nourishing ourselves with darkness: a winter solstice practice
.We are moving through the threshold of Winter Solstice, the shortest, darkest day of the year. Many cultures honor this time as a sacred pause, the cycle in which nature shifts into deep rest to prepare for rebirth. Imagine a flower's life cycle: Spring buds expand into summer blooms; in fall it withers, returning to earth in the winter.
As the teaching goes, we are not in nature, we are nature. And just like a flower, right now we are reconfiguring in order to become the material of something new. Darkness is a nourishing force, and it's necessary for growth and evolution. At the same time, especially during these heavy, difficult times in our personal lives and in the world, we benefit from stoking our inner light to generate warmth, support, and kind attention, creating a compassionate, safe inner environment for ourselves.
It’s a time to practice being gentle, soft, and loving with ourselves—which is ultimately the fertilizer for how we nourish ourselves in this dormant season, and eventually allows us to blossom again when the conditions draw us forward.
In this practice, we'll use gentle movement to generate warmth, and then transition into yin to burrow inward... then slowly expand open to receive more light.
“...When we look into the heart,
May our eyes have the kindness
And reverence of candlelight.
...When we are confined inside
The dark house of suffering
May moonlight find a window in.
...For Light cannot see inside things.
That is what the dark is for:
Minding the interior,
Nurturing the draw of growth
Through places where death
In its own way turns into life.”
FREE: NEW YEAR’S RESET PRACTICE
Join us for a free live online meditation & movement class
Join us for a FREE New Year’s Reset practice to come home to the present, the place where we have the capacity to choose how we will meet ourselves… in the here and now. The place where we have the capacity to cultivate compassion with ourselves… just as we are. All in service of grounding ourselves in the present moment… the stepping stones paving our path into the future.
We’ll start our time together practicing the LARLAR technique to pause and connect more deeply with ourselves in the present moment. We’ll set the conditions to create new, more conscious connections, and to find ways to be more fully expressed in our lives, in the world, and with each other.
Then we’ll shift into a somatic practice designed to cultivate a supple psoas, free the diaphragm, and awaken the deep core. This breath-based flow will help set the conditions for us to feel strong, stable, and centered, as well as soft, open, and fluid with whatever arises in the daily moments of our lives.
Over and over again in this practice, we’ll notice when our mind is wandering and return to our calm, steady center. As we bring the mind back home, the breath expands, and we allow the body and nervous system to come back into a state of rest and digest—where we can flow more freely into the present moment as the doorway to our future.
