that book or listening to that podcast that’s going to help us become better people. We have begun to take action on a bunch of stuff from last year that we want to be different this year.

 

There’s nothing wrong with doing those things – I’m doing them, too. But I want to point something out, just in case it will make a difference in how you go about it.

 

The calendar is wrong.

 

This “new beginnings, fresh start, emerging from my cocoon” energy belongs to Spring. I point this out on the off chance that it has felt intuitively weird to you (whether you realized it or not) to be celebrating rebirth as we head into the dead of Winter.

 

That doesn’t mean that this phase of the cycle has no relationship to the New/Next/Updated you. It just means that you might reconsider how you go about pursuing it if you care about being more in alignment with the energy of the cycle we’re actually in.

 

This is a Yin phase. It is a time to go inward and be still. If new beginnings are important to you, this would be the time to reflect and contemplate who you are headed toward becoming, as well as who you no longer are. It is a time to shed that which no longer suits you and begin to clear a place for the future aspects of you to arrive.

 

In some cases, this is when an underworld journey must begin. The darkness should be explored and new parts of you discovered and prepared for exposure to the light. This shadowland may be something you’ve struggled with or avoided, or it might simply be the unknown – something it’s finally time to acquaint yourself with and incorporate into your awareness.

 

The days are beginning to get longer, but this is only a harbinger of things to come, not the dawn of a new day. It’s a reminder that the tunnel will eventually end, but that there is still so much distance to be crossed before life will burst into full sunlight.

 

I don’t mean for this to sound dismal or discouraging, but to highlight the connection between the inward phase and the outward one. The better we lay the groundwork now, at the appropriate time, the more successful and abundant the overt growth can be.

 

Also, I am offering support and clarity to anyone who might be feeling out of sync with all the other people joining gyms and committing to a fresh set of goals; for you, things may still be moving slowly and feeling not quite resolved. Maybe that is as it should be.