What Happened When I Learned To Go Gently Into January

Untitled mixed media on raw canvas

For those of us in the Northern part of the Northern Hemisphere, we are in the long season of winter, with shorter days and longer nights. This is the season that offers us the opportunity for deep and nourishing rest, and we can begin by going in gently.

Delicious naps, hearty soups, fireside reading, friends for tea. Sounds so good, right? But this is not how we are encouraged to be in our culture. We are encouraged to Make Resolutions and to ‘come out of the starting gate on January 1st’ with new and bigger lives and audacious kick-ass goals.

What if instead, we consider the time after the winter solstice as a quiet deepening time, a time to listen closely for our dreams and desires to make themselves known, a time to gently nourish our soul so we can enliven our spirit? What if we eased into January the way one might ease into a warm bath, taking our time to enjoy the process of entering. So much better, no?

I’ve had to learn this lesson the hard way, literally.

One New Year’s day, I fell through the basement trap door. A shocking way to enter the New Year…Thankfully, I didn’t break.

On another New Year’s day, I inadvertenly went into a state of toxic ketosis and landed myself in the emergency room, another shocking way to enter the New Year. Thankfully, my systems didn’t shut down completely and I’m still here.

It was that year when I had no choice but to ease gradually into January as my body recovered, that I learned a few things.

And you know what happened when I didn’t commit to Big Things at the beginning of January?

Nothing. Terrible. Happened.

The world did not come crashing down. (I worried about it, though, because…Goals! Outcomes! Resolutions! (Even though I stopped New Year’s Resolutions 20 years ago.) And this one: I will be forever behind if I’m not ready to go on January 1st. with big goals and big plans out of the starting gate!

Instead, what happened was that there was space for new insights to find their way to me, along with the seeds of new ideas . And as gently began to follow them, it led to the creation of The Radiance Way, a curriculum that was created through me as a pathway for all of us to embody our unique exquisiteness.

What I learned by going gently into January is that it takes the pressure off of this one moment in time to make big changes and big declarations and instead allow for life to more organically unfold. I learned to allow space for silence, contemplation and rest that will serve me through the seasons of growth and expansion to come. It gives me time to re-orient, to learn to be in the liminal space, to befriend the quiet.

So once again, I am going gently into January, following the natural rhythm of the season, incubating and hibernating in a way that supports my system to tune into a natural state of ebbs and flows. There is a time and a season for all things, and this season is for listening.