How to move In the Season of Quiet

HOW TO MOVE IN THE SEASON OF QUIET

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1.

There are seasons when your inner Magic asks you to be still.

Not to quit. Not to shrink. Just… to remember that even the Moon disappears every month to become new again.

This is not failure or loss of your spark.

This is sacred composting. A stage of existence when we need to “ferment” for a bit to become enriched to produce again. A replenishment of sorts.

At this time you are allowed to go unseen, unpolished,and undone. Because Magic grows in silence, too.

Essentially, there comes a time in all of our lives when we enter a period of being that feels distinctly self-isolating, fatiguing, and contemplative.

I am not talking about taking a few low-key, quiet weekends to yourself, away from social engagements, just to have a little personal time and maybe setting the phone down for a couple of days to unplug from the endless scroll and barrage of the social media.

I am talking about the eerily quiet, secluded, and strangely potent stretches of time that last weeks, months, maybe even years for some. The in-between energetic space. That liminal spell. A time suspended between worlds, where a cloak of stillness prevails. Where your sensitivity heightens and you grow extra aware of your own exceptional abilities of discernment.

You begin to see energy clearly – what nourishes you, what drains you, who drains you… Energy exchanges come up for review, and instinctively, you will feel especially attuned to the conservation of your own reserves.

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2.

During such times, you start to notice how many social interactions feel shallow and have no room in your life now, and quite frankly, they begin to feel incredibly draining as your bandwidth for “people” tasks becomes rather sparse.

The body slows down as well, feeling tired, or maybe even begins to ache in ways that no lab test can explain, as nothing is really wrong, physically. Your doctor just shrugs their shoulders, unable to pinpiont the exact cause of your “generalized complaints”. But you know your energy has not been the same lately, you are seeing and feeling a change of pace, knowing something deeper is stirring.

Within you, there is this unmistakable craving for silence, stillness. An aching for reprieve from this daily, extremely draining race that feels overly stimulating

And if you allow yourself to slow down enough, you may hear your intuition calling for a change of emotional scenery, because beneath the fatigue, there is a longing for silence, simplicity, and space.

If you find yourself in such a season of Quiet, know this isn’t a detour or a setback. Energetically, you have simply entered your own dark season of Winter. And this piece, my dear friend, is written for you.

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3.

If you are reading this, you are probably a lovely sensitive soul and you’ve likely already established an overarching understanding of how our physical reality works, that all major aspects of our life tend to ebb and flow in predictable cycles. Things come in, things go out. Tides swoop in, tides swoop out…

The way our energy and manifestations fluctuate around our desires, creativity, jobs, relationships, etc is entirely normal, echoing the well established patterns of contraction and expansion seen in nature. Our personal lives very much resemble the cyclical nature of the Earth. And just like the Earth, we move through periods of growth, blossoming, harvest, contraction & clearance, followed by rest.

I know using seasons is a tired metaphor, but it is one used so often for a reason – it just makes so much sense! Becoming a witness to these cycles within the natural world, helps us understand and accept our own personal cycles, especially the tough ones.

As we are not just part of nature, we are nature. We are the tic AND the toc in the rhythm of this earthly middle world, and not just some casual observer using up Earth’s resources. We do not just exist inside of the materia, we are built of this stuff, you know?

And what we know of Nature is that it does not bloom and produce fruits all year, she takes breaks.

Trees let go of their leaves, nourishing the earth through decomposition. Branches withdraw their sap in preparation for the winter. Birds cease to nest. Flowers die down and reseed. The Earth goes quiet, losing its luster, its saturation of color. And the cooler weather, with its darker hours in the day, slows down our metabolisms cooling down our drives.

With all the signs of death present in the season of winter, it would be easy to get despondent if we didn’t know that spring will come indeed. Although appearing deceased, life is still there, underground, in the roots; waiting, sleeping, and weathering out the cyclical phase of deep sleep.

Zooming out, Earth herself consistently dips into the shadows, initiating her inhabitants into sleep. And Luna, our satellite, wanes down to disappear into the sky once a month, taking a break too.

So doesn’t it make so much sense, that we, material beings, beings of nature, also have periods of time when we want to withdraw and step into the darkness to rest?

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4.

There could be different reasons for the onset of this reprieve.

It could be related to something happening to us and within us on an energetic level, which would be visible through astrological transits to our natal chart.

Maybe we are expanding into a much more evolved version of ourselves, maybe we are on a path of a major spiritual transformation.

Not all great achievements require energy in the external world. Sometimes all the work is happening on the inside, in the unseen realms. This doesn’t mean you’re not working or things aren’t happening for you and within you. It’s that these things are happening behind the scenes and can appear invisible.

Personally, the more intense my quiet periods have been, the higher the craving for solitude and rest, the greater the need for “cocooning”, the bigger the energetic shifts were occurring within me. Though externally, it would have appeared that I did not have a whole lot going on at the time. I appeared quiet, withdrawn, and extra introverted. Meanwhile, my energy body was quite active and my physical body was a container for intense psychic remodeling.

