Wintering and Grief

Dancing with Darkness

How does January feel for you? Is there ever a disconnect between the cultural push towards productivity and new beginnings and an internal pull towards stillness and rest?

This year I have read many references to the concept of wintering, popularized by writer Katherine May. The concept resonates for me, and it points towards even deeper grief-specific applications that I have been exploring since the death of my husband seven years ago.

Self-care is a complicated topic in 2026 America. As a country we bounce between extremes of media-fueled self-indulgence and exhaustion, desperation, and overwhelm. The clients who grace my office are mostly in the second category: beautiful souls who push themselves so hard to be productive that they don’t remember who they are. They struggle to find the bandwidth or the budget for authenticity, and self-nurturing may feel like an abstract and confusing concept.

For them, the concept of wintering is revolutionary. Although it may not feel fully accessible due to cultural, family, and financial pressures, introducing the concept of celebrating quiet, offering comfort, and allowing slow-paced ease and coziness feels like an invitation to finally breathe fully.

I love this. Comfort needs to be celebrated, and to have its place. I support hanging up fairy lights, drinking cocoa, and snuggling into a fuzzy blanket.

Grief has also taught me how to go deeper into what the dark times offer. It’s possible to focus so much on bringing light that we miss the power of darkness. In the context of a cultural fascination with fixing ourselves, escaping pain, and doing it all the space of thirty days of less, we can overlook profound opportunities for healing.

I hope wintering doesn’t become oversimplified in our collective cultural mindset as a form of escapism. Real self-care is more than dressing avoidance up in a cozy cardigan.

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Going Deeper into Wintering

In the natural world there are mysterious and essential transformations that happen in winter. For many species of plants, a period of cold is required before seeds can germinate, in a process known as cold stratification. Winter shifts soil patterns of moisture, nutrients, structure, and pest populations in key ways. Biologists even have found that animals who are natural hibernators in the wild may still require a period of winter slow down in captivity—regardless of environmental factors being managed.

It’s not surprising that humans also feel seasonal physical and emotional shifts. The interesting part is how little we do to as a collective to understand and work with these shifts effectively. Most often we brace against natural rhythms instead of embracing and working with them.

The same can be said for how we collectively approach grief. Grief can be understood as a metaphorical winter. It is the pause, the space in between. It is the time when mysterious and essential processes can also happen within us, if we allow the space for them.

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Breathing into Winter

Try an experiment with me.

Put one hand on your heart and one hand on your belly. Breathe out slowly, and pause mindfully in that space at the bottom of the breath. Don’t rush your inhale.

This space between inhale and exhale represents winter. Metaphorically speaking, it is the void, or the pause. There is a human instinct to be uncomfortable in the sense of emptiness here and to rush the next inhale, but let yourself linger. Allow winter to have its space.

There are processes in your body (which I’ll explain in a moment) that are invisible yet important that happen only here. When you are ready, breathe in intentionally, with no rush. Pause again after inhaling. This is summer. It also has a purpose and a space, no more or less important. When you are ready, exhale slowly and intentionally.

As you repeat this cycle several times you might imagine the pattern of your breath forming a circle, supporting you in a path of internal wholeness that mirrors the external seasons.

Do you notice a sense of grounding as you do this?

Physiologically, an extended exhale followed by a pause causes your heart rate to slow and invites calming alpha waves into your brain. This is a variation of a box breathing, a technique made popular by Mark Devine, who shared how it was part of the stress resilience training he received as a Navy Seal.

On the other hand, breathing that rushes from one inhale to the next has the opposite effect. Imagine someone hyperventilating under extreme stress. This kind of breathing also has an important purpose. We need extra oxygenation in situations like running a sprint, for example. The problem comes when there is a lack of balance, a lack of knowing when or how to slow down.

So how does that relate to grief?

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Living the Pause

The coping mechanisms we use for winter—and for grief—often focus on calling in more light. There are winter sports, special lamps, increased activity—and they are all good and helpful.

But equally essential is allowing all the seasons, including all the aspects of winter. Can the quiet of January be as welcome as the sparkle of December?

