With the colder weather closing in, the daylight hours growing less and less each day, the winding down of late nights and early mornings, we find ourselves called to pull back, pause and be still.

The Yang energy of summer, with its hustle and bustle, its ever mounting adventures, its allure of seemingly endless balmy evenings has propelled us forward in our goals and our lives. We may have been inspired to take that trip. Replant the garden. Spend time outdoors with our loves. Getting sweaty on hikes. Eat. Drink. Party. Repeat. The infectious energy of summer invigorates us and calls us to amp things up a notch. It’s the season of doing. Of action. And of drive. 

Well. It’s easy to see then why I fucking love summer. It’s me in a nutshell. One part bounding energy, one part sunshine and one part happiness. 

And on the flip side, it ain’t hard to see why winter can be a bit of a drag for Yang enthusiasts like myself. 

Winter is all Yin baby. It’s the slowing down. The retreat and renewal. It’s about days spent nurturing ourselves and our families. Refilling our cup that was pretty much guzzled by its predecessing seasons. It’s warming meals. It’s fireplaces and books. It’s receiving, rather than giving. It’s cuddles and blankets. It’s the snooze button of our metaphorical alarm of life, that saw us jumping out of bed at crack of dawn just months before. It’s the plugging in of an iPhone as it’s glaring “1%” signals its overuse and that it’s overdone. We are the iPhone and it’s time to plug up and airplane mode, honey. 

“But I can’t factor in some Yin lovin’ Em, I’ve got too much to do?!”. Firstly, I hear ya. I oppose yin energy like the plague so, so often. Since I first learnt about the masculine and feminine, the yang and yin, the doing and being – I quickly realised what side of the tracks I had set up camp in. I was/am a full time Yanger, Masculine, doer. So like I said, I hear ya. 

But my darling, if you can visualise now that ever famous Ying and Yan symbol, a perfectly and symmetrically divided circle comprised of equal parts light and dark, a piece little of each spilling into its neighbours boundaries … We are that circle. A whole and ever perfect little entity, with equal parts light and dark, fast and slow, positive and negative, up and down, cold and hot. Ourselves and the world around us exist in an ever evolving dance between dualities such as these, with none really possibly existing without the other. The bad allows the good, the pain allows the joy, the emptiness allows fullness.  

So too it works with seasons. The doing cannot exist without the being. The summer sun cannot be appreciated without the winter chills. The hustle cannot be achieved without the pause. And so, as if perfectly architectured, our physical world gives us little reminders of this intertwined and cyclical play of energies. The days shorten, luring us to stay in bed a little longer; our social commitments lull just a little, allowing space to unwind solo; our bodies crave something different, swapping sweaty park workouts for yoga by the fire. 

This is simply a little reminder (cough, permission slip) for my fellow Yangers. A reminder that it’s in the interplay of the go and stop that magic happens, that when we slow down the pace of our lives (even just a fraction) we carve space for our next brilliant idea or project to come through. 

Here’s to changing seasons and to loving the shit out of the change in pace.

Blessings and yin soaked day dreams x