“Give yourself permission to be where you are and to still be loved for it.”
Danielle Doby’s potent poetry bursts to the surface of my inner winter.
Here, healing tastes like honey.
Here, healing actualizes in the impromptu desire to cook, to follow an impulse to make homemade biscuits, and I do.
Here, healing sips black coffee out of fine china teacups and writes unfiltered, expressive lines in the gentle illumination of flickering candles.
Healing smells like rose oil, feels like skin on skin – an open palm turning back to gently and purposefully meet the open heart.
Healing hums when a felt-realization or a spoken Truth initiates a visceral river of resonance up the spine.
Healing sings like the first birds who are awake to life before the pink-kissed dawn.
I am still in my inner winter, and now, I stand facing a window of spring, on the cusp of an emergence, and yet, I am reminded by the healers who witness me, by the unhurried and consistent cycle of my body which reflects the cycle of nature because my body is nature of these essential truths:
Trust the unfolding mystery, do not rush forward, stay in your feet, receive the presents of this season.
This winter season sent the chill of change while I was in Texas, two years ago, in a heat that makes elbow sweat at 6am, and my days were colored with caring for chickens (Rhonda the white-feathered hen), crafting yoga videos for the City of Austin’s exercise program, and facilitating improv classes in theatres-turned-playgrounds for kids. But beneath the excitable motions was a troubling exhaustion that revealed the drained lack of my own liberating, rejuvenating connection to Self.
A burn out sizzled from the inside out. I lived, with heightened awareness, in patterns: over-working and being underpaid, avoiding conflict by repressing my needs and swallowing whole my feelings and ending up being taken advantage of financially and strung out emotionally, and over-giving in an attempt to secure external assurance of goodness, validation, and lovability.
I craved an internal alignment with my divine nature and to have my outer life be an extension of this nourished aliveness.
And so autumn came – in the unrelenting blaze of an Austin June. An unexpected and life-saving summons swept me up, crisply announcing the necessary letting go to create the spaciousness for evolution, deliberate destruction to nurture the soil for redemptive renewal.
In a ritual of thanks, I set fire to my former life, watch the leaves of my work color to amber and crimson and drift to the awaiting earth. Later I will learn that this conscious composting of what-was makes what-will-be my resting ground of the fertile void.
The fertile void is a winter rich in wisdom. Here rest is not escapism, and it’s not a numbing out, a hiding out, a bone-aching depression. Those dulled and life-drained states are symptoms of an inner winter denied organic expression.
The inner winter brims in intelligence, generates consciousness, and replenishes the body like grandmother’s soup. It’s a stillness that speaks the soothing language of safety to the nervous system. Permission to be held, to exhale completely, to digest, to grieve and to celebrate, and to luxuriate in the simplest pleasures – of the back body sinking into the comfort of the mothering earth.
My inner winter blankets two years, and these are two active years of soul-led inquiry, relationship mending, and spirited discovery. I embrace my inner winter, become a student to these inward teachings, and in turning the gaze toward the chambers of my own heart, I am enlightened by an ancient remembering: our lives our cyclical, I am a cyclical being, and everything – relationships and projects, homes and spaces, endeavors and ideas – operates in circuitous flow. My creativity has a cycle. My relationships move through cycles. And my body sways through seasons.
The honeyed biscuits hint at an inner spring.
When I departed Austin, when I answered the soul-summons to complete that chapter and continue onward into an exuberant emptiness, I adventured forward into my hibernation cave with a tag-along, sneaky expectation that my healing would result in an external emergence of a more confident me, the “me” I understood myself to be at that time, and a me who when I cradled in the cocoon of winter began to see with brightened insight the layers of codependency, people-pleasing, fear to fit in or avoid abandonment that governed me.
I thought my healing would look like achieving a self-awareness that would lead me to producing more, giving more, being more … and this is the sly trickiness of the ego.
Nature and the nature of our bodies move and unfurl in the profound beauty of simplicities and subtleties.
The sign of an inner spring is not something that can be easily shared on Instagram or communicated through a text. It’s a specific warmth, like huddling around a fire in the bite of a dark and cold night, an illuminated possibility that I could make myself biscuits for breakfast. This idea stirs within me in January, a spring sprouting in a snowstorm, and with ease, I locate a recipe by Reese Witherspoon (affectionately titled by our Southern superstar, “Mama’s biscuits”). I follow along without fear of doing it right or doing it wrong. I knead the dough. I make a mess and my first few batches are a C minus at best, and yet the result of the creation does not define me. I experiment and enjoy the embodied experience of baking. I delight in taking care of myself, in infusing attention and care to attending to my needs, and in curating a breakfast that is beautiful and delicious to me.
In Texas, I left behind the ruined remains of a coffee pot I accidentally set on fire (I feel compelled to put accidentally in there), a chorus line of exploded sweet potatoes, and pots of boiled-over bowtie pasta. An iciness, that had nothing to do with the health of true inner winter, would seize and zap my attentiveness whenever I was in the kitchen. This disassociation, this disembodied state manufactured a complete disinterest, a learned helplessness, in culinary pursuits. I would self-sabotage. I would flee. I would actively check-out and freeze. A freeze reaction is a trauma response, a deer caught in the headlights, the motions of a leap stagnated in a stunted halt.
Curiously, as I begin to gradually and gently tend to my nervous system (breathing into the back of the ribs, pressing feet into dirt, grounding into stability, doing the most doable piece, choosing nourishment over noise), I warm up to cooking. The constricted belief that I can’t cook has fallen away and this accompanies a softening of perfectionism, which stemmed from fear, and a strengthening of my own sense of internal safety, which comes from being myself, an embodied presence that embraces both my humanity and my divinity. And I find these two intersect in that honeyed biscuit. When I slow down to tend to my needs, when I honor my humanness and create rituals of meaning, like a breakfast prepared for me and by me, then there’s a transcendental peacefulness, a deepened joy that I feel in my bare feet, that can shine through steady breaths as I knead and send thanks from my heart and through my palms to the dough beneath.
I am safe if I make C minus biscuits, and I am free to savor every honeyed bite. This is the lesson of the inner winter. In the stillness, I experience the felt-realization that this enlivened stillness is who I am, and from this felt-truth, all else flows – the biscuit making, the ritual-making of an everyday breakfast, the showing up to whatever season, whatever cycle I am currently in, because it’s an integral part of my humanness, and when this being human is embraced, a radiant expansion of spirit can flow through. This is dance between the divine and the human in my kitchen, making the biscuits and brewing the coffee and moving at a patient pace, the pace of nature, the pace of you.
So wherever you are, whatever season, be there. See what wonders of wisdom bloom for you. Remember healing can be joyous and spontaneous, and can even taste like honeyed biscuits.