It can be a time for:

• meditation
• journaling
• stillness
• dreaming possibilities
• celebrating the darkness that comes before possibility has fully taken shape

It can be a time for allowing the human fear that comes when the future is unformed, and instead of letting it rush us, giving the season its time and space.

I moved to a mountain valley in the Rockies after the death of my husband. It was COVID, and social distancing requirements combined with layers of snow and new-community isolation gifted me with hours of alone time I never would have chosen. I think of that time as a long, cold winter.

I remember feeling lost and searching for direction and connection I couldn’t find. And now, years after the fact, I can see how the long, slow embrace of winter did prepare me for the next season.

In stillness there was a slow autonomic reset from the near-panic I had lived in while caretaking my sick husband and trying to manage the complicated aspects of our busy life with a large family and a hobby farm.

I like doing things—having a list to check off. This wasn’t something I could do. It was a way I needed to be, and I could only enter into that state through the quiet unfolding of time.

There was a long, slow, metaphorical exhale and pause as I allowed myself to absorb the magnitude of the loss—not only the death of my beloved, but shifts in career, community, and my core sense of identity. All of that had to unravel before it could be knit together again. I had to step into the void and feel what it was to no longer be in my old life. That’s a terrifying thing.

I experienced a different kind of growth than I had been taught to understand and focus on for my entire life. Instead of having a clear plan with measurable goals, corresponding objectives, and ambitious timelines, I found myself co-creating something I couldn’t fully see with something larger than myself.

The closest analogy I can think of is what it is like to be pregnant, which not coincidentally is the other experience in life that draws us closest to the veil of this existence. Both are periods of profound internal changes that cannot be consciously controlled. They call us into a liminal state of power and transformation.

I was fortunate to stumble into the practice of yin yoga, a slow deep practice that provided a philosophical framework and a physical outlet for understanding the season I was in. It helped me to allow the season instead of fighting it. I will offer yin applications in future posts.

I also rediscovered a love of poetry, which speaks to the soul in ways that prose can’t.

Consider the following poem, Winter Grief, by David Whyte:

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Winter Grief

David Whyte

When you find yourself alone in this winter’s narrow light,
when you want to come out of the darkness only to confirm you can return there again.

When you see by a single glance through the misted window that the rain has come to beat on your walls.

When you watch yourself alone and walking,
when you watch yourself alone and remembering so closely what you never wanted to remember.

When everything near to you is too near to you and everything faraway, is still too far away.

Let this wind and this winter and this rain and this weather and all the difficult blessings of the world find you here, walking in the shelter of white walls under the tracery of stone windows in the nest of greenness at the valley floor below a sailing sky between mountains and green fields among centuries of the rested dead.

Let the green that laps at their graves hold your memories in place when they want to slip through your hands.
Let the rest in this rested place rest for you.
Let the birds sing and the geese call and the sky race from west to east when you cannot raise a wing to fly.
Let evening trace your loss in the stonework against a fading sky.

So that you can give up and give in and be given back to,
so that you can let winter come and live fully inside you,
so that you can retrace the loving path of heartbreak that brought you here.

So you can cry alone and be alone so you can let yourself alone to be lost,
so you can let the one you have lost alone,
so that you can let the one you have lost have their own life
and even their own death without you.

So the world and everyone who has ever lived and ever died can come and go as they please.
So you can let yourself not know, what not knowing means.
So that you can be even more generous in your letting go than they were in their leaving.

So that you can let winter be winter.
So that you can let the world alone to think of spring.

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When Spring Comes

Spring comes gradually, in spurts that tease and dance, then retreat again. It’s often unclear: will the season last? Or will there be snow again in a week?

Grief is like that.

I recently moved states again, and this time I find myself asking different questions:

• “When did I learn to like too much color on the walls?”
• “When did I start planting fairy gardens?”
• “When did humor and whimsy become part of what I want in my surroundings?”

This is a version of me that didn’t exist in the same way, even before my husband died. Who is she? Where did she come from?

I can’t pin it down exactly. I just know that she was born while I was sitting in the dark.

For deepening practices, consider a paid subscription for access to the companion piece: Practices: Wintering in Grief