How to Overcome the Winter Woes
Do you struggle with season of Winter? The shorter, darker days … the cold and icy nights. And are you finding that as you progress in age, the struggle gets more intense every year?
Kelsey Dhra, Registered Yoga Teacher and Holistic Nutritionist and founder of WholeSOULme Healing shared with us that in the Winter, she always found herself feeling exhausted. Her sleep wasn’t great, her eating choices weren’t great, and her mental health wasn’t great … the cold and gloom of Winter seemed to parallel her darkest times physically and mentally.
Last Winter, she decided enough was enough and sought to take control of the narrative she had been living in at this time each year.
With the help of courses on Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), and Self Compassion, and experience working within a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) clinic, Kelsey learned to reframe her relationship with Winter and reduce her resistance to it.
Resistance is like fuel for the fire of suffering. The less you resist, the less suffering you experience. (Don’t believe us ‘til you try :P)
There are two over-arching expectations that add to someone’s resistance to Winter:
Winter will be awful … lack of light, lack of socialization, lack, lack, lack
I need to keep going, pushing, and producing like I do any other season
In Kelsey’s upcoming workshop: Adjusting to Winter, she’ll be sharing perspectives and tools from MBSR, TCM, and the schools of Wholistic Nutirition and Self Compassion to:
Reduce resistance to winter
Better embrace how to show up through the layers of the season
Although she doesn’t expect people to love Winter, she knows firsthand how it feels to shift from suffering through Winter, to accepting what is within her control during the season.