Inner work takes energy, and a lot of it. When we’re undergoing an energetic shift, clearance, restructuring or upleveling, there is transmutation taking place, an inner alchemy of sorts. And you become a vessel for that inner energetic reconstruction for the time being, which draws heavily on your physical energy, prompting you into a kind of metaphorical hibernation, hence the fatigue.

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5

Of course we can also be initiated into these periods of personal winter via an occurrence of a traumatic event. We can be shocked into stillness and solitude, in order to process our grief. In such a case, please take extra good care of yourself and seek out all the appropriate resources to help balance mental and emotional health at this time. This is more than just an energetic upleveling or a tough Pluto transit ripping a mask off of your persona, prompting you into soul-seeking introversion. If you are going through a deeper trauma, please do not treat it lightly as it should not be walked through alone.

Even without a traumatic event, it is so improtant to recoginze a depressive episode that may be slipping out of control.

But if you are finding yourself with all the aformentioned “symptoms” of personal winter without a significant external cause, finding yourself quieter and more drained than usual — maybe you just don’t really want to spend time with your friends as much and want some more alone time in nature, or find yourself enjoying the peace more than the noise…

Whatever it may be — I hope this article provides some glimpses into understanding and most of all, acceptance of yourself when you are not at your “most productive”, your most vibrant self.

Because moving through the Personal Season of Quiet with grace means accepting it without guilt, without self flaggelation for not being productive enough, and, having trust in the cycles of nature and the divine timing of the Universe.

Can you love yourself without the self-imposed stipulations to “produce” without guilt because you are “feeling lazy”? Or do you only feel good about yourself when you are working hard and pulling in tangible results? If so, this is conditional self-love, my friend.

What if… you loved yourself even when you felt tired, uninspired, and unproductive? Maybe instead of talking shit about yourself to yourself, you could talk nurture. Deep breaths.

But why do so many of us do this to ourselves? Where do these unrealistic expectations come from?

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6.

It just so happens that a lot of us love our lives and ourselves the most, when our lives resemble the seasons of spring and summer. When the energy is high and when we get to initiate, be robust, creative, and magical, feeling most inspired and fired up, driven by our innate creative urges.

It feels so good to be in our Sun or Mars power, in our fiery suit of wands energy.

This energy is outwardly driven, there is movement and excitement, there are rewards! And when we’re conditioned to hinge our self-worth on how much output or success we produce, in the pursuit of which, we release that super satisfying, yummy dopamine, and our happy little reward centers in the brain get scratched with the chase of each achievement.

So then, the natural periods of slowdown and constriction that follow such dynamic bursts of activity can feel like punishment or even lead to feelings of guilt. Because it is a withdrawal of sorts from “juicing” our dopamine centers while also depriving those conditioned parts of ourselves that pull the invisible strings demanding outward achievement.

When we hit a slow down of energy, enter our personal season of Winter, our conditioned nervous systems ignite a desire to keep clinging and holding onto the same productivity levels we had during our hottest seasons of action and creativity, fighting and pushing through our body’s signals for rest, even when it is entirely natural to do so.

But we are not designed for perpetual motion. A personal season of solitude is just a different but very much necessary and a healthy way of being, just like sleep is a different state of our conscious awareness and is a very necessary part of our health.

As I mentioned earlier, I want to reiterate — because mental health is absolutely essential — that I’m not referring to depressive episodes. Those deserve to be taken seriously and treated with care and priority.

What I have been referring to here are the natural periods of slowdown, the cocoon-like phases when we rest and reset, hopefully, now with less guilt and more acceptance and respect for our own natural cycles.

Our productivity-obsessed world has conditioned us to expect ourselves to stay in perpetual summer, a constant state of action and visibility, driven by achieving “success”.

Constant forward motion in life is not sustainable. We are living meatbags who need rest, joy, and sustenance. Hell, even robots and their fancy mechanical joints wear out, requiring maintenance and downtime for repairs and tune-ups.

So if you are noticing yourself slowing down, do not despair! You are not falling behind! You are just in your dark season of Quiet.

And just because the world feels extra loud and happens to be in constant motion around you, does not mean you have to continuously keep up with its pace. It’s okay to set your own drum beat and it’s okay to honor your body’s physical, emotional, and energetic requirements even when these needs do not meet your conditioned egoic drives.

A cocoon is where a metamorphosis happens, all within the divine timing to every contraction and expansion; to every slow down and initiation. I accept.

Tides come in and tides go out. The coiled spring has to contract before releasing tension and translating that energy into action. It’s physics, really. And the more we resist the craving for rest, the more challenging the experience of transformation becomes and the less benefit we receive from it.

And on that note, I must retrieve back into my rest, or maybe it is more like back into my “nest” or “nook” where I am weathering out my current season of solitude, as I have found myself in such a liminal standstill.

It’s not easy to release control and to trust the process. To just be here, allowing it all to unfold around me, trusting that this slow simmer at midnight is just a phase. That my spring will come and I will sow my seeds of sunflowers again.

It’s an exercise in trust and a lesson of surrender for sure. I’m giving my body the rest it needs, and allowing it to let go of everything that I have outgrown in seasons past. Clearing. Composting.

Inhaling magic. Exhaling trust.

With so much love,

Katerina Rose