Transmuting Unpalatable Offerings Into Gifts: My Journey with Covid
It's been a potent little cocooning period over the past week and now I'm emerging on the other side feeling a little sleepy, but also refreshed.
It felt like a much needed invitation to slow down and go within. The first few days were roughhh, but through the tantric lens, each moment, every circumstance, is a doorway to the divine, and the choice is ours to step through it or turn away from it.
Sometimes life's gifts and lessons don't come packaged as prettily as we would like, and we turn our noses up at the gift being offered to us, seeing them instead as an inconvenience, a massive disappointment, or even as proof the world is out to get us.
While covid wasn't my top choice for spending the solstice and the five year anniversary of my relationship with my partner, it offered a prolonged period of spaciousness and downtime that neither of us often gift ourselves these days, and we chose to receive it with gratitude.
We spent lots of time curled up by the fire with our three fur babies, sipping spiced chai and homemade chicken soup, and sleeping long, luxurious hours. In a way, it set the tone for winter perfectly and reaffirmed the importance of relating to winter in this way.
Oftentimes life knows what we need more than we do, and it's the ego's attachments to the way we think things "should" be that disrupt the magic weaving in our lives in covert and unexpected ways.
Sometimes the magic being woven seems mundane, but to me, the gift of slow, spacious simplicity this holiday season was deeply nourishing to my body, despite having covid. Sometimes the most simplistic of treasures are overlooked in today's hectic busy world, and I cherish them dearly.
While our modern culture doesn't typically honor the rhythms of the changing seasons by aligning our lifestyles accordingly, these short days and long, dark nights of winter are a time for introspection, gestation, rejuvenation, and stillness.
Winter is the yin season, the time for turning within into the fertile, wombic void from which all life arises. It's not a time for go-go-go busyness, hyperactivity, and external focus, but rather a time to mirror the trees in the dropping of their leaves so we an recharge from the yang seasons and be reborn again in the spring, refreshed and replenished by the deep slumber of winter.
According to Taoist tradition, winter is governed by the kidneys. The kidneys are the storehouse of our qi, or life-force energy, and the adrenals sit just above them. These organs need the opportunity to rest and recharge in the winter in order to avoid going into burnout. This is their time for hibernation, for staying warm and toasty, and drinking lots of warm fluids to nourish the kidneys, which are connected to the element of water.
In a progress-obsessed culture plagued by nonstop to do lists, honoring the winter season and tending our bodies in this way is one of the most important things we can do for our overall health and wellbeing.
It's an excellent time for being, rather than doing. Downtime by the fire with a book, journal or instrument and cup of hot tea; long baths; cat naps; stretching; self-reflection through various creative art forms; cooking nourishing, warming meals; and dreaming are the flavors of this season.
It's a time of receptivity and cultivation, whereas the yang seasons are the time of offering ourselves outwardly. Then, when spring arrives, we are able to bloom with the fresh vitality of the spring blossoms.
In the spirit of transmuting life's sometimes seemingly unpalatable offerings into gifts and cultivating energy, check out my offering, The Art of Transmutation.