Hello you,
These are the days of hibernation. These milky pastel days of winter. Can you feel it too? The pull to ground, the urge to bundle yourself in blankets and get quiet for a while?
I’m writing this while the gloaming twilight slowly invades my office. It’s 2:47pm. There’s a thermos of steaming Rooibos tea on the desk and a warm woollen blanket tucked over my lap and yet I can still feel the persistent nip of the cold. I’ve accepted that I’m part-lizard and that my fingertips are perpetually chilly from October until whenever the UK weather gods allow Spring to set in.
Once this is written I’ll pad downstairs and warm my hands by sneaking them under my partner’s jumper. She always manages to remain stoic, bless her. I’m the one who shrieks and whines when she returns the favour.
Winter Solstice is next week. The darkness wrapping around us just a teeny bit more before we start to turn back towards the sun.
I used to hate the dark of winter. I’d rail against the bleak every year, my misery enhanced by the compare and contrast with my family in Australia as they sweated under the burning blue skies of Summer Solstice. I hated the monotone grey-on-grey palette. The starkness of the bare trees felt incompatible with beauty. I resented my losing battle against the cold.
It’s the ultimate enemies-to-lovers plot twist to find that it’s one of my favourite times of year now.
Because the thing about the dark is that it’s a time for visioning. The same way that you can only see the distant shine of the stars when the sun gets out of the way, winter is a time to catch glimpses of what isn’t normally visible. What’s possible.
As the nights draw closer, I snuggle down and start to dream about what I could step into. I spend this time in the dark surrounded by notebooks and Notion pages and tarot cards. Where am I pulled to go next? What feels true in my bones? What seeds am I planting deep in the soil, ready to poke their tender shoots up in the Spring?
Let me tell you, there are some fucking BIG seeds being planted for next year.
More on that as the dark recedes, but I will say that if one of the seeds that you’re planting this winter is for an unshakeable sense of self trust and an expanded nervous system capacity, then I have something for you.
I’ve decided to offer extended payment plans for The Intensive, my 90 day programme to help you develop a personal practice of embodied magic.
Books are now open for Spring 2024. If you join this month you can jump on the 6-month payment plan and spread the cost out. And spend the winter knowing that you’ve set in motion your growth for the Spring.
Or, of course, if you want to get going and spent these dark days developing a personal practice, you can begin in January. Either pay-in-full or on a 3-month plan.
Either way, book in a (free) chat with me. We can talk about what you want to grow next year and how The Intensive could help those visions flourish. No obligation. No weird aggressive sales manipulations. Just a chat to see if we’re a good fit